Thanks for your responses to the chow mein survey. As a broad disclaimer, they're hardly a representative sample of Australian eating habits. You can't get much more selection bias than asking people who read your blog and presumably, share your common interests to fill out a survey regarding one of those common interests. Anyhow, why let bad data fall in the way of making beautiful graphs?

Here’s the results.

My broad hypothesis running into the survey is that there would be revealed a great chow mein divide by state and by income; that there would be amongst this regional pockets of different styles of the noodle dish. The styles I defined as:

• the "Australian" style that contains cabbage, minced meat, chicken noodle soup, curry powder
• the Hong Kong/American style that contains crispy noodles
• the broadly Chinese style that consists of any other stir-fried soft noodle dish named "chow mein" on a menu or in a recipe.
• the Indian/Hakka style that is spicy and contains green chili sauce

Above – first chow mein eaten, mapped

As the first chow mein that anyone ate, Australian-style chow mein was predominant and spread widely around the country. 77% of people’s first encounter with chow mein was with the stodgy Australian version that I outlined in the original article. I’d hazard to draw any regional trends from the maps due to the low number of respondents. Perth may have a vibrant Chinese-style chow mein scene, but two responses are not enough to draw any conclusions.

As for when chow mein was first eaten, the 1970s were the most popular decade (just), which is most likely a better reflection of the age of the readers of this blog rather than when chow mein was first popularised in Australia. If we average the first encounters with chow mein, the average date that someone in Australia encountered chow mein was June 27, 1977, the day that France granted independence to Djibouti. This is not significant.

That the earliest Australian-style chow mein recorded was in 1960 suggests that the dish has been around much longer than previously expected. In subsequent conversations about the preparation of Australian-style chow mein, a few friends mentioned that it was a dish in their family that was always prepared in an electric frypan. Maybe this style of chow mein was the result of the free recipe books given away with electric pans in the early 1960s; a new food designed for the new kitchen tool.

While the Australian version was most popular, chow mein tastes are changing. Popularity of the Chinese style of chow mein – the chow mein in the most literal translation – has grown at the expense of Australian chow mein. It is worth noting that there is a strong correlation between the first style of chow mein eaten and the most frequent style of chow mein eaten. Tastes are changing, but they are only marginal changes.