1/10/2024 0 Comments Lazy susanHe spent much of his career studying outbreaks of pneumonia and tuberculosis, and grew critical of Chinese hygienic practices-including in the way people ate. Wu Lien-Teh, a doctor of Chinese descent who was born in Malaysia and educated at Cambridge, helped to reshape theories of disease in China. Mason's hunch echoes the first-known revolving dinner table in China-found, rather oddly, at a 1917 public health conference in Canton. “The origin probably lies in the transmission of the innovation from European forms, likely in Hong Kong, Canton, or Shanghai.” “Historically, I can't recall any example earlier than the 20th century,” says Lark Mason, an American expert on Chinese antiques, via email. Many Chinese people do remember rotating tables built decades ago-but their origin story is hazy. If you turn to historical accounts of Chinese furniture, you'll find that dining tables tended to be rectangular, and didn't rotate. In this sense, it worked very much like a tabletop Lazy Susan.īut Wang's table certainly wasn't used in the dining room. Wang's solution was to make the table move, so the typesetter didn't have to. He faced the challenge of organizing thousands of individual Chinese characters (alphabetic languages, by contrast, require about 100). Its author, Wang Zhen, was a Chinese official who helped pioneer movable type. The first known mention of a Chinese revolving table, and the source of much speculation about the Lazy Susan's origins, comes from the 700-year-old Book of Agriculture. So for now, we have to leave our friend Susan-whose identity, by the way, is lost to history-in the 20th century, and turn back the clocks to 1313. This means that a century ago, the name Lazy Susan had nothing to do with Chinese food. Restaurateur Johnny Kan in the center, 1965 Basically, the idea was to buy a “dumb-waiter” so you could layoff your real waiter. All three devices were used in Europe and America to save domestic labor during meals. Back in the early-1900s, however, “Lazy Susan”-previously known as a “dumb-waiter”-described not only revolving tabletops, but also revolving tables, as well as elevators that carried plates and food. Today, it describes a spinning platter that rests on the tabletop. Technically, the “Lazy Susan revolving table” isn't a table at all. Let's take a minute to get the name straight. So either this style of eating really was, so to speak, made in China, or it had been outsourced from the West even during an era of chilly international relations. The plane’s crew was promptly treated to lunch-served on a Lazy Susan. And just before President Nixon's historic 1972 visit, the first American commercial flight in decades landed in Shanghai, 23 years after Chairman Mao Zedong severed most of China's ties with the West. In 1971, an American visitor to Taiwan found them in common household use. The composer Igor Stravinsky ate off one in 1959, at a Chinese restaurant in Japan. You don't really find fortune cookies in Asia, but Lazy Susans, by contrast, are all over. Other times, as in the case of fortune cookies, an object only seems traditional because it's so ubiquitous. Sometimes objects catch on because they're traditional. emphasizes the democratic nature of the meal.” But of course, tracing the roots of a tradition can be tricky business. A popular book of food anthropology even called it an “ethically ideal table shape. In the decades that followed, travel guides and restaurant reviews proclaimed the Lazy Susan a Chinese tradition. Diners gathered around a big round table, chopsticks ready, and turned the Lazy Susan to bring each dish within reach. The New York Times described one piled with crab rolls, dumplings, and moon cakes at a celebration of the 1965 Mid-Autumn festival. The Washington Post described a 1963 Chinese New Year celebration by highlighting crispy duck, shark's fin, and a Lazy Susan. Lazy Susans became standard fare during the 1960s. Staples like chow mein, chop suey, and fortune cookies had vague culinary roots in Asia, but all three were invented stateside. Chinese food wasn't as ubiquitous back then as it is today, and it wasn't necessarily that Chinese, either. Through the 1950s, many Chinatown restaurants had a reputation for being dingy and cramped, but the introduction of lazy susan tables was the key element in a transformation toward refined and spacious restaurants. Its new look-in American restaurants, at least-revolved around a single piece of furniture, the “Lazy Susan” rotating table. Sixty years ago, Chinese food got a makeover.
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