Crab Rangoon Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Crab Rangoon is an appetizer of wonton wrappers filled with cream cheese and crab, then deep-fried. It was born in mid-20th-century California, in the 1950s. The setting was the tiki bar, where diners were entertained amid décor evoking the South Pacific islands. The strand credited with fathering the dish is Trader Vic's, the restaurant empire run by Victor Bergeron. By 1955 the name Crab Rangoon appears on the menu of the Beverly Hills location, so it was being served by then at the latest.

Cream cheese is what holds the dish together. That rich, molten filling is what makes it what it is. Cream cheese was a comparatively new ingredient, mass-produced in the United States over the 19th century. The wrapper is borrowed from the wonton, and the technique of folding and frying from Chinese cooking. Crab had long been caught along the coast. For all its exotic name and Chinese wrapper, the ingredient at the heart of its flavor came out of America's own dairy culture.

Crab Rangoon is dogged by the notion that it is a traditional Chinese dish. Because it turns up as a matter of course in Chinese restaurants across the United States, people have taken it for something eaten in China since long ago. Both the record and the contents of the dish undo that idea.

Start with the contents. Chinese cooking made little use of dairy to begin with, in a region where many people digest lactose poorly. The idea of building a filling around cream cheese exists as a tradition in neither China nor Burma. The name Rangoon points to the former capital of Burma, now Myanmar, yet nothing links this dish to Burmese cooking. It is a signboard name, borrowed only for its whiff of the exotic.

The oldest trail one can actually follow leads to the 1955 menu of the Trader Vic's location in Beverly Hills. The invention is credited to Victor Bergeron, or to Joe Young, a Chinese-American cook who worked at the restaurant. Either way, food history agrees that this is an appetizer devised by Americans within a tiki culture staged to conjure the South Seas and the Far East. Its Chinese pedigree was a story draped over the dish after the fact.