Lemon Chicken and Cyclotene
Some of our favorite flavors
Are we connected elsewhere? Say hi on: Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
Please forward Smart Mouth to your most culture-hungry friend!
The second article in this edition got me thinking: What is your birthday dessert? The one you return to every year, for any number of reasons? Let’s talk about it here.
Photo: Pamela D. McAdams
A Slice of Midwestern Food History
The story of Chinese food in America has a is a long and twisty one, from the first Chinese restaurants in Gold Rush-era San Francisco to Andrew Zimmern’s Lucky Cricket fiasco in 2018. Unless you’re a resident of the Midwest, there’s another American Chinese food chapter that you likely haven’t heard before: the history of Leeann Chin, a 48-location, multi-million-dollar chain that started in the founder’s south Minneapolis home.
Born in Guangzhou, China in 1933, Leeann Chin settled with her family in snowy Minnesota in 1957. What started as a desire to cook traditional dishes for her family with the bok choy and eggplant she grew in her garden turned into gifting dishes to loyal clients, as a thank you for work they gave her as a seamstress. Delighted with Chin’s cooking, clients began asking her to cater parties and teach classes. In 1980, she opened the first Leeann Chin restaurant, in a suburban shopping mall.
“I remember going to [the original restaurant] and it was so elegant. It was dark grey and sophisticated. I remember sitting down to big piles of lo mein and lemon chicken,” says Minneapolis food writer Stephanie March. The 80-seat spot specialized in Szechwan and Cantonese dishes, guided by Chin’s principle of ensuring a balance of color, texture, and flavor on the menu.
The restaurant was immediately popular with her former clients and cooking class students. But it was an unexpected encounter with actor Sean Connery — while Chin was catering a party at the home of then-Minnesota Twins owner Carl Pohlad — that yielded early investments from both men in what would become her legacy: a 19-year career running a successful restaurant chain that has since expanded to North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and airports in Baltimore and Atlanta.
Conceived as a fine dining restaurant, the flagship establishment is a far cry from the chain’s fast-casual concept today. Chin’s early restaurants — a second location opened in downtown St. Paul in 1984 — left their mark on the Twin Cities. “Back in the ‘80s, there was really nothing [in terms of Chinese food in the Twin Cities], and especially nothing of that caliber,” March says. “She was ahead of her time.”
After opening a third location, Chin sold the lot and its name to Minnesota-based General Mills for “millions of dollars.” Three years later, Chin bought her namesake restaurants back with a $6 million investment/loan combination and a vision of doubling down on the chain’s Midwest fanbase. After clashes with investors, Chin ended her involvement with the chain in 1999. Today it’s owned by the LA-based owner of Mandarin Express, Lorne Goldberg, who bought the enterprise for an undisclosed amount in 2007.
Despite formally leaving the restaurant industry a decade prior, Chin continued to cook until she died in Seattle on March 10, 2010. “I don’t think she could be called this great chef, but at the same time, she did what she did,” March says. And what she did created a legacy. 🥡
[Click here for more on the history of American Chinese food.]
Photo: Ruth Black
The Synthetics We Love to Eat
When we eat a bag of dill pickle chips or have birthday cake Oreos, we don’t tend to think about how they came into existence. How do we get potato chips to taste like pickles? What exactly is the taste of birthday cake? Flavor science can explain it.
Michele (her bosses won’t let her share her last name here), who works in regulatory and technical services for a company that manufactures flavors for the food industry, got interested in this world because “there's a sense of being removed from the sources of our food and where it comes from. I don't think very many people consider all of the back processes behind picking up a package of their baloney … or their box of macaroni and cheese.”
A number of companies across the world specialize in producing the flavors that we consume every day, from “kiwi-strawberry” drinks to grape-flavored candy. The flavor market is big business. Grand View Research, Inc., a market research and consulting firm, estimated the US flavor market to be at $3.97 billion in 2016 and recently projected that it will increase to $4.87 billion by 2025. Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association of the United States (FEMA), the US national association for the flavor industry, has over 100 individual and corporate members.
Vanilla extract is a big part of the business, and considered by many to be the most popular flavor in the world. But naturally grown vanilla is extremely expensive. According to Food Business News, it’s now over $200 per pound.
Vanillin is the main compound in vanilla that gives it its taste. Michele explains that scientists have been able to synthesize vanilla and create synthetic vanillin, the dominant flavor in items such as Vanilla Coke. Natural vanilla extract, from plants grown in places like Tahiti and Madagascar, has a deep bodied smell and taste; synthetic vanillin definitely tastes like vanilla, but it’s flatter and less complex.
And that’s fine for Vanilla Coke, cream soda, breakfast cereals, and other processed foods where the vanilla flavor doesn’t need to be deep and rich. Moreover, says Michele, “There's no way that the amount of industrial consumption of the [natural] vanilla extract industry can support” all of the items that now contain vanillin.
And birthday cake flavoring? That’s synthetic vanillin plus maltol and cyclotene, which are “basically like brown sugar notes,” giving it that baked cookie effect. The chemicals are also found in “fruit flavors to give a candied, ‘jammy’ note,” says Michele.
The FDA says that the difference between synthetic and natural flavorings comes down to whence the flavor is derived: if it’s a laboratory, it’s synthetic; if it’s from a plant or animal, it’s natural. In both cases, the flavor has to be isolated from the source, so oftentimes natural flavoring isn’t that much different from synthetic, says Michele. And as it turns out, these synthetics are the spice of modern life. 🎂
The changing of the Land O’Lakes butter box design has attracted a lot of attention. Here’s an essay explaining why we might have it all wrong.
This newsletter is edited by Katherine Spiers, host of the podcast Smart Mouth.
A TableCakes Production.
Want to contribute to this newsletter? Here are the submission guidelines.