Crossroads, No. 7: MacKenzie Chung Fegan's Campbell's Chicken Noodle Egg Drop Soup
"Mmm! Mmm! Good!"
Crossroads is a column about cooking and eating at the crossroads of multiple cultures. We explore dishes created from immigrants’ resourcefulness and creativity as they create the foods of their homeland while having to make do with the ingredients they have available to them in their new environment. This isn’t “fusion cuisine” (as in, the kind of stuff that would be served at a restaurant or marketed to the masses), but rather, food that’s part of a quirky, in-between cuisine reflective of where they’re from and where they currently live—something rooted simultaneously in tradition and innovation. You can check out TOD’s archive of past recipes here.
As a child, MacKenzie Chung Fegan was a self-professed picky eater. Her diet for the first seven or so years of her life, in fact, exclusively comprised foods of varying shades of yellow and brown—processed cheese, potatoes, the works. Over the phone, she recalls to me a memory from being the only mixed child in an all-Chinese daycare; while her teachers dished out a variety of home-cooked Chinese meals for the students every day, she opted for a boiled plain hot dog instead.
“My palate was pretty limited at the time; you don't eat what you're not familiar with at that age,” MacKenzie reflects. “I think Chinese food felt kinda foreign to me, which is weird to say now because I’ve embraced my Chinese heritage and identity more as I’ve grown older—which is a common third culture experience.”
MacKenzie was born to a Chinese mother and an Irish-Catholic father. Though her mother was born in China, she arrived in the United States as a baby and spent the first 14 years of her life in Texas before moving to the Bay Area. “I’m not quite first [generation], but I’m not quite second [generation],” she tells me. “She was technically born in another country, but her immigrant experience was very much one of, you know, her parents speaking to her in Chinese and her answering back in English. She still had a lot of those assimilatory experiences common for people part of that first generation born in the United States.”
MacKenzie’s mother’s side of the family proudly hails from the Hunan province. Her grandparents, Henry and Diana, fled China’s communist regime following Mao Zedong’s rise to power in 1949 and ended up in Houston, where Henry was assigned a post as a diplomat. Shortly afterward, the Nationalist Party (with which he was affiliated) fell to Mao, and in the blink of an eye he became a diplomat without a state. They had an opportunity to go to Taiwan where the Nationalists had retreated, but Diana felt like they could build a good life for their family in the United States. In a continued effort to provide for his family in a foreign land, Henry took up a variety of entrepreneurial endeavors—from starting a hamburger joint to pursuing a shoe shine business.
When they later arrived in San Francisco, Henry and Diana decided to open a restaurant serving the kinds of dishes they enjoyed back in Hunan. In 1974, they opened Henry’s Hunan downtown, which is still in operation today. Customers go for the juicy crescent-shaped pork dumplings and spicy fried bean curd, but stay for the founders’ specials—“Henry’s Special” (stir-fried scallops, shrimp, chicken, and vegetables in a spiced gravy dished out over hot rice) and “Diana’s Meat Pie” (a blend of seasoned ground pork, shredded lettuce, and a generous dusting of grated parmesan cheese sandwiched between two scallion pancakes). (We’ll learn more about that second dish in a future dispatch, don’t worry 😉). Many of MacKenzie’s family meals revolved around the restaurant, but surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly, if you work in the restaurant industry), Chinese food was rarely cooked at home. Just as her mother was interested in Americana fare growing up as a Chinese-American, her grandmother was equally curious about indulging requests (from both her children and Henry’s Hunan customers) for quirky fusion foods that blended the best of Chinese flavors with Western ingredients.
“The setting is Texas in the 1950s. It’s not like there’s an H Mart down the street from where my family is, so they ended up improvising a lot,” MacKenzie says. “At the same time, my mom and her siblings are seeing advertisements for American food, they’re going over to their friend’s house and seeing foods they haven’t had at home before; they want to be like everyone else and assimilate and all that.
There are stories of, for example, my grandma saying, ‘Okay, I’ll make you pancakes if you want pancakes,’ [despite her] not really knowing what a pancake was supposed to be like—getting Bisquick mix and making one big pancake in a skillet and slicing it like a cake. You know, taking something American and putting our own spin on it. Ironically, when I was at Bon Appétit, we had a recipe for one big pancake in a skillet that did gangbusters.
She would also take Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and, to add extra protein, create a vortex in the soup and drizzle in beaten egg so it forms very wispy strands that add body and texture to the soup. Sometimes my grandma would skip the ‘vortex step’ and drop the egg in, which gives you a fluffier texture than the thin, silky strands. This would be a typical breakfast for [her children]. My mom and her siblings loved it, and it’s something that my mom would also make for me when I was a kid. She actually says that their favorite variation used the Manhattan clam chowder, which is a little harder to find.”
Today, MacKenzie is the lead restaurant critic at the San Francisco Chronicle. Her weekly reviews cover gems in the Bay Area’s food scene—from long standing classics to up-and-coming eateries and small independent businesses. Her work mainly covers food, drink, and culture, though she aims to focus on “representing the underrepresented” whenever she can. MacKenzie’s way of cooking and eating as an adult continues to be influenced not just by her years of experience in food media, but her quintessentially Chinese-American upbringing.
“A good analogy is that I don’t speak Mandarin, nor our local dialect,” MacKenzie says. “My mom didn’t feel comfortable speaking it to me when I was a kid, but I was around Chinese speakers so frequently as a kid that I can pick up words. It doesn’t sound like gibberish to me, I can pick out words, and I have an innate familiarity with the language—even if I don’t speak it. I think it’s similar to my palate. I didn't eat Chinese food as my main source of substance growing up, but I was around it and ate enough of it to provide a baseline of my palate. As I got older and became less of a picky eater, I did start to eat more Chinese food. Now, it’s one of my favorite cuisines.”
This dish comes from MacKenzie’s grandmother, who had the idea of drizzling beaten egg into Campbell’s chicken noodle soup à la egg drop soup as a way of adding more protein to her children’s breakfasts. A Chinese favorite, egg drop soup is made by slowly drizzling beaten eggs into hot broth. Pouring the eggs into a steady stream helps to create delicate, wispy strands, while the addition of a cornstarch slurry yields a thicker, silkier soup. Luckily, Campbell’s chicken noodle soup concentrate already contains cornstarch—making for one less step to making this recipe :)
Recipe courtesy of MacKenzie Fagan
Serves 1
Two large eggs
A pinch of table salt
A pinch of cracked black pepper
1 (10.5-ounce) can of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup
In a small bowl, scramble the eggs with salt and pepper.
Prepare the soup on the stovetop according to the can's directions. When the soup is hot, use chopsticks or a spoon to stir it in a circular motion, creating a small whirlpool in the center. Drizzle the scrambled eggs into the center of the whirlpool as you stir. If you like larger chunks, stir slowly. If you like the egg to disappear into thin wisps, acting more like a thickener, stir quickly.
Serve immediately.