Hi -

This relates to the thread 'Peanut Sesame Noodles' above, but I was
afraid it might get lost there. The NYT had a nice article today about
the great Sesame Noodles available in Manhattan in the '80s, and the
hostory associated with them. I remember them myself from Empire Sechuan
at 97th and Broadway (and their other branches).

Here is the article, and their recipe:

Food: The Way We Eat
New York Noodletown
By SAM SIFTON

Historians may quibble, but spend any time with the jokers and memory
thieves who while away their days eating and talking about Chinese food
in New York City, and you’ll hear someone say it was Shorty Tang who
cooked the best cold sesame noodles Manhattan ever tasted.

Tang was a tiny chef of the oldest school, who worked for the great
David Keh at Szechuan on upper Broadway and then had a joint down in
east Chinatown back when subways cost two dimes to ride. His sesame
noodles were soft and luxurious, bathed in an emulsified mixture of
sesame paste and peanut butter, rendered vivid and fiery by chili oil
and sweetened by sugar, cut by vinegar, made fantastic by technique.

You could find them all over New York City in the 1970s and ’80s, or
ones like them: at Hwa Yuan on East Broadway, at the Empire Szechuan
chain uptown, at Tang Tang’s near Gramercy Park. Bright with flavor,
slippery against the plastic chopsticks, they represented one of the
great steps forward for Chinese food in the United States in the
post-chop-suey era: away from bland monotony and toward real complexity
of flavor.

It is Tang’s recipe, legend has it, that so many of us remember when we
order cold sesame noodles today, and why — the recipe being lost to time
— we’re so often disappointed when we do.

Here’s the flickering-newsreel version: The Communists took over China
in 1949. Tang and other great chefs began to slip and slide toward the
United States soon after, riding to Taiwan with banquet crews loyal to
Chiang Kai-shek — and from there to Hong Kong, India, Brazil, East
Broadway and the Upper West Side.

They arrived in New York in the years following the 1965 changes in
American immigration law and set up restaurants that over time began to
offer a new kind of Chinese food, one remodeled first to fit and then to
mold American tastes. “Szechuan food,” they called this new style of
cooking, and it became as much a part of 1970s Manhattan as cocaine and
disco. (The spelling would later shift to “Sichuan.”)

And as New York went, so went the nation: a cold and fiery dish meant to
combat the lazy, brutal humidity of a Chinese summer became a staple of
takeout menus across the United States.

Now, of course, those cooks are dead and buried, their recipes
butchered, their admonishments forgotten. Patterns of immigration have
changed. Much takeout Chinese food in New York these days comes out of
kitchens run by immigrants untrained in banquet arts.

A plate of cold sesame noodles today? It’s often just pasta with peanut
butter, fridge-flavored nostalgia not worth ordering, though many do.

Eddie Schoenfeld, the affable yarn-spinner and Chinese restaurateur who
helped open Chinatown Brasserie in NoHo last year, can take you back to
those glory days, though, in word and occasionally in deed. Schoenfeld
worked for David Keh for years, as the maitre d’hotel at Uncle Tai’s on
the Upper East Side, before going on to open restaurants of his own. He
is among the top brains on Chinese food in New York City and a
phenomenal cook, prone to serving guests dumplings and sticky ribs the
way some grandmothers dispense cake and tea.

Schoenfeld is large and friendly and sometimes loud. He wears slightly
cartoonish eyeglass frames, and when he’s surprised, he raises his
eyebrows under them, and the glasses amplify the effect: he looks very
surprised. Occasionally, he wears suspenders. In better thesauruses,
you’ll find him listed as an antonym for “Chinese guy.”

But if you need a road map back to a certain era of Chinese cooking in
New York, he is your man. A few lunches with Schoenfeld, followed by a
fair amount of reading and a number of afternoons of kitchen adventures,
lead us to the recipe that follows, which plays at least to my
recollection of the original like a faithful cover of a favorite song:
the Clash’s “Police and Thieves,” say, in place of the Junior Murvin
original.

It combines sense memory (East Broadway, 1984!) with some of the
plainspoken wisdom of the great New York Times cooking reporter Marian
Burros, who declared flatly in these pages in 1995 that home cooks could
prepare cold sesame noodles as easily as any restaurant chef, and the
cheery hucksterism of the underrated television cook Martin Yan, who did
much the same in his 2002 book “Chinatown Cooking.”

But Burros adds broccoli to her recipe, thus rendering it weird and too
healthful besides, and Yan puts shredded chicken on top of his finished
dish, making it into something you’d take to a church dinner. Their
sauces aren’t quite New-York-centric enough. They don’t taste like takeout.

Schoenfeld’s version is fiery but uses too much sugar for my taste — he
adds so much, in fact, that he needs a measure of black tea in which to
dissolve it. This is a common maneuver, but unnecessary. There’s plenty
of sugar in most commercial peanut butters, and making the tea is too
complicated for such a simple dish. (If you’re using a natural peanut
butter, you’re already complicating matters. As Schoenfeld says, “It’s
all about the Skippy, baby.”)

My own take is almost comically easy to prepare. Simply whisk together
the ingredients and taste them. “The art is in the balance,” Schoenfeld
says, correctly, “between the salt and sweet, the sweet and the fire,
and the fire and the acidity.”

Takeout-Style Sesame Noodles

1 pound Chinese egg noodles (1/8,-inch-thick), frozen or (preferably)
fresh, available in Asian markets

2 tablespoons sesame oil, plus a splash

3½ tablespoons soy sauce

2 tablespoons Chinese rice vinegar

2 tablespoons Chinese sesame paste

1 tablespoon smooth peanut butter

1 tablespoon sugar

1 tablespoon finely grated ginger

2 teaspoons minced garlic

2 teaspoons chili-garlic paste, or to taste

Half a cucumber, peeled, seeded, and cut into 1/8,-by- 1/8,-by-2-inch sticks

¼ cup chopped roasted peanuts.

1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add noodles and cook until
barely tender, about 5 minutes; they should retain a hint of chewiness.
Drain, rinse with cold water, drain again and toss with a splash of
sesame oil.

2. In a medium bowl, whisk together the remaining 2 tablespoons sesame
oil, the soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame paste, peanut butter, sugar,
ginger, garlic and chili-garlic paste.

3. Pour the sauce over the noodles and toss. Transfer to a serving bowl,
and garnish with cucumber and peanuts. Serves 4. Adapted from Martin
Yan, Marian Burros, and memory.

Notes

1. The “Chinese sesame paste,” above, is made of toasted sesame seeds;
it is not the same as tahini, the Middle Eastern paste made of plain,
untoasted sesame. But you could use tahini in a pinch. You need only add
a little toasted sesame oil to compensate for flavor, and perhaps some
peanut butter to keep the sauce emulsified.

2. On which subject, the whole point of cold sesame noodles is what’s
called in the food trade its “mouth feel,” the velvety smooth feeling of
perfectly combined ingredients. That’s why you find so much peanut
butter in preparations of cold sesame noodles. Peanut butter emulsifies
better than sesame paste.

3. Hey, where are the Sichuan peppercorns? Sichuan food depends on their
tingly numbing power! Perhaps, but the little fruits were banned from
the United States from 1968 until 2005 by the Food and Drug
Administration because they were feared to carry citrus canker, a
bacterial disease. And while you could always find them in Chinatowns
somewhere (sitting, dry and baleful, in a pile), there are few in the
true cult of sesame noodles who use them in their recipes. By all means,
add some if you like: toast a tablespoon’s worth in a dry pan, crush
lightly and whisk the resulting mess into your sauce.