Eggrolls

Egg roll

A freshly fried egg roll with rough, bubbly outer skin
Type	Chinese-American cuisine
Course	Hors d'oeuvre or side dish
Place of origin	United States
Created by	Undetermined. General belief is in New York City in the 1930’s. Henry Low included an egg roll recipe in his 1938 book “Cook at Home in Chinese.”
Main ingredients	Wheat pastry skin, cabbage, pork

Egg rolls are a variety of deep-fried appetizers served in American Chinese restaurants. An egg roll is a large, cylindrical, savoury roll with shredded cabbage, chopped pork, and other fillings inside a thickly-wrapped wheat flour skin, which is fried in hot oil. The dish is served warm, and is usually eaten with the fingers, dipped in duck sauce, plum sauce, or hot mustard, often from a cellophane packet. Egg rolls are a ubiquitous feature of American Chinese cuisine and are often served as free additions to American Chinese lunch special take-out combination platters throughout the United States, along with fried rice and fortune cookies.

The origins of the dish are unclear and remain disputed. Egg rolls are closely related to, but distinct from, the spring rolls served in mainland China, and were first seen in the early 20th century in the United States. An early reference to egg rolls appeared in a 1917 Chinese recipe pamphlet published in the United States, but the dish does not resemble the modern egg roll. The 1917 recipe described a meat and vegetable filling wrapped in an egg omelet, panfried, and served in slices, similar to Gyeran-mari.

Andrew Coe, author of “Chop Suey: A Cultural history of Chinese food in the United States", has stated that the modern American egg roll was probably invented at a Chinese restaurant in New York City in the early 1930s, by one of two chefs who both later claimed credit for the creation: Lung Fong of Lung Fong's, or Henry Low of Port Arthur. According to Coe, Low’s recipe, printed in a 1938 cookbook, Cook at Home in Chinese included “bamboo shoots, roast pork, shrimp, scallions, water chestnuts, salt, MSG, sugar, palm oil, and pepper,” but notably did not include cabbage, which is the main filling ingredient in modern egg rolls.