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186 9 “Oriental Cookery” Devouring Asian and Pacific Cuisine during the Cold War Mark Padoongpatt Cold War “Oriental” Food “Cooking is considered an art in the Orient,” Ruby Erskine explained to students in her cooking class at the Women’s Auxiliary to the Salt Lake Chapter of Life Underwriters in Utah. “And the food in the Orient,” Erskine added as she used chopsticks to stir-fry vegetables in an electric skillet, “is a happy combination of good eating and good health.” It was 1970, and Erskine had been teaching courses like these with “tremendous enthusiasm” for several years throughout Salt Lake City. She regularly spoke on the topic of “Oriental cookery” in front of church and civic groups, organized Oriental-themed benefit dinners, and once demonstrated the preparation of Oriental food at the Winder Stake House, where she served it for lunch.1 At one point, Erskine even flirted with the idea of publishing an Oriental cookbook. She treated the cuisine as an art form, making sure to emphasize in teaching demonstrations how to delicately mince and julienne vegetables for stir-fry dishes. But Erskine also assured her students, almost all of whom were white housewives, that Oriental cooking was not simply the “most delicious in the world” but could also transform them into ideal, economically efficient, suburban homemakers. Or as she once told a local newspaper, “Oriental cooking is pleasing to the palate, the profile, and the pocketbook.”2 Erskine’s experiences as an expert on Asian culinary practices reveal quite a bit about race, gender, and class in Cold War U.S. society. First, the popularity of her cooking classes and banquets among white housewives, as well as the fact that Christian groups and church community centers such as the Winder Stake House sponsored such events, suggests that a number of white Americans had a deep interest in the cultural practices of Asia. While white Americans ’ fascination with the “Orient” is certainly not new, as it dates back to the Revolutionary period, what is significant is that the interest in Asian food practices occurred simultaneously with the formation of suburban whiteness, Cold War “Oriental” Food 187 a cultural crackdown, in U.S. society.3 In addition, this fascination preceded the arrival of a large number of Asian immigrants, in places that were overwhelmingly white and, in many cases, historically hostile to Asians. Salt Lake City was roughly 90 percent white when Erskine spread the gospel about Oriental cooking.4 Indeed, locals described her as someone who held the “secrets of the Far East” based solely on her knowledge of Asian cooking practices. But for Erskine to operate as the authority on Asian cuisine meant that she either learned to cook Asian dishes from a member of the local Asian population— and thus committed an act of severe cultural and racial appropriation—or she learned the cooking practices on her own. But where did she learn? And how? Erskine’s experiences raise important questions about why U.S. citizens became fascinated with food culture from Asia and the Pacific more broadly, what enabled their access to Asian cuisine, how they introduced it to U.S. consumers , and the way in which food configured categories of race, gender, and class in the Cold War period. The story of how and why a white suburban housewife from Utah like Ruby Erskine evolved into an Asian culinary expert and a vessel of Far East secrets— and why such “secrets” meant anything at all—is, at heart, a story of U.S. global expansion in Asia and the Pacific after World War II. Erskine traveled to Japan sometime in the 1950s to be with her husband, Jasper, who was stationed there after the war as a U.S. Army officer.5 The United States was strengthening its occupation of and influence over Japan while it was recovering from the effects of two U.S. atomic bomb attacks on both the natural and built environment and the psyche of Japanese people. The United States saw this devastation as an invitation. Accordingly, U.S. officials decided to restructure Japan’s postwar economy to become more like the United States, using it as a primary model for future American aspirations outside Europe.6 It was in this context that Erskine “fell in love” with Asian cuisine, learning how to prepare Japanese food from the couple’s domestic servant, whom she described as a “fantastic Japanese cook.” In this chapter, I use Erskine’s story to show...

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