Cans Cooked in Dragon Fire
A food writer contemplates the lasting legacy of La Choy.
After moving to the U.S. from Japan at the age of 3, I had a peripatetic American childhood, following my dad’s various classified government jobs in dusty Southwest towns. The landscapes were arid, sprawling, maybe beautiful, but also barren of some key food choices. There were never any Asian grocery stores, sometimes not even a single Chinese American restaurant. No kung pao chicken or mu shu pork, no “oyster pail” takeout containers with wire handles, folded and waxed and printed with red pagodas and the words Thank you, enjoy. No fortune cookies.
My Tokyoite mom made do. We ate stir-fries on many nights (I remember a large, red West Bend plug-in electric wok was in use for a while) and sticky white rice with almost everything. On rare, random occasions there was La Choy—the line of canned Chinese food that she might buy at the on-base commissary.
The canned water chestnuts were for rumaki, a holdover appetizer from Trader Vic’s–era tiki menus. Water chestnuts and chicken livers were wrapped in bacon, held together with toothpicks, marinated in some kind of teriyaki sauce, and either fried or baked. I was down with rumaki, just as much as I liked chicken-stuffed Pillsbury crescent rolls and green Jell-O salad made with cottage cheese and pineapple.
But I was simultaneously repulsed, excited, and fascinated by the double-decker cans of La Choy chicken chow mein meal kits. Even as a kid, who thought rumaki was a Japanese word, I don’t know if I ever believed La Choy chow mein had much to do with Chinese food. Maybe, though, I understood it was somehow analogous with my own mixed-up identity: American but not, Asian but not.
La Choy was founded in Detroit in 1922 by Ilhan New, a Korean immigrant and entrepreneur, and Wallace “Wally” Smith, a grocery store owner. New and Smith (neither of them Chinese) were classmates at the University of Michigan who reunited when New started growing bean sprouts for sale.
In the 1930s, La Choy began making crunchy deep-fried chow mein noodles, and apparently on the East Coast, many Americans still associate crunchy noodles with the dish that first arrived stateside with immigrants from Guangdong during the late 19th-century Gold Rush. Chao mian, from many regions in China, was typically stir-fried noodles with vegetables and meat or tofu.
By the time the company was sold to Beatrice Foods in the 1940s—with a line of soy sauce, kumquats, brown sauce, bamboo shoots, and chow mein noodles—New had left to pursue other business interests in Korea, and Smith had been killed by lightning.
But their legacy of American Asian canned foods persists.
The double packaging of La Choy chow mein included a canister of crunchy noodles and a can of pallid chicken and vegetables suspended in a gooey, translucent sauce. The noodles were unlike any I had known, such as ramen or spaghetti. They were short, crunchy squiggles that I snacked on like pretzel sticks.
The famous puppeteer Jim Henson created TV ads for Beatrice Foods’ La Choy products in 1965, starring Delbert the La Choy Dragon and his bespectacled sidekick, Mert.
Delbert: “You should try La Choy chow mein. It’s crisp and crunchy, as good as the takeout kind.”
Mert: “Why?”
Delbert: “Because it’s quick-cooked by me, the La Choy dragon, in dragon fire.”
Decades later La Choy, now owned by ConAgra Foods, is still available. A Google search shows it is sold by Ralphs, Vons, Walmart, Pavilions, Target, Wegmans, and Albertsons. On La Choy’s website, the chow mein has 44 reviews with an average of 1.5 stars. Apparently ConAgra reformulated the recipe: “This used to be a very good item, but not anymore,” one reviewer noted.
I can’t say that I ever thought any previous version was a very good item. I might have preferred the shrimp egg rolls from La Choy’s competitor, Chun King, the brand founded by Italian American Jeno Paulucci, creator of Jeno’s Pizza Rolls.
