Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe. I’m your avant-garde auteur and risible raconteur Jon O’Guin, and if the rhyming didn’t give it away, we’re starting this one a little later than usual, so let’s see what we make of it. For those wishing to skip the exploration and get to the…I really wanted to say “Expectoration”, but that’s the opposite of eating. (and I just learned that word has an E, not an A as the second vowel. You CANNOT convince me that Gaston in Beauty in the Beast is saying “Expectorating”. He says “ExPACtorating”. Or does he? Crap, he DOES rhyme it with “decorating.” This is a weird thing to have an existential crisis about.) Anyway, here’s a link to the recipe. For everyone else, let’s…do whatever it is “this” is.

Back to What’s Important

Alright, I just re-watched the original song. Hard to say. He MIGHT be doing an “ey” sound.

It’s hard to judge with the lack of precision in animated lip posture.

What were we talking about? Oh, right, the lettuce thing. Which is a P.F. Chang thing. Who, and this is probably not a surprise to you, is not a real person. What may surprise you is how close the name is to being that of a real person. The company P.F. Chang was started by two men: Paul Fleming (P.F.), and Philip Chiang, who thought it would be better to simplify his last name to “Chang” for the restaurant, but who also might have been trying to avoid looking like he was trying to cash in. Because maybe the most interesting thing about Philip Chiang is Cecilia Chang, his mother.

Cecilia Chiang, who passed away at the age of 100 in 2020, is credited as the REASON America started eating any kind of regional Chinese food: she opened The Mandarin restaurant in San Francisco in 1960, and decided to serve the food she grew up on in Bejing, rather than the more popular American understanding of Chinese food, based on Cantonese cuisine. For comparison: Beijing is about 1,139 miles from Guangzhou, the capital of “Cantonese food”, which is only 15 miles shorter than the distance between New Orleans and Manhattan. So imagine if you were a New Yorker, and everyone you met thought that “American food” was gumbo, crawfish, and Jambalaya.

“This is some real bad lox, man.”

Cecilia’s life story is…something we should honestly expect to see a movie made of at some point, because it is LOADED with weird details that Hollywood producers would love. She was born to a wealthy family, who lived in a 52-room mansion in Beijing. During the Japanese occupation, she and her sister fled, walking over 850 miles over six months, to find family. She began teaching Mandarin at the US and Soviet embassies (a statement that IMPLIES she spoke Russian), met a man, got married, had two children, served as a SPY for the OSS (aks “what would eventually be the CIA”) and supposedly was on the LAST flight out of Shanghai before the Communist Revolution, being forced to LEAVE her (mathematically no older than 7) year old son Philip behind for a year.

Her family ended up in Tokyo, where she opened a restaurant and did well for herself. In 1960, she came to visit San Francisco because her sister had recently lost her husband, and encountered a couple of Japanese friends looking to start a new restaurant in Chinatown. She helped them negotiate a lease, and put forth thousands of her own money…only for the friends to back out, and the landlord to refuse to free her from the lease. Rather than take the loss, she just started a new restaurant.

I’m just saying, we need either Michelle Yeoh or Ming Na Wen on this gig.

The restaurant took off, with her aesthetic choices (focusing on/evoking the grandeur of her Beijing home, rather than the smaller and more humble restaurants Americans were used to) helping bring a degree of ‘critical respectability’ (this was the 60’s after all. We hadn’t yet adopted the “sometimes a kinda sketchy hole-in-the-wall is the best place to go” style of food journalism.) But she made many influential friends. She taught California culinary Icon Alice Waters how to cook “Chinese Food”, she taught Julia Chlid, Chuck Williams, the “Williams” in “Williams Sonoma” loved one of her dishes, and brought his friend, James Beard, as in “the James Beard Award” (the American culinary equivalent of an Oscar.)

She retired in the 1990’s, at the age of 71, published several books, and by all accounts passed peacefully in her sleep. And she has left a towering legacy. You wanna know a food that they didn’t make in American Chinese restaurants before The Mandarin opened? Try fucking POTSTICKERS.

You down with ol jiaosi? Yeah you know me!

Yeah, jiaozi guotie are a Northern Chinese dish, so she was one of the first to make them commercially in America. Along with Sizzling Rice Soup (a dish I had forgotten that I loved as a child until this moment, and now have an almost painful desire to hunt down and try again) and many other dishes.

Indeed, today’s recipe, for a “P.F. Chang-style” Lettuce Wrap, is certainly an imitation of a dish. But it goes deeper than that, because the P.F. Chang Lettuce Wrap is itself a knock-off. So let’s talk a LITTLE bit more about that, before we get into the recipe (because it is stupidly simple, so I’m really just kind of riffing, here. Probably should have taken the link.

Step By Step, We Move Ever Onward

This might be a little too high-minded of a section, especially since, spoilers: it’s now 3 in the morning, so I’m passing out and letting Monday Jon pick up the pieces of “Alpha Centauri Quote”, “Ettore”, and “racism/growth”. BYE FELICIA

You know damn well that’s not how that meme works, you sleepy dick.

Alright, those may have seemed like ominous and cryptic riddles, for Legally-Also-Monday Jon to announce before he went to bed but I assure you, they make sense to me. A quote that has stuck in my head for DECADES is from Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri: a game about settling a planet around the star Alpha Centauri, and the futuristic version of human civilization that has developed. The game holds that the ship bringing 10,000 space colonists has arrived, but due to malfunction and sabotage, the captain has been murdered, and the ship’s colonists have aligned under 7 of the ship’s officers, forming new “nations” based on ideology who represent a kind of fragmented and interesting facets of culture. If you’ve played any of the Civilization games (or any 4x game, where you build cities and armies to explore and oppose other cities and armies), you know the basic structure. But something I found really cool as a kid were the quotes that were joined with a lot of technological breakthroughs. And one of them long stuck with me: “Technology is an inherently iterative process. One does not simply take sand from the beach and produce a [computer]. We use crude tools to fashion better tools, and then our better tools to fashion more precise tools, and so on. Each…refinement is a step in the process, and all of the steps must be taken.” It is, in my opinion, a great tool for thinking about technology, and social progress in general. Progress is progress. It’s okay if we only make things better, not perfect.

And I think that’s really useful and helpful to think about, especially in the context of Cecilia and Philip, due to a moment I passed over briefly earlier: Philip Chiang named the restaurant after himself…but he did so while also changing his name to something less likely to confuse Americans. Chang, not Chiang. And that was a refinement from the previous generation: Cecilia herself was BORN Sun Yun, with “Cecilia” being a western name she adopted for business purposes. It’s a common trope from the era, remember Jon and Tom (Ivan and Athanas) from the Cincinnati Chili post? Hell, you probably know the work of Ettore Boiardi…oh, I’m sorry, “Hector Boyardee” as in “Chef Boyardee”.

THIS IS A MAN, A REAL MAN. NOT SOME CLOWN FOR YOUR AMUSEMENT.

Things are better now. Chefs can get famous in America with names like Samin Nosrat, or J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, or Ming Tsai. We are grinding the edges of chef’s identities less to make them fit the American mold, and instead we are expanding the mold to fit more edges, because that’s where the good bits are.

So when Philip Chiang started the P.F. Chang company, one of the first dishes on the menu was Chicken Lettuce Wraps, itself a revision of his mother’s recipe for “Minced squab in lettuce cups.” Because Americans always struggle when reminded what ‘squab’ is. In the latin, Columba livia. In the English, well…

A beautiful specimen. Look at that plumage.

IF you want to be technical (and when do we not?) Squab is technically the veal to pigeon’s “beef”. Squab are pigeons that are only a few months old. But yes, squab is technically just pigeon. Though, to be fair to raisers of Squab, thinking of wild pigeon when you think of it is somewhat off-base, in the same way that domesticated pigs are not the same things as wild hogs. But it’s pretty easy to guess why he changed the recipe. For one thing, the only place I found near me selling Squab was charging $15 a pound, so chicken is VASTLY…actually, hold on…yeah, okay, so for comparison, the same farm is selling a whole chicken, roughly 4x heavier than the squab, for $3 more. So Squab is about 3-4x more expensive than chicken, based on this single data point. It’s ALSO easier to convince ‘normal’ (read: white) Americans to eat in middle or lower-class settings: squab is for fancy pants and people who farm their own.

So, how do we build on this classic recipe? By not trying particularly hard!

The Actual Cooking Process Begins, Fairly Late in the Process

Shut Up, Title Jon. Anyway, part of the reason I wasted so much time is that this is not a particularly deep or complicated recipe…nor do I believe it to be very accurate. Basically, what happened is I was buying up ingredients for the other 8 things I legitimately wanted to make, and thought “hey, I like lettuce wraps, and this recipe is all stuff we have around the house except a pound of ground chicken, lettuce, and some ginger. That’ll be easy to add in.” And thus it was.

So, if you want to understand this recipe: it’s another “dump recipe”, this time consisting of some fairly basic steps: sauté some aromatics, add some chicken, simmer in a sauce, and serve. The whole process should be less than 15 minutes.

Including chopping up way too many water chestnuts.

For your Mise-en-place, you want to chop up an onion, mince some garlic, grate some ginger baton some water chestnuts, and whip up a sauce. According to some sources, no one beyond Philip himself knows the exact recipe of the sauce for the P.F. Chang’s lettuce wrapped chicken, which…isn’t believable, but is probably functionally true. By which I mean that Cecilia Chang wasn’t the only cook, or even the PRIMARY cook, at The Mandarin: she hired chefs while she handled running the restaurant: finding and buying ingredients, washing dishes, overseeing, etc. So she almost certainly wasn’t the ONLY person to know the recipe for her sauce. Now, Philip almost certainly changed the recipe when he changed to chicken, but he still probably had people with him, tasting it and letting him know. But those people were probably his family members, business partner, or very close staff. So while I bet some small number of people know the recipe, I do also believe it’s quite probable that none of them are/have been willing to talk.

The general consensus is that at least three specific ingredients go into the sauce: hoisin, rice vinegar, and soy sauce. Those are the agreed-upon basics. From there, you sometimes see oyster sauce, you see a lot of chili-based additions, such as Sriracha, or Chili-garlic paste. Some people believe that minced garlic and ginger are part of the sauce, others think they’re just aromatics cooked with the chicken. The recipe we’re using today relied on hoisin, reduced sodium soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, and sriracha, and, in my family’s opinion (which, I should note, I think it’s been a decade since any of us have been to a P.F Chang’s. we’ve had lettuce wraps, sure, just not from there), it wasn’t hugely accurate. (though our biggest complaint was that it wasn’t cohesive/didn’t coat the filling enough, so maybe a cornstarch slurry would have helped.) In any case, it’s a solid base if you want to try experimenting on your own. I’d personally look into Dark Soy sauce, for more coloration, and maybe some oyster sauce, as our version was a little on the sweeter side.

Damn you, goo!

From there…Well, I basically already told you. Cook some onion until soft, cook some ginger and garlic, realize you have twice as much ground chicken as you need, wait what was that last step?

I am, by popular report, the most literate man many people know.
How am I so bad at reading?

Yeah, turns out the “add a recipe to the list last minute” plan had a flaw, where suddenly I was either going to have to figure out what to do with a spare half pound of ground chicken, or we were going to have to double everything in the recipe. We chose the latter, since the alternative almost certainly meant the chicken would end up going to waste. This required us to shuffle around our storage containers a little, but we made do for the few minutes we’d need them.

Get in the can, ginger.

From there, it’s a pretty quick and simple process: cooking the aromatics is like, 6 minutes, add the chicken, cook until no longer visibly pink, add the sauce, and cook until you think it’s dried out enough, or, like my family, we got sick of waiting/things were getting dangerously close to “Jon’s going to be late to this last dress rehearsal if we don’t serve up now.”

This picture was taken at 6:05. I was supposed to be at rehearsal between 6 and 6:30.

The result? MEDIOCRE. In a positive way. Think like, “6.5 out to 10” (no comeback mechanics) Honestly, two big things brought it down. Firstly, as I noted, the sauce was a little off. But it was just ‘not right’ enough to be noticeable and a little distracting. If/when I do this again, I want to swap out the Sriracha for something more complex, and try some other little tweaks (like, I think the reduced-sodium soy sauce threw off the savory-sweet balance) Secondly, we went with some living butter lettuce for the cups. (if you’ve never interacted with that: it’s a type of small lettuce that they sell to you with the roots still attached, and imbedded in a little brick of dirt.) Which is a great lettuce for like, burgers, but here it was a little off. It was a little too soft, not providing that little snap of crisp coolness to offset the warm filling. For being so simple and adaptable, I’m sure we can explore other formulas, or even make our own sauce that we like. (Oh man, can you imagine like, a gochujang based one?) So I do recommend you give this recipe, or at least something like it, a shot. And if you don’t love it, use that template to advance and iterate. Build a better lettuce wrap. FROM SAND. Nope, lost the thread there. Buh-bye

THURSDAY: JON WILL HOPEFULLY NOT GET OVERWHELMED WITH STUFF AGAIN, AND ACTUALLY DO A POST.

MONDAY: OH SHIT IT’S ALMOST ST PADDY’S DAY. I WAS THINKING OF DOING SOMETHING WITH BUTTER OR CREAM. IRISH CREAM? I’LL GET BACK TO YOU.

Here's the

Recipe

“P.F. Chang” style Chicken Lettuce Wrap

Ingredients

Sauce

3 tbsp hoisin

3 tbsp reduced-sodium soy sauce

2 tbsp rice wine vinegar

1 tbsp Sriracha

1 tsp sesame oil

Lettuce wrap

1 tbsp olive oil

1 medium yellow onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 tbsp freshly grated ginger

½ lb ground chicken

1 (8 oz) can water chestnuts, cut into batons (or cubed, your choice)

2 green onions, sliced

Salt and pepper

1 head leafy lettuce

Preparation

In a small bowl, whisk together all sauce ingredients. In a large skillet over medium-high heat, heat the olive oil. Add the onion and cook until soft, about 5 minutes.
Stir in Garlic and ginger, cook for 1 minute, until fragrant. Add in ground chicken, and cook until chicken is no longer visibly pink, breaking into small pieces.
Add sauce, and cook until sauce is reduced and chicken is fully cooked, about 2 minutes. Remove from heat, stir in water chestnuts and green onions, and season with salt and pepper.
Scoop chicken mixture into lettuce leaves, and serve.