Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, where one man…no, one FAMILY eats their way through history a quarter-pounder at a time. I’m your Domestic Dom Toretto, Jon O’Guin, and today’s recipe really was a group effort. Both to make and to eat. And you can skip all the details of cultural appropriation and group celebration by clicking this link. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

Not At All Crabby

The first thing we should address: “Jon, you famously don’t like seafood. Why did you make crab Rangoon?” And, to use a mildly racist and outdated term (which, as we will soon learn, is more than a little appropriate), I was basically shanghaied into it: Since coming back from Leavenworth, I have struggled to get my family to agree to ANY dishes I suggested making, or even acknowledge I was suggesting them. A problem I have lamented on the site multiple times…but one that I was frankly SHOCKED to see drastically overcome for today’s recipe. During dinner 2 or so weeks ago, I listed a bunch of dishes I was considering making to my mother, all of which were greeted with a non-committal “okay”, or one or two questions about the dish, ending in a non-committal “okay”. Which, given the range of foods I was discussing, was slightly irritating:

“Horchata Granita?” “Okay”.
“Rajas Mac and Cheese?” “What’re Rajas?” “Rajas are like, roasted poblano-peppers simmered in Cream. So it’d be like a Poblano Mac and Cheese.”  “Okay”
“Korean Short Rib Tacos?” (For context: my mother LOVES braised short rib dishes, and has been on a big Korean food kick.) “Okay”.
“Crab Rangoon?” “Okay.”
“Xiao Long Bao?” “Okay.”
“Chicken Cutlets with Kimchi Ranch?” “okay.”

I walked away from that conversation a little frustrated at the lack of response. But apparently, my mother walked away inspired, because 3 days later, when she stopped by the store on her way home, she bought wonton wrappers, cream cheese, and imitation crab. She had decided that she definitely wanted Crab Rangoon.

Behold all the ingredients needed. Even one we didn’t use!

At which point NATE volunteered that he would HAPPILY make the filling and put the dumplings together, as long as I fried them. This may sound generous, but it is actually a subtle form of bullying: it is well known in my family that the cooking technique I hate the MOST is deep-frying. A cooking incident in my teens where a frying flauta popped, searing the inside of my arm, has left me notoriously high-strung and jumpy as oil sizzles away.

And so with Nate volunteering to do most of the work, my mother having already grabbed the ingredients, and a cast party yesterday where I needed to provide a snack, we set out to put together 48 crab Rangoon. Which we’ll get to, but before that irritatingly simple process, we should answer, what exactly IS crab Rangoon?

 A Little Dumpling of Deception

Firstly, let’s answer the question: what is “Rangoon”? It’s actually a noun, and an outdated one at that: Rangoon USED to be the capital of Burma. It’s not anymore, because A: they built a new city to be the capital, and B: because it’s named Yangon now, and C: The country is named Myanmar now.

They went full “change my name and address” on that shit.

This is most notable, because, fun fact, the Burmese alphabet doesn’t have a fucking R in its base alphabet (which is technically an abugida, not an alphabet, which means that it doesn’t typically have independent vowels (so like, it’s not “B” and “u”, it’s “bu”), but that’s a complicated topic for another day). It turns out that in Burmese, the country was called “Behma”, which happens to sound like an English accent (closer to an Australian, but whatever, it was the 1850’s) saying “Burma”, so that’s what the English wrote. Don’t know how they misheard “Yang” as “Rang”, but, you know, there’s a bunch of American rivers named “(Local tribes’ word for River) River”, so we all make mistakes.

But hey, the dish was made back when Rangoon WAS the right name, and the capital. So what’s the dish’s history? How did dumplings made of crab and cream cheese catch on in Southeast Asia?

They didn’t.

The first evidence of the phrase “Crab Rangoon” is from an American newspaper in 1952, about a Hawaiian themed party in Pittsburgh. Specifically, it was “crab Rangoon a la Jack”. Then, about 4 years later, the dish showed up at Trader Vic’s. Trader Vic’s is…okay, this is going to take a bit to unpack…You know what? There’s too much to get even MOST of it, so we’ll talk about it Thursday. Basic summary for now: Tiki bars/restaurants, based off a flawed understanding of Hawaiian/Polynesian culture and food, started up in the 1930’s. And while certainly some of that lack of understanding is due to racism, we should also remember that learning stuff used to be a LOT fucking harder than it is now. Like, I was able to find out that Burmese doesn’t have an R with like, 2 minutes of research. But imagine me trying that in the 30’s: I’d have to go to the library, and see if they have any books about Burma or the Burmese language. And if not, they’d have to call OTHER libraries, who would have to check card catalogs, and hope the cards were organized correctly. Learning that detail would take hours, if not days of collective human effort. This is one of the reasons that racism/stereotypes were so common: people straight up didn’t know better. Sometimes they did, and willfully chose to be dicks, but there was also just a lot of straight-up ignorance.

Look, in 1958, there were FIFTY different Cowboy shows on TV. That is not a media environment for nuanced understanding of Pacific Islanders.

Anywho, dude makes a Tiki Bar in Los Angeles called Don the Beachcomber (kind of, again, talk about it Thursday), another guy starts a restaurant in San Francisco named “Hinky Dink’s”, and two years later goes to The Beachcomber, loves it, comes home and decides to make his own version of the same place, renaming Hinky Dink’s to “Trader Vic’s”. He would later invent the Mai Tai. Anywho, these restaurants do really well. Like, “there are still 20+ Trader Vic’s worldwide RIGHT NOW.” And in the 50’s, “Crab Rangoon” starts showing up on the menu.

And here’s the thing about that: Don the Beachcomber was basically just serving Chinese food. Specifically Cantonese food. Trader Vic’s similarly had an INTENSELY Chinese menu for much of its early years. Its first menu was basically “a Chinese menu with New Zealand Oysters and Pineapple Spareribs”, and it still held a lot of that by the 1950’s, with only the addition of a Western section, some curries, and some mainstays of the now-well established tiki bar fare to expand it.  So “Crab Rangoon” is basically the 1950’s version of “Beijing Beef”: it has nothing to do with the actual PLACE, it’s just a name people slapped onto something they made for completely different reasons.  If I had to guess…I’d say it was a combination of a cost-saving measure and buying into a trend: Trader Vic used to sell Pork and Shrimp wontons, based off relatively standard Chinese wonton fillings. At the same time, for CENTURIES America had been combining Crab with dairy products, a trend that was leaned into HARD in the 1950’s, during the rise of the “dip dinner era”: dinner parties from the newly stable middle class, which used the no-longer rationed American dairy products and various exotic/strongly flavored ingredients as pre-dinner appetizers. Cream Cheese Balls and Crab Dip both took off at this time. So it’s entirely possible Vic himself simply came up with the idea “If I sell crab dip in a wonton, people will DEFINITELY buy that, and it’ll be cheaper than the current wontons I make.”

Dude was not missing opportunities to make revenue, is all I’m saying.

So that’s the history: American Chefs riffing with American Chinese cuisine, and a flawed understanding of Polynesian dishes, probably not even trying to mimic the flavors of the country and just picking a good sounding name. All of that complicated enough? Good, because this recipe is like, 3 steps, and while they’re a little irritating, they’re not HARD.

Making A Mess of Crab

Fun detail for me: since the initial crab Rangoon creation, imitation crab meat was invented, and has become a go-to ingredient for most recipes. Trader Vic’s themselves does not use it, sticking with Blue crab, but I really like the idea that a dish with a ‘fake’ name now uses a ‘fake’ ingredient. It’s a sort of culinary poetry in my opinion.

By the way, there are TONS of recipes for this out there, that really only agreed on “Crab (or a crab-like device”, “cream cheese”, and “wonton”. Trader Vic’s seasons the crab, in part by dousing it with A.1 Steak Sauce and Lingham’s Chili Sauce. (Which MIGHT be part of the name? LIngham’s is a British sauce, so it’s possible Vic landed on British-controlled Burma as a reference to the British ingredients) but otherwise just mixes it with cream cheese. The recipe on our Wonton wrappers calls for soy sauce, salad oil, ginger, and garlic, all of which are absent in our recipe. Our recipe, which I suppose you could call a “minimalist” take, comes from “Let’s Make Dumplings! A Comic-Book Cookbook”, which is exactly what it sounds like: a cookbook, in the form of a comic book, about making dumplings.

The worrying thing is I am now so deep down the culinary rabbit-hole that I can identify every dumpling on this cover.

It’s a neat fusion of forms, since cookbooks often WANT a lot of illustrations and pictures in order to convey the steps needed for the recipes, especially for something as hands-on as dumpling making, and an idea so clearly up my family’s alley that my mother and I each bought a copy independently, without talking to the other about it. But that’s neither here nor there. To make their recipe, you’ll need Cream Cheese, Imitation Crab, Green Onion, and Wonton Wrappers. The recipe also includes Salt, which my family “chose” not to add (because we’d actually made like, 5 wontons before remembering the salt was supposed to be in there), and optionally includes lemon juice, which my brother addressed by noting he was “opting not to”.

Nate sliced and minced Green onions, and then, in the interest of time, I started working them into the cream cheese while the oil heated, and he cut up the imitation crab.

We had a brief argument on whether the crab would flake enough, but I yielded, figuring even if it was too chunky, that’s content, baby.

Once the crab was all chopped up, Nate took over making sure the crab was flaked through the cheese, and my mother came in to help him form the wrappers, as I set up the draining rack for the frying station. The cookbook has you make a 4 petaled flower, or 4 pointed star design, pinching the middle of each edge to its opposite, forming a unified center, with 4 wings/petals/points. Or, rather, they suggest an entirely different way to do it, but Nate didn’t read how to make them, so that’s what he did. (For the sake of thoroughness: the printed recipe has you pinch two opposing corners “shut”, so that, when you bring them together, they fully insulate the filling from potential exposure to the oil. Our method…doesn’t make that assurance, so the hot oil might get into and directly cook the filling.)

Nate assures me he put some effort into protecting the filling, but I was busy learning our infrared laser thermometer wasn’t going to be helpful, so who’s to say.

From there, you just drop them into 350 degree vegetable oil, and fry them for around 2 minutes. Which sounds like this is a very quick recipe, but it should be noted you fry in batches of 6, and this recipe makes around 48 dumplings. So that’s 8 batches you need to fry, and you’ve got to make sure the oil holds the right temp, and some batches are going to brown a little slower than others, so this is definitely a 20-25 minute process for just FRYING the wontons…assuming you do them all at the same time. You COULD freeze the dumplings for use in future meals, which will add a couple extra minutes (and be a little scarier) to later frying. But, as noted, I had a cast party, so we fried them all, so that we could eat 10 of the dumplings, and then bring the other 30ish (My mother was very bad at “put 2 tsps in each dumpling”, often taking rounded ‘teaspoons’, meaning a lot of our dumplings had closer to 3 tsp than 2) to the party.

Look at them: fat and swollen with bourgeoise gluttony.

The Results are, by all accounts, good. I don’t personally think they’re amazing, and would like to try more boldly seasoned (or you know, seasoned-at-all) versions in the future, but, again, I don’t particularly like seafood. My castmates thought they were great, my mom said they had the right texture, taste, and temperature, Nate thought they were fine, etc etc. Look, if you want a fairly fun and low-stress dish to cook with like, a partner or your family, I think this would be a good 45 minute to 1 hour recipe: it’s hands-on enough to feel like everyone’s really doing something, and as long as an adult is making sure no one gets frisky with the boiling oil, there’s not a lot of chance for people to get hurt: Imitation crab is already cooked, so the worst case scenario is cold filling or soggy wontons. So give it a try, and maybe give it your own twist too.

THURSDAY: WE TALK TIKI.

MONDAY: I THINK NATE IS MAKING A DISH I HAVE BEEN TRYING TO GET MADE FOR 2 YEARS, AND THAT OUT OF NOWHERE BOTH HE AND MY MOM COMMITTED TO.

Recipe

Crab Rangoon

Makes 40-48 wontons

Ingredients

8 ounces cream cheese, room temperature

8 ounces imitation crab meat, roughly chopped

2 green onions, minced

48 wonton wrappers

1 quart vegetable oil

Water for the wrappers

Preparation

1. Combine the cream cheese, crab, and green onions in a large bowl, stirring until well-mixed. Preheat the oil in a large pot to 350 degrees. Actually, heat it a little more to start, as it’ll drop a bit when the wontons go in. Not past like, 375. Set up a draining rack of a rimmed baking sheet lined with paper towels, preferably with a cooling rack over it. (this will keep the wonton bottoms from getting soggy)

2. Place 2 tsps crab mixture in the center of each wonton wrapper, brushing the middle of each edge with water, and pinching them all together on top of the filling.

3. Working 6 at a time (less if your pot is not particularly wide, more if you have a huge pot), fry the wontons for around 2 minutes, until golden brown. Move to the cooking rack/baking sheet, and repeat with remaining wontons. Serve with sweet sauce, such as duck sauce, plum sauce, sweet chili, or Sweet-And-Sour.