I recently made some stir fry, which made me start thinking about the history of Chinese food in this country.

Joseph Conlin’s Bacon, Beans and Galantines is a book that looks at what gold miners ate back in the gold rush of the 1850s and 1860s. It talks quite a bit about Chinese food, specifically Chinese food in mining camps.

A wave of Chinese immigrants, mostly men, came to this country starting in the 1850s to look for gold. While many of them did work in the gold fields, some of them realized an easier way to make money was to cook food for the gold miners. As it turned out, Chinese food was quite popular among the gold miners.

Part of this was because the food was good, and part of it also may have been because the food was very spicy – we’re talking Szechwan Chinese food here. As Conlin points out, miners spent their days breathing in the dust from explosions and the resulting chemical fumes. This probably resulted in taste buds that were nearly dead. Spicy Chinese food, and very flavorful French food, were both popular in mining camps in California and Nevada.

As the Western gold and silver mines were tapped out over time (and because the Chinese were often kicked off mining claims), Chinese miners gravitated towards Western cities, where, among other things, they opened restaurants. The popularity of Chinese restaurants started in the West and gradually spread across the country.  It eventually reached the point where, even in cities without a large Chinese population, a Chinese restaurant was nothing out of the ordinary––think of the end of the movie A Christmas Story, where the family ends up having their Christmas dinner at a Chinese restaurant.

Of course, most Chinese restaurants in America are nothing like Chinese restaurants in China–they serve fortune cookies, which are, after all, an American invention.