An authentic adaptation

An immigrant from Shanghai makes a Taiwanese recipe her own

My mother has always used food in two ways: one, to express love and appreciation, and two, as a means of currency in her community.

When mom, Ling Ling Zheng (affectionately called Momma Wong by my friends now), moved from Shanghai to Chicago in the ’90s, beef noodle soup was one of the recipes she brought with her, a comforting dish to ward off the bitter winter and a sense of loneliness from leaving her family and homeland. But she remembers being intimidated by American grocery stores, with their seemingly endless rows of cereal and canned food — it was all terribly foreign and strange.

At the time, there were no giant Asian supermarkets in the suburbs where she lived. She was limited to a few tiny markets tucked away in strip malls, so she found solace in Mexican grocery stores, where more familiar ingredients could be procured. Every month, she had to convince my father to make the trek to Chinatown, where she would stock up on pastes, spices and things that could be stuffed into the freezer at home.

Making beef noodle soup was a huge inconvenience because it was expensive and required hard-to-procure ingredients. So she made it infrequently in favor of other recipes she could more easily adapt to accessible ingredients. When she did make the soup, she swapped out traditional ingredients for ones she could find at the supermarket.

My mom was and always has been plugged into the Chinese church, and it was there that she realized beef noodle soup far from her homeland could be more than what she was making. An elderly Taiwanese woman was making lunch for the congregation one day, and my mom begged her for her recipe. But she refused. Prized recipes weren’t shared willingly — many of the women in the church had one or more signature dishes that they prided themselves on and kept close to their chests.

Thankfully, my mother had a few, herself. One was zhongzi, an autumnal food typically eaten during the Duanwu Festival (Dragon Boat Festival) that is bursting with fat chunks of pork belly and sticky rice wrapped into a triangle of bamboo leaves. After some cajoling and bartering on the exact number of zhongzi for an equal trade, the elderly woman agreed to share her recipe.

But my Shanghainese mother had her own flavor proclivities, and Shanghainese food is known for being sweet. In her years living in Chicago, she had grown accustomed to some American flavors (shoutout to ketchup), which she incorporated into the recipe she’d gotten from the church lady.

This beef noodle soup recipe is both inauthentic and wholly authentic. Mom took the recipe that the church lady gave her and created a dish that is true to her experience as a Shanghainese woman who immigrated to Chicago, found solace in the Asian church community in the suburbs and poured her love into the food she served to her tiny family.

I can’t have beef noodle soup any other way now, and like clockwork every fall, my father and I crave the rich, hearty flavors.