Stir Fried: Adrian Miller and Deborah Chang talk Asian heritage chefs in the White House

I recently spoke to Miller and Chang about why there were so many Asian immigrant chefs in the White House and how they impacted what presidents ate.

These interviews have been edited for clarity and length.

Serving, with no path to citizenship

A Stanford-educated attorney and barbecue expert, Miller got the idea for this book after stumbling upon Li Ping Quan’s autobiography. We delved into the social-political shifts shaping White House kitchens and how surprisingly private White House dinner menus were kept.

Clara Wang: Li Ping Quan was the first White House Chef to put out a cookbook, and in many ways the first “celebrity” White House chef. How did this young man from Guangzhou end up cooking for Presidents Harding and Coolidge?
Adrian Miller: Early in his career, he cooked on a number of boats, including a torpedo boat with the person who would later become Admiral Charles Nimitz, a significant historical figure in World War II. But he just started rising through the ranks, and then eventually he gets detailed to the presidential yacht. So it must have been because of his wide reputation as being an excellent cook that he got offered that position.

There was one instance where First Lady Grace Coolidge asked him to get 125 lobsters on very short notice. He was only able to get two, so they had to change the entire menu. But when you read a lot of cooks’ memoirs for presidents, there's all kinds of stories about being asked to do stuff at the last minute and trying to perform a miracle.

CW: Quan and other Asian chefs through the first half of the 20th Century were getting hired during a time of anti-Asian sentiment. The Chinese Exclusion Act was still in place. Then we go into World War II and anti-Japanese camps. Coolidge effectively banned Asian immigration with the Johnson-Reed Act, yet his chef was a Chinese immigrant. How did this irony play out? Weren’t they scared of chefs poisoning the president or something?
AM: The racism was so thick that a lot of white people at that time thought of Asians as a new class of servants. It was almost like, “How would anyone dare do that?” Even though you see so many cases of where African Americans poisoned the food of the people that they were serving. Now, it was different, right, because they were enslaved, and Asians were signing up for military service, but I just thought it was an interesting dynamic.

CW: The fact that citizenship was not a requirement, and they hired Asian cooks who at that time could not even become citizens, is interesting.
AM: They just had to pass basically some kind of security check. I don't know what it was like 100 years ago, but yeah, we had a lot of non-citizens serving on these ships and serving food, which is kind of mind boggling.

CW: Many Asian heritage cooks ended up serving American political leaders through their experience cooking in the navy. Under the Chinese Exclusion Act, most foreign-born Asians couldn’t achieve citizenship through military service until 1943, yet until the Spanish-American War, most U.S. Navy cooks were Asian. Why did so many Asians end up serving as cooks in the military?
AM: Like the case for Black people, because of racism, they had no choice. If you signed up for the military, you were put into a servile position. So you were either a cook, you were either a dishwasher, or you're doing other kinds of manual labor. You weren't considered worthy to be a soldier or a seaman or anything like that, so they pretty much had no choice. What I can tell you, and it says this in the book, is that by the time that you get to 1915, 96 percent of the people in the mess men branch (military cook division) were Asian-heritage people.

The late 1800s is the time of the Spanish-American War, there’s this growing sentiment of the white man's burden. You know, white Europeans felt like they had to civilize the world, and so they looked at much of the world that was non-white as servants. There was a shift among white people in positions of power to prefer servants, cooks from Europe, and also from Asia, displacing the African Americans who had traditionally been in those positions.

CW: Pre-Quan and around the time of the earliest Asian chefs, what was the overall recognition of Asian cuisine for the broader U.S., as well as for political leaders, who would’ve been more globalized than the general public?
AM: Although Chinese food, and to some extent Japanese food, was well known in the broader public because there were Chinese restaurants in a lot of cities starting in the late 1800s, you don't see it as a heavy influence with presidential food because you just don't see a lot of newspaper articles talking about it. In the navy cookbook in 1902, there aren't any Asian recipes, but then by the time you get to 1920, there's several. You start to see presidents regularly eating Americanized Chinese dishes. Eisenhower, if he was in the White House on a Saturday night, he was getting chop suey from a local Chinese restaurant. That was his tradition.

CW: What are some notable Asian, or Asian-inspired dishes that were served at political functions, and is there any historical context behind them? For example, after the annexation of Hawaii, does pineapple make more of an appearance?
AM: No, that's a fantastic question. So, we just don't have a lot of that in the historical record, unfortunately, because people just didn't really talk about food the way they do now. It drives me nuts, because I would find the newspaper article about a White House state dinner, right? And I'm thinking about the first time that the royalty from Hawaii went to the White House. I think that was the very first state dinner in the 1870s. And you get a description of the event and everything except the meal. 

You'll get vivid details of the floral arrangements and all this other stuff. And then you just basically get, “Oh yeah, they had a nice meal.” No printed menus or anything like that. So unfortunately, the historical record is just very sparse when it comes to actual food items, how they got popular, when they were introduced, things like that. I had to piece this history together by looking at newspaper articles, hoping for nuggets here and there, and then also just looking at old cookbooks of the time period to see how those dishes show up, and we just really don't see these things show up until the 1920s or so. But just because we don't see it in cookbooks until the 1920s doesn't mean that it wasn't being served, we just don't have a record of it.

CW: Were there any preserved White House menus? How did you figure out what presidents ate on a daily basis?
AM: So it really depends on the president. So you have some presidents that were very good about writing down what they served, what they ate. But most presidents didn't. It was very, very private. The only president who really was good about that was Jimmy Carter. So if you go to the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, every day that he was at the White House, there's a menu available, and you can look at exactly what he had for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Carter was grubbing on egg foo young, sweet and sour pork, made by the European chef (Henry Haller) so I have no idea how good it tasted. He's really the only president where we have records like that.

CW: Leading towards the modern day, what are some differences in how the White House approaches Asian food now, compared to 100 years ago?
AM: The menus are more cosmopolitan now, especially since the 1990s. Because before that, at least a lot of the public menus were very Eurocentric, right? This is kind of an innovation of Hillary Clinton that she really doesn't talk about, but she really changed the trajectory of White House food with their emphasis on American ingredients, but still trying to find the flavor profiles of other countries, and then being more open to getting food from other countries.

The evolution of techniques and taste

Miller’s old University of Michigan undergrad pal and fellow recovering attorney, Chang developed 20 home-chef friendly recipes based on historical cookbooks and celebrity guest menus from Asian-heritage White House chefs. We discussed the challenges of adapting antiquated techniques and what “Asian fusion” means to her.

CW: Most of the older recipes from the book came from Li Ping Quan’s out-of-print cookbook. What was something that stood out to you about Quan’s recipes?
Deborah Chang: The first 20 recipes of Quan’s original cookbook are Chinese recipes, nothing fusion. He didn't use as many ingredients as we have today. One thing that was the same throughout all of his recipes, which reflected the period of time, is the fact that they didn't have as much stuff available. So he would have maybe six to eight ingredients for a chicken chow mein recipe. It’d be like chicken, bean sprouts, onion, and maybe red pepper or something like that. Whereas today you could use so many different kinds of vegetables, soy sauce, rice wine.

CW: How did you approach developing recipes for the book?
DC: I was really trying not to turn them into my recipes, but at the same time, I wanted our readers to be able to make the recipe, and for it to taste decent. I also was not aiming to be America's Test Kitchen, to have the best recipe out there. The overarching question was, “How much should I change this recipe?” The general principle was to stay authentic to the original cook, but makeable for the home chef.

His recipes for baked goods were very, very difficult. The baking ones were a huge challenge to adapt because baking requires precision and he had very sparse instructions, and the technology was different back then. There were no small appliances, so he was doing everything by hand. Today if we bake a cake, we take out the beater or the KitchenAid, right? And we throw in some baking powder to make it rise. He was actually making things rise by whisking in egg whites beaten stiff (by hand). That’s a very technique-heavy thing to do, and requires expertise to get the thing to rise. So I decided to add baking powder in those recipes.

CW: The way America eats has changed significantly over the last hundred years. Were there any recipes or ingredients Quan used that seem shocking today?
DC: Totally. He had over 400 recipes in the book, and the first issue was to pick which ones to include. Some of those ingredients, we just would not eat them today. An easy one is green turtle soup. We would never do that today, right? And he had funky combinations of things, like he would put bananas in salad, and stuff all kinds of weird things in peppers. Some of the combinations didn’t make sense. The ones that did make it were things that I knew people would eat today. Lemon pound cake, filet mignon, fried chicken, there's a shoestring potato recipe, a couple of salads.

CW: What were your favorite recipes?
DC: I like the cover recipe for tricolor pepper steak, the cauliflower mac and cheese is good. The egg roll recipe.

CW: Working on this project adapting Asian heritage chef recipes in the White House, how would you define Asian fusion food in a historical context?
DC: I would define Asian fusion food as adapting Asian food to suit the customer, which would be the First Family and guests of the White House. When I look at the recipes that all of these chefs did, it's like when you cook, you aim to please the patron. And that's what was cool to see—you had chicken chow mein or chicken chop suey adapted for Mrs. Coolidge. And you had pancit or pork adobo being served to presidents pretty much as is. But then you see all of these chefs cooking without Asian ingredients. Everyone can cook all different styles of food.

And the part that I'm having trouble verbalizing is, even if you cook filet mignon the fact that you're Asian, I just really think that it affects how you cook it. You don’t need to add shiitake mushrooms to make it fusion. I just think the fact that an Asian person is cooking, there has to be some sensibility that kind of gets into the food.

It’s easy to point to an ingredient—like, if there’s an Asian ingredient in the dish, different cooking techniques, it’s fusion, right? I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Edward Lee did butter bean grits for the state dinner for South Korea—it’s not Korean at all, but I feel like it is fusion in a way. I just feel like the fact that an Asian person cooks it is fusion.

CW: Maybe what you mean is that the significance of having an Asian person cooking for policymakers, throughout American history, goes beyond the food that’s being served—it’s fusion in the sense that the Asian person making the food is putting their touch on American history.
DC: I’ve said this in other interviews. In older times, cooking was a servant job. Today, food is cool. Executive chef is a position of leadership. That’s one reason why I liked working on this project—anything where an Asian person is in a position of leadership, I think is important.

Whereas back in the day they were viewed just as household help, now, executive chef, it’s a career. It’s put on a pedestal. You’re on TV. It’s what piqued my interest about this project: Asian immigrant pride, the contributions to our nation. We’re here too.