Okay, I’ve got Prudhomme on Cajun…Sahni on Indian…Egerton on Southern…Chantiles on Greek…Derecskey on Hungarian…Madison and the Moosewood Boys on Vegetarian…Bayless on Mexican (I’m not a Kennedy man)…Sheraton on German. Et cetera et cetera.
Not that I don’t have more than one cookbook for each of the above cuisines, but I consider these boys and girls to be the Main Source. If I try mint in a new keftedes recipe instead of oregano, I wonder vaguely if Chantiles’ THE FOOD OF GREECE would approve. If I substitute Italian peppers for bell in a Creole gumbo, I worry that Prudhomme will come though my door with a hatchet.
**What I do NOT have, however, is the be-all and end-all of Chinese cookbooks. **
I have nice Thai and Korean and Japanese and Vietnamese books. Jeffrey Alford’s HOT SOUR SALTY SWEET (Artisan Books, 2000) is particularly good.
I have Gloria Bley Miller’s THE THOUSAND RECIPE CHINESE COOKBOOK. I have Craig Clarborne and Virginia Lee’s THE CHINESE COOKBOOK. These are supposed to be classic texts. I am not overly impressed by them. The recipes have a certain sameness throughout…ginger, garlic, soy, ginger garlic, soy, verything reeks of ginger, garlic, soy.
I have Nina Simonds’ CLASSIC CHINESE CUISINE and Ken Hom’s CHINESE COOKERY and The Frugal Gourmet COOKS THREE ANCIENT CUISINES and Jennifer Brennan’s THE CUISINES OF ASIA, which includes lots of Chinese material. None of these do I consider must-have texts.
What is out there that I’m missing? What is THE cookbook I should be going back to over and over when I want to cook Chinese? The one that will end up dogeared and broken-spined and with little stains (garlic, ginger, soy) on the pages?
Well, seeing as how you have listed many of the Chinese cookbooks from my own collection, I’ll just say that a more authentic one might be rather difficult for you to read, unless you are fluent in Chines that is. Unfortunately, due to my remodeling, all of my cookbooks are packed in boxes right now. Once they’re out on the shelf again, I’ll think about this thread (and giggle).
I am pretty happy with Miller. Maybe the problem is that it is relatively old (I don’t have it in front of me but I think it was published in the sixties)? It therefore doesn’t reflect innovations in the cuisine from the last 30 years or so. Then again, we are talking about a cooking tradition that is several thousand years old.
What do you have against ginger, garlic and soy? One of the things I like about Chinese cuisine is that it is so much variations on a theme. You could try your hand at “Fusion” using ideas from your Thai/Korean/Japanese/Vietnamese repetoire.
You want maybe Chinese recipes with Cheese Whiz in them?
I was down on White Street, a block below Canal in Manhattan’s Chinatown, the other evening, and I stopped in at a Chinese bookshop to check over the cooking titles.
There was quite a selection, and a good percentage included translation (irritatingly in the British style, giving quantities in weight rather than volume).
These could be more authentic that some of the whitebread titles I cited above, but I noticed a tendency for the recipes to sound like this:
Yeah, the Miller’s 1966, and the Clairborne/Lee’s 1972.
Surely there’s something splendiferous that’s been published SINCE then…Christ, in 1972 Chinese Cooking in America meant fried rice and chow mein and egg foo yung, and maybe Mo Shu Pork, if you were lucky…all the factors added up to a rather dim sum.
Although none of her recipes have anything to do with Chinese cuisine, this is exactly how all of my mother’s recipes look, except with the odd English measurement instead of metric.
I’ve got Yan Kit So’s Classic Chinese Cook Book (Dorling Kindersley), which has a large selection of regional Chinese recipes. As a Chinese cooking novice who nonetheless cares about authenticity, I’ve found it to be good on ingredients, technique and tradition.
I like Charmaine Solomon’s books a lot but I’ve no idea whether you lot over there can get them. Dunno if she is the dernier cri in Chinese cooking but her Asian books are wonderful.
But Ike? How the hell can you not love Kennedy? have you read Nothing Fancy? It’s wonderful, memoir and cookbook which is great cooking and great reading. I make the Xmas cake every year.
I’m sure it isn’t what you are looking for but the Pei Mei series of books published bi-lingually in Taiwan are pretty good.
I haven’t see anything worthy of the name published here in China in either English or Chinese.
and Ike, I’m not even sure if egg foo yung is Chinese or part of that whole thing that mascarades as food but is really hideous American Chinese food complete with doo-doo plate.
Speaking of some dim sum, I had a beautiful lunch yesterday at the best dim sum restaurant in Shanghai located inside of a beautiful park, and the Thai APEC delegation ate there at the same time. The restaurant does the nicest fresh turtle I’ve ever had.
I really like Irene Kuo’s The Key to Chinese Cooking. I far prefer it to The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook, which I found dull and somewhat repetitive.
Key starts with techniques and spends about 75 pages on everything from “How to bone a chicken” to “How to make basic Chinese sauces”, “How to deep fry”, “How thick is ‘paper thin’?” etc), and then delves into recipes that range from classics to less common dishes to a nice smattering of weird ones. I don’t care about color photos everywhere, but if you do, this book doesn’t have any (it does have nicely retro looking pencil drawings).
It’s well organized, however and in addition, it has a wonderful conversational tone that I really, really like.
It’s out of print, but you can find a copy on Bookfinder cheap
Wow! The Yan-Kit So and the Irene Kuo look tremendous…thank you, guys!
Primaflora: I’ve got nothing against Kennedy, but she’s like James Beard to me: I have some of their books, and hardly ever think to go to them when I want a recipe or a technique.
Rick Bayless’s MEXICAN KITCHEN is so good that I grab him first when I want to eat Mexican. It’s so good I haven’t even gotten past the god damn TACO recipes…“should we have something from one of the later chapters?” “Nah…let’s just make the chicken-spinach-tomatillo thing again, fold it up in warm tortillas, and sprinkle it with white cheese. Frijoles and sliced avocado on the side.” “Sounds great!”
China Guy: Yeah, I said “Chinese cooking in AMERICA,” circa 1972. Egg foo yung is probably about as authentically Chinese as chop suey.
I like a book called “Mrs. Chang’s Szechuan Cookbook” by Ellen & John Schrecker. It’s out of print, but I’m sure you’ll have no problems with that, Uke. In fact, there’s a copy here.
I wouldn’t call it the end-all, be-all of Chinese cooking, but it’s got some interesting recipes. The basic premise is that the author’s employed Mrs. Chang as a cook for many years, and her recipes were so good that they wrote 'em all down and published a book. An old roommate of mine had this book, and I liked it so much that I stole it from the local library. (hehe, that’s my life of crime, stealing out of print books from the library. Actually, I didn’t really steal it, I just took it out so often that I eventually noticed I was the only one who ever checked it out. In over 3 years, I was the only borrower. I decided then that I’d “lose” the book and pay the library for it.)
I’m gonna check out the Irene Kuo & Yan-Kit So books, too. Can’t have too many Chinese cookbooks.
