Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Chinese Food on Christmas

Episode Date: December 23, 2020

What started out as a tradition among Jewish people on the Lower East Side at the turn of the last century has become a full-blown American holiday custom. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck Jerry's even here. She's sitting in for Dave C, the super producer.

And this is short stuff, a good one too, if you ask me. Yeah, so I know that A Christmas Story is one of your favorite movies. And I know that that great scene at the end that is unfortunately now dripping with ethnic overturns and racism. Sure. But it was, it's still a funny scene

of the family going out to eat Chinese food on Christmas. And an empty Chinese restaurant, the only problem I have with that, well, aside from the other stuff I just mentioned, is that it's not full of Jewish patrons. Yeah, it's pretty much empty if I remember correctly, isn't it? The only one's there.

It is entirely possible that I think that it takes place in Cleveland, outside of Cleveland, doesn't it, or is it Indiana? I think it was shot outside of Cleveland, but maybe set in Indiana. Okay, there was probably not a Jewish person to be found in Indiana in the 1930s. Maybe so.

That's probably it. And my God, did you know Bob Clark died in a car accident brought on by a DUI driver in 2007? Oh yeah. I had no idea until just recently. I think his son too, right? Yeah, his oldest son. Very sad.

RIP Bob Clark and son. But yeah, so there is something weird in that there's no Jewish people in there because at any Chinese food restaurant on Christmas in America, especially these days, you're going to find plenty of Jewish people eating there. In fact, it's a huge tradition among the Jewish American community, it turns out.

Yeah, and you brought up this very kind of funny moment at the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Justice Elena Kagan. Someone said, where were you during the Christmas attack launched by Al-Qaeda the year before? And she said, like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant. What a great line.

And apparently Chuck Schumer was like, well, the reason being is because it's probably the only place open. So he just kind of ruined the whole thing. Yeah, he did, he explained it. But he probably didn't need to explain because from just researching this, but also my own awareness,

like eating Chinese food on Christmas is not just a Jewish tradition any longer, it's become an American tradition, but it definitely traces its origins back to the Jewish community. And apparently right around the turn of the last century in the Lower East Side of New York City is where it really finds its roots,

which is pretty cool that you can trace something like that back like that. Oh, totally. It makes sense because if you're talking about different types of food, like Mexican food or Italian food, there's dairy mixed in with the meat and a lot or most of the dishes.

So it's hard to eat kosher. Chinese food, first of all, doesn't have dairy. My famous story about, does that have cheese on it in the Chinese restaurant. Still one of the great things that ever happened to me as a child was overhearing that conversation. But they don't have dairy in their food generally. And stuff is just, you've got your meat

and you've got rice and you've got things that are cooked together, but it's like vegetables and meats cooked together. It doesn't have like cream sauce or cheese and stuff like that. Right, which to a Jewish person is basically the tantamount to being kosher. And today it's really easy to be kosher in America

because the food industry back in I think the 50s said, oh, there's a lot of Jewish people who live here now. There's like a whole market for making kosher foods or just labeling foods as kosher that were already kosher anyway. But before that, Chinese restaurants were one of the only places out in the rest of America where a Jewish person could go

and feel pretty confident about having a kosher meal. So that in and of itself makes sense. And there's also some other, there's some commonalities too, especially between Eastern European Jewish people and Chinese cuisine, and that there's a lot of sweet and sour dishes common to both.

Creplak, which is like a meat filled dumpling is kind of resemble some of the Chinese meat filled dumplings like dim sum. And then also the pancakes, Chinese pancakes resemble blintzes too. So it's not like it was just the most entirely foreign concept to a lot of these Jewish Americans who were recently arrived,

but it was still exotic and new too. Yeah, so we'll take a break now. And then as promised, I know I let us astray, but we will head down to the lorry side right after this. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so you promised talk of the lorry side where this was kind of born. So there's a woman named, and this is not a joke. Her name is Jennifer Ait Lee, the number eight. I guess she's named after the movie.

I don't know. I didn't get that far. I just verified that that was in a typo. Yeah, Jennifer Ait with Andy Garcia. And I can't remember who else. And John Goodman, I can't remember who. Who was Jennifer Ait? Was it Uma Thurman?

Oh, maybe, maybe. Well, you talk and I'll look up. How about that? All right, so Jennifer Ait Lee is a producer of the search for general so, it's general so, right? Yep. Okay. General Ait.

And she had this to say, Jews and Chinese were the two largest non-Christian immigrant groups at the turn of the century. And so these groups were linked by living in the lorry side of Manhattan. And they were also linked by otherness. And for Jewish people to love Chinese food, she feels just says a lot about immigration history

in the United States and being an outsider in the United States kind of living together, which is really kind of a nice thing, I think. Yeah, I thought that was a really good point. And I'm sure it's an accurate point too, but it's something that's kind of easy to overlook. A lot of people just kind of, I think narrow it down to, oh, well, that was what was open on Christian

and Christian holidays and Sundays, which is true. Like the Chinese restaurant's gonna be open on Christmas. So if you're a Jewish person looking to go out to eat, the Italian place is gonna be closed because they're celebrating Christmas. The Irish pub's probably gonna be closed because they're celebrating Christmas. So the Chinese food happened to be open,

but it's definitely, there's a lot further deeper layers to it than that. Yeah, another one is that Chinese people had no history of being prejudiced toward Jewish people, which was a big deal. They were open on Sundays. They were open on other Christian holidays. They, I think there could have possibly been a reputation

at some Italian restaurants early in the day of, early in the days of New York, that they were maybe not as welcoming for Jewish people. Is that a nice way to say it? At the very least, if you were a Jewish and you went to an Italian restaurant, you might take note of the extensive religious, yeah, the imagery of the Virgin Mary and Jesus

with the crown of thorns and all that and be like, ugh, you know, I'm going to the Chinese food place instead. Yeah, yeah, it wasn't necessarily hostile. Right, but yeah, it wasn't like, come in Jewish friends necessarily, who knows? But they didn't have to think about it at the Chinese restaurant.

And then what's more too, it wasn't just the Jewish community that was welcomed with open arms to Chinese restaurants during this time. If you were black too, you could find a place to eat at a Chinese restaurant. They didn't discriminate against anybody. They were like, you got some money and you want to eat, come on in.

Yeah, it's very nice and welcoming. In the 30s, by the time the 1930s rolled around, Jewish cookbooks like full on had Americanized versions of famous Chinese dishes like egg-foo, yang and chop suey. And the Lower East Side sort of started expanding. Jewish people moved out, moved to different boroughs, different neighborhoods, out into the suburbs

and Bada Bing, Bada Boom, all of a sudden Chinese restaurants were following because they know they've got a good customer base. Yeah, dude, so I saw that there's something like 40,000 Chinese food restaurants in the United States these days. There's 14,000 McDonald's. So 40,000 Chinese food restaurants.

And it was the Aspera of the Jewish community from the Lower East Side of New York further and further out into America. That kind of drew Chinese food restaurants out with them. So you can thank the Jews from New York for your local Chinese food place that you love so much. Give them a tip of the hat and say, thank you, Jewish friend.

I appreciate you bringing the Chinese food restaurant this way. That is really cool. I know they became sort of neighborhood hubs in Jewish communities and they would see friends and neighbors and the families were there and children were playing together. It was just sort of a beautiful symbiotic relationship,

it seems like from the beginning. Yeah, yeah. And so over time, the rest of America said, hey, the Jewish people are really onto something here. Let's get in on this. And nowadays, like eating Chinese food on Christmas is just a general American tradition. And you can see that apparently in Google searches

for Chinese food, which I guess skyrocket on Christmas or right around Christmas, right? Yeah, I think they go up, or actually that's a grub hub stat is Chinese food is up 152% on Christmas day, but it definitely, the Google search peaks on Christmas day and that's been going on since they've been keeping track of Google stats.

Yep. And so apparently the most popular Chinese food order in all of America on any day, but in particular Christmas day is that General So's. Have you ever had Chinese food on Christmas? Yeah, yeah. And as a matter of fact, I didn't realize how cliche we were.

You me and I would go get General So's chicken at a Golden Buddha on 10th Street. Oh, okay. On 10th in Midtown, not the one indicator. Gotcha. And we just drove past it the other day and it's gone, which is kind of sad. So there goes our Christmas tradition,

but yeah, for a few years, we would go eat Chinese food on Christmas is good. I love Chinese food so much. Yeah, I do too. I do too. As a matter of fact, researching this the other day, we ended up getting Thai, it wasn't Chinese, but you know, close enough.

But I was like, we've got to get some Chinese food just from reading about all this and seeing words like egg fuyang and chop suey and stuff that made me so hungry for it. I never had that stuff. I don't even know what chop suey is. So that I think is a short stuff in and of itself, but supposedly they think it's,

chop suey basically means leftover. So it has its own origin story. We'll do one on chop suey too, okay? Sweet. Sweet indeed. So if you want to know more about Chinese food on Christmas, well then buddy, you've got a day to figure it out and then try it for yourself tomorrow

because the Jewish community figured it out a long time ago. And since I said that, it means that short stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen

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