This story is part of a week-long series exploring how we as Canadians define "Canadian food," and how it has evolved in modern Canada.

How many times have you heard that the Chinese food you’re eating isn’t “real” Chinese food?

If what’s on your plate or in your take-out container is lemon chicken, ginger beef, chicken balls or anything else coated in neon red sauce, then it probably isn’t Chinese food.

What you’ve got is Chinese-Canadian food, which pretty much makes it Canadian – a distinct style of cooking with a rich history as old as the nation it was created in.

“Everybody who has eaten in one of these restaurants knows there is something very specific about the food on that menu,” says Lily Cho, an associate professor of English at Toronto’s York University and author of “Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada,” a study of Chinese diasporic culture.

Cho should know. Besides making Chinese-Canadian restaurants and their typically split menus (“Chinese” in one half, “Canadian” in the other) the focus of her doctoral dissertation, the Edmonton native spent her childhood around them. Her aunt and uncle owned one in Red Deer, Alta. and while she was still quite young, her dad took the family up to Whitehorse, Yukon where he tried his hand at running the local Chinese restaurant there, the Shangri-La, in the early 1970s for two years. A photo of the place, replete with the unmistakeable red, white and gold signage and stylized lettering, graces the cover of her book. Her favourite dish from its menu? The hot beef sandwich, which she believes has been perfected in the Chinese-Canadian restaurant.

A time before chicken balls

View photos The Shangri-La owned by Cho's parents in Whitehorse, Yukon. (Courtesy Lily Cho) More

For a long time, that was the sort of food most often found on Chinese-Canadian restaurant menus, before sweet and sour anything was even a brightly-hued thought in some cook’s mind. The earliest eateries were products of Chinese migrants and their families who had first come to Canada in the mid- to late-19th century, during successive gold rushes, to build the country’s unifying railroad, work in its mines and pick up other jobs that needed doing, including cooking, thanks to the resources boon.

The restaurants they started in British Columbia, moving out to Alberta and Saskatchewan and, in time, further east, were set up to cater to a rural crowd in towns that often did not have anywhere else to go for a meal out or even somewhere to meet with friends or neighbours over coffee. Vancouver artist Janice Wong, in her family and food memoir “Chow,” writes that at her parents’ popular Wings Café, opened in 1944 in Prince Albert, Sask., the offerings of the day were things like Finnan Haddie (a Scottish-style smoked haddock), breaded lake trout, raisin pie and custard pudding. There was no chow mein in sight.

Dishes like egg foo young, chop suey and stir fries started to creep onto menus in post-war Canada, an event Cho believes was not so coincidental with the end of the Chinese Exclusion Act (formally known as the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923), which restricted Chinese immigration to Canada, and the granting of the right for Chinese-Canadians to vote in federal elections, both in 1947. Even then, Chinese restaurateurs tread carefully, creating dishes that wouldn’t overwhelm the Canadian palate.

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