Soy Sauce

No matter how skillful your deft fingers may be, you cannot make good chop-suey and other Oriental dishes with inferior sauce. It is absolutely necessary to use the best chop-suey sauce (soy) to get the tang of the Orient.

So reads a passage from a 1930’s volume called Oriental “Show-You” Recipes printed in Indiana and containing recipes like “La Tempura No. 1.” I support the feelings of its author (perhaps the ancestor of the Kikkoman factory in Wisconsin?) wholeheartedly. One cannot cook good Chinese food without a good soy sauce, “good” meaning one whose flavor and texture is appropriate to the dish being made.