Crab Rangoon is a fixture on American Chinese restaurant menus. Yet it is neither traditionally Chinese nor Burmese, and depending on where you order it, it may not contain any real crab.

The crispy, golden wontons are generally filled with cream cheese, seasonings, and crab meat or imitation crab. That last ingredient is typically made from processed white fish, often Alaska pollock.

The dish's history is even more curious than its ingredients.

Despite its Asian-sounding name, crab Rangoon appears to have originated in the United States, most likely at Trader Vic's, the Polynesian-themed restaurant chain founded by Victor Bergeron.

By 1950, Trader Vic's in Oakland, California, was advertising an appetizer called Rangoon Crab. The restaurant would later serve it under the name Crab Rangoon, and the dish gradually found its way onto Chinese American restaurant menus across the country.

Rangoon was the colonial-era English name for Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. But food historians have found no convincing evidence that the appetizer originated there.

The filling offers another clue to its American ancestry. Cream cheese, a product developed in the United States in the 19th century, was enjoying enormous popularity in American kitchens during the 1940s and 1950s. Someone at Trader Vic's apparently decided it belonged inside a Chinese wonton wrapper, alongside crab meat, and sent the whole thing into a deep fryer.

Who first came up with the combination remains uncertain. But by the late 1960s, Trader Vic's was publishing its own recipe, complete with real crab, cream cheese, garlic powder, and a dash of A.1. sauce.

Today, imitation crab has become a common substitute, adding another twist to an appetizer whose name and ingredients have taken quite different journeys.