Transcript:
Hello and welcome to another episode of This Food in History! Today we are looking at something because it’s a common appetizer in Asian restaurants and after learning how not Chinese fortune cookies are, I was curious about these Crab Rangoons.
So let’s start with the obvious, they do not come from China, Japan, Korea, Thailand or any other actual Asian country. What was wildest to me is that they aren’t even the product of Chinese- American restaurants that exploded in America thanks to a loophole exploited by immigrants when laws were created to try and reduce Chinese Immigration. In 1915 restaurants were declared a qualified business for merchant visas which allowed Chinese-Americans to find Chinese workers to emigrate and work for them in the rise of Chinatowns and restaurants. There’s an estimation that the number of restaurants quadrupled between 1910 and 1920 due to this. The dishes that would become popular today started to form and evolve due to American tastes as well as access to ingredients that were cheaper in America than in China. For example, white sugar, certain cuts of meat, oil were cheap in the states while not prized in China. Also spice stables like Szechuan peppercorns were expensive and mostly inaccessible in the states. Jennifer Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles says this was a major influence. Lee also makes a fun analogy where these Americanized dishes were like open-source software and all restaurants would copy and share the dishes so finding a true origin is actually hard.
So all of this set a stage for how dishes were being conceived in those years, but crab rangoon takes a similar but different path. The origin is also not as concrete as some other foods we have looked at here, however the most commonly accepted answer is that it comes from a chain of restaurants called Trader Vic’s that were started by Victor Bergeron.
Trader Vic’s started as Hinky Dink’s, a food-and-beer joint in Oakland, California that opened in 1934. He was influenced by a rival location run by Donn Beach who originated Tiki Culture restaurants that grew in the 1940s thanks to WWII veterans. He then rebranded in 1937 to Trader Vic’s with the motif they are known for today. The lure of Tiki Culture stemmed from the tropical vibes of Polynesia and the American perception of tropical islands and locations. They were an idealized version of island life that focuses on leisure, exoticism and things we still associate with it today: pineapples, Easter Island heads, sandy beaches, palm trees, colorful flowers.
Most articles I could find seem to agree that Victor is the originator of crab rangoon, originally called rangoon crab according to San Francisco Chronicle (CA), May 15, 1950 in their The Chronicle's East Bay Dining Directory. The name comes from Rangoon, now Yangon, which is the largest city in Myanmar, formerly Burma. I am finding slight disagreement on if Victor himself as claimed by his granddaughter Eve Bergeron (head of marketing and public relations) or if Joe Young, a Chinese-American barback at Trader Vic’s did the actual creation. The same description on using wonton wrappers to come up with the cream cheese and crab creation was used in different sources though mostly attributed to Eve stating: “Knowing my grandfather, he probably just started to play with it,” she says. “Just put stuff in here, fry it up, and see what we get.” Eve however does also give Joe credit for influencing the very Chinese based menus at Trader Vic’s. Joe’s involvement is mentioned as ranging from just influencing to partnering with Victor on recipe creation.
An interesting thing however is while multiple places are concluding Trader Vic’s has the first mentions and menu item for crab rangoon Victor is mostly known for his drink inventions such as the Mai Tai. When looking up the man, nearly all articles were about mai tai’s and I had to include specific search terms to tie him to crab rangoon.
Regardless of that, experimentation with wonton wrappers, deep frying and crab and cream cheese gave us the well known crispy’s that we can find on nearly every Asian based menu in America and some abroad with the expansion of Trader Vic’s.
One of the biggest clues in the makeup of crab rangoon that this dish is American over Asian in origin is the cream cheese. Cream cheese was a staple in 1940s and 50s America but this is not an ingredient you’ll have found in China or Burma or Polynesia. The lactose intolerance common in China especially would not have likely led to the creation of this dish as it did in the states. The oldest recipes include the wonton wrapper, cream cheese, garlic powder, A-1 steak sauce and crab. Imitation crab came out from Japan in 1975 and its cheap cost led it to replace real crab in many restaurant recipes. You can find few variations nowadays from recipes that remove the crab entirely to ones that also add in green onion and other small spices.
So that is the short but technically unverified history of an American Asian restaurant staple appetizer, crab rangoon. Born from Tiki culture and an American obsession with Island life and shared extensively with a network of Asian restaurants all across America, this simple appetizer delights many looking for a sweet fried snack to compliment their meal. This has been another episode of This Food in History, please like and subscribe for more!
