The mix is probably sold in bulk from one of the various suppliers of sundries for Chinese restaurants, which is just an entire industry. If you’ve ever seen the identical fixtures and trimmings at multiple Chinese takeout places in your town and thought to yourself there must be a master catalog of this junk, some kind of Chinese Store Store if you will, that’s because there is.

I worked at a Chinese take out restaurant for a while. While we did not serve the ISO Standard buffet sponge cake, I can tell you a few of the following secrets. None of them are ancient wisdom.

Actually, the hoisin sauce (the thick soy sauce stuff that serves as the base for many, but not all of the sauces we’d make) was not made in a batch at the beginning of the day. We got it from a massive can bought from our goods supplier. Actually, not massive can in the singular. Cases and cases of them.

The “Chinese store iced tea” that all the homeboys in the hood loved so much was, in fact, just Country Time iced tea mix, from Costco. Mixed in a thoroughly washed out 5 gallon bucket that originally contained soy sauce. Ditto with the lemonade. Same kind of mix, both packaged into quart soup containers. It’s about as “homemade” as a box of Hamburger Helper is.

On the flip side, we made all of our roll products by hand, from their constituent components except the pizza rolls, which came frozen from our goods supplier. Dumplings and wontons we also made by hand, although the dough wrappers we got from our goods supplier. The owner of our restaurant hand chopped the cabbage and so forth for the egg rolls. I would have used a mandolin for this purpose, but then I guess there’s a reason I don’t run a Chinese restaurant.

The sweet and sour sauce you get with your sweet and sour chicken, pork, etc. in the little quarter height soup container is roughly a 50/50 mixture of ketchup and pineapple juice spiked with an (un) healthy ladlefull of sugar. My boss indicated to me that in his opinion this was the most vile stuff on Earth, but it’s what customers wanted so he’d hold his nose and make it anyway (see my other comment in here for his take on American style ketchup).

Yes, the chicken is real chicken. We got it frozen from… you guessed it, our goods supplier. Chicken is cheap in bulk, and cats are really hard to catch.

MSG went in everything. The cart between the woks contains three bowls of white powder. One is granulated sugar, one is salt, the third one is MSG. If you told us you wanted “no MSG” the cook would put less of it in your dish, but you’d still get some. Does your local takeout place have a “no MSG” badge on their menu? I’ll bet they do. Our place did. That was on there just for decoration. It was a bold faced lie.

Several of the other base ingredients also inherently included the stuff (including the hoisin sauce) so it’s actually physically impossible to get most Chinese takeaway dishes made while truly containing none. Curiously, none of our regular customers who claimed they were deathly allergic to MSG ever came back to us with any problem over this. (People will now attach comments to this absolutely insisting that, nuh-uh, they are in fact totally actually allergic to MSG!!! Am I calling you a liar? Well, I’m saying it’s significantly more likely that some other ingredient in there disagrees with you instead.)

The curry you make at home never quite looks like Chinese restaurant takeaway curry because ours has about two tablespoons of yellow food dye in it. Other than that it is totally the same cheap curry powder you can buy at the grocery store.

Uh, both the scallops and crab we served were imitation. That’s probably not much of a secret. If you have a shellfish allergy, you can probably safely consume those. The shrimp in everything is the real deal, though. Including in the shrimp toast.