The Cambridge University students who are reported to be upset by what they regard as the “culturally misrepresentative” offerings on their college menu – among them Jamaican stew, a seemingly insulting concoction of beef and mango – might like to tune into this week’s episode of the BBC series The Best of British Takeaways, in which Helen and Lisa Tse proudly describe the Chinese restaurant their grandmother Lily Kwok opened in Middleton, Manchester, in 1959. Lily, whose journey from Hong Kong to the north of England took her 35 days by boat, didn’t give a bamboo shoot for so-called authenticity in the kitchen. Being of entrepreneurial bent, she wanted only to ensure that her tiny cafe, bounded by smoky pubs and over which a great cotton mill loomed like a cliff, had a steady supply of diners. To this end, her attack was two-pronged. First, she hired a local woman called Mavis to drum up custom. Second, she added chips with curry sauce to her first menu. A wok in one hand and the basket of a deep fat fryer in the other, thus she became a foot soldier in Britain’s slow-rolling culinary revolution.
Helen and Lisa, who are twins, are the third generation of female Chinese takeaway owners in their family, their mother having followed Lily into the business. Both of them left Manchester for a while, going off to university elsewhere. But, somewhat to the horror of their family, they jacked in their high-flying jobs and returned home. Now they’re the proprietors of Sweet Mandarin, a restaurant and takeaway in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, where they very proudly serve traditional British-Cantonese food. No, it’s not terribly Fuchsia Dunlop; those still working their way through her huge book of recipes from the Yangtze region, Land of Fish and Rice, might want to give it a miss. Nevertheless, the Tses’ sweet and sour pork balls give the lie to the ridiculous notion that food can ever be “culturally misrepresentative”. Muddle is the essence of food, its very life blood. In their case, every mouthful tells a story: of creative immigrants and suspicious indigenous diners; of changing tastes in the 20th century (in 1959, most people had not yet tasted an avocado, let alone a water chestnut), and of a certain kind of nostalgia in the 21st (even as we’ve learned to love slimy black mushrooms that look like newly washed-up bladderwrack, there are still times when nothing but crispy duck pancakes and gung bao chicken will do). Cooked to family recipes, they have an authenticity that is all their own.
By coincidence, I found myself standing outside Sweet Mandarin not so long ago. I’d tumbled out of the restaurant just across the street, and there it was, all red lampshades and black tables – a look that took me (deliberately, I’m sure) straight back to the first Chinese food I ever ate, Technicolor gloop that was completely delicious until the moment when, sated, it suddenly wasn’t, at which point the foil cartons needed to be piled, pronto, in the bin. We British, who now eat some eight million Chinese meals a week, developed our love of chicken with cashew nuts over an inordinately long time, for while the first immigrants arrived in ports such as Liverpool in the early 19th century, it wasn’t until the 1950s that we tried their food. This happened courtesy, first, of the automatic washing machine – many Chinese laundry workers converted their businesses into cafes out of sheer necessity – and second, of Billy Butlin, who opened Chinese restaurants at his holiday camps. Visitors, having enjoyed the novelty, went home boasting to their friends, who then wanted to try it, too.
Some of this information is in the programme. But it misses a trick, most of it being given over to yet another tedious competition – “which of our cooks can deliver an order of spring rolls the fastest?” – rather than to the story of British-Chinese food. How I wish the producers had traced the history of, say, sesame prawn toasts, or interviewed the owners of a Chinese supermarket (one of my favourites, Hondo, by Liverpool Cathedral, was put up for sale last month, its owners having decided to retire after 30 years). Still, there is one moment to treasure. Somehow, they tracked down a one-time regular at Lily’s place, a geezer who was in a band back in the day, and apt up to turn up late at night feeling ravenous. “Well, it was the 60s,” he said, recalling, with something akin to wonder, the chips with curry sauce. “We were breaking free.” What exoticism. What luxury.
