How to Cook and Eat in Chinese

What a charming book from an earlier time. Recipes are simple but, the real charm comes from the author's sense of place and time. It's like recieving a personal note and family recipe from the past.

Fascinating author. Interesting way to handle Chinese recipes.

If you just want authentically Chinese recipes you can find them everywhere now, especially on line. Read this book if you want what the title offers: a sense of Chinese cooking and dining. It is a cultural treasure written by a family who had a great role in the 20th century American reception of things Chinese. As one amusing example, this book created the term "stir frying." On the surprisingly complex question of who in the family actually wrote this book see the author's note. In the 1970s I began reading about Chinese food, and pestering Chinese restaurant owners in Cleveland Ohio for the real Chinese food. (One place had sea cucumbers on the menu -- and flatly refused to sell them to anyone who had not been in China!) Then, over the past 10 years, I've gotten to China many times,working with Chinese colleagues. I keep reading too but never heard of this book until last summer. I have to say even the most recent books on food and etiquette in China are generally very limited. They tend to have a narrow range of topics and present things that indeed can be done in China, as if they were the rules for how things are always done there. By all means read many web sites and books if you want to know about such things. Only be sure to include this older book. It covers very many more topics, and has a wider view of what all happens in China, and in Chinese communities overseas, and how these things change over time, than any other food book I know. The book is extremely witty, in a 1940s Cole Porter or Robert Benchley way (not quite Dorothy Parker, since there is no even slightly mean humor). It is also vastly well informed by decades of travel across China where the father, Yuan Ren Chao, collected linguistic information and the mother Dr. Buwei Yang Chao, collected cooking tips. A few of the observations on Chinese ways are bit dated now, but the scope and subtlety more than makes up for this. For example, while few people alive today were educated in missionary schools in China, the gist of this remark on cultural inhibitions is still relevant today: "missionary-educated Chinese students hesitate to go [fully] Chinese before Americans ... I share some of this feeling myself, because I was partly missionary-educated" (p. 13). In fact this book has similar cosmopolitan confidence, and smartness, and sophistication to Julia Child, since it comes from much the same milieu as Julia Child. Like her, this Chao family lived in very comfortable (not quite wealthy) elite academic circles in the US. The father, Yuan Ren Chao, was central to Chinese and Japanese language instruction for the US military and intelligence during WW II -- while Julia Child and her husband were in Intelligence. This is a book about food, for sure. It is all about food. It teaches far more of what American should know about Chinese food than any other book I have seen, because it teaches a vast amount about the whole encounter of China and the US which is still relevant today.

Back in the dawn of time, when this book was written, things like fresh ginger were difficult to find in most of the USA. This was also back when travel was expensive, long-winded, and difficult to do. By then, Ms Chao had travelled to Japan to do her medical degree, and all over the Chinese countryside with her husband (who did some kind of linguistics work). She had what she called "an open mind and an open mouth" when it came to food. Because of this view towards the world of food, she's compiled a fairly wide-spread base from which to cook. There are recipes for every kind of meat and seafood imaginable (including calve's brains). She's got the basic sauces down, she's got the vegetables covered, and she even mentions substitutions when the regular ingredient may be hard to find. BUT! More than that, she also explains how to EAT in Chinese. There's a lengthy section on how to serve a traditional Chinese meal, both banquet style and family style. Throughout the book, you see many examples of Ms Chao's humour and lively use of English to suit her needs. She couldn't find a suitable word for a gender neutral singular pronoun, so she made one up: hse. There were techniques still unfamiliar to Western cooking styles, so she coined new terms for it, like ________ stirs ________. There is plenty of good-natured ribbing between her husband and herself interspersed throughout the book. If you like a good story teller, and an excellent set of recipes, pick this one up.

Fascinating book that gives a fascinating insight on meals, ingredients, and techniques from 80 years ago. Excellent way to understand where the fundamentals used today originated. Seller was fantastic. Beautiful packaging and fast delivery.