07/28/2023
🥗 Do you love Asian salad? Swipe to learn more about this controversial dish that can be found everywhere from Michelin restaurants to fast food chains to online cookbooks. Let us know in the comments or @ us in your stories about your favorite salads—recipes welcome 😋
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Series of slides with a gold background, red text, and vector graphics of a leafy salad mixed with vegetables and shrimp, cucumbers, sesame seeds, and small bowls of dark dressings.
(1) What is “Asian” Salad? The Origins of “Asian” Salad
(2) Asian salad is a catch-all term that has been used in Western media and restaurants to describe a variety of different salads of “Asian” origins. What makes a salad “Asian” is hotly debated though, with no similarities or any real historical basis for many “Asian salads.”
(3) The term has been criticized for its use in media and restaurants for its casual racism in how it exoticizes and generalizes a whole region and cultures to a monolith—a phenomenon which has been explored by outlets like The New York Times and Eater. Many critics have pointed out how many popular “Asian” salads in various restaurant and fast food menus are not made by Asian chefs or seem to have a basis in specific Asian cuisine. Some businesses such as Applebees, use dated and offensive terminology to refer to their Asian salads, namely their “Oriental Chicken Salad.”
(4) The term “Asian salad” seems to be a spiritual successor to the popular “Chinese chicken salad” that took hold in the 1960's U.S. The “Chinese chicken salad” was a best-selling menu item at Madame Wu’s Garden in Santa Monica, a restaurant popular with Hollywood celebrities of its time from 1959-1998. The owner, Sylvia Cheng Wu, who was born in China in 1915 and moved to the States after WWII, created the salad at the request of one her regulars, Hollywood star Cary Grant. This salad was made up of chicken mixed with fresh vegetables that were topped with sesame oil, soy sauce, mustard, and other seasonings.
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