The misnamed US favourite that’s actually Australian (well, almost)

The dish: Egg roll, the US

Plate up This is wild. You’ve probably heard of egg rolls, a staple of American-Chinese cuisine, thanks to US TV shows and movies. You can picture the scene: the chop suey in the classic “oyster pail” container, the fortune cookies in their shiny wrappers, and the egg roll poking out of a paper packet. It looks like a spring roll, the egg roll, but it’s different.

Egg rolls have a distinctly Australian aftertaste.Credit: iStock

It’s bigger. Its filling is mostly shredded cabbage, with some chopped meat, a few other vegetables and spices, it’s deep-fried, and … whoa, it’s a Chiko Roll! An egg roll is a Chiko Roll. It’s basically the same. An American cultural icon, a proud staple of a distinct cuisine, and someone in Australia, independently, created it too. Wild. Anyway, talk to any American, and they will no doubt disavow any relationship between the two, despite their being essentially the same.

First serve Here’s where we doff our chef’s hats to the Americans because egg rolls were created a good 15 or 20 years before Frank McEncroe began selling “chicken rolls” at the Wagga Wagga Agricultural Show (interestingly, just as Chiko Rolls contain no chicken, egg rolls don’t have any egg). In the early 1930s, at least two Chinese restaurants in New York began producing a snack inspired by classic spring rolls, though these were larger, and based around chopped bamboo shoots. Egg rolls morphed to use cabbage as their bulk filler, and were served both in restaurants and as a takeaway snack in a cellophane packet (sound familiar?).

Order there Though two of the claimed inventors of the egg roll in NY have since closed, another still exists: Nom Wah Tea Parlor (nomwah.com), which has been in business since 1929.

Order here There’s good news and bad news for those hunting American-style egg rolls in Australia. The bad news is that basically no one serves them. The good news is that Chiko Rolls are everywhere.

Cook it Want to have a crack at making your own? Follow Good Food’s spring rolls recipe here.

One more thing How did a dish with no eggs come to be known as an egg roll? There are a few theories: that chefs began making the wheat-flour wrappers with egg as a binding agent; and that the Mandarin word for egg sounds similar to spring (as in rolls), and there was some confusion.