Life.Culture.Discovery.

The Chinese cookbook you need: All Under Heaven by Carolyn Phillips

The food writer, who moved from the United States to Taiwan in the 1970s, reveals how she discovered real Chinese food. In her book, she gives recipes that cover the country’s five major gastronomic regions and 35 unique cuisines

Reading Time:2 minutes

Inside Carolyn Phillips’ book, All Under Heaven.

Published: 12:03pm, 4 Feb 2017Updated: 12:03pm, 4 Feb 2017

For those of us interested in comprehensive Chinese cookbooks, 2016 was a good year: there was Land of Fish and Rice, by Fuchsia Dunlop, China The Cookbook , by Hong Kong husband and wife Chan Kei-lum and Diora Fong Chan, and this one, All Under Heaven, by Carolyn Phillips.

Phillips says she didn’t know much about Chinese cuisine when she moved from the United States to Taipei in the 1970s. “I didn’t have an inkling of what was in store for my palate – nothing I ate was anything like the so-called Chinese food I had eaten in the States. As I started to roam around the city, fragrant aromas lured me into little restaurants that plied me with their specialities from all over China. Taipei was still a quiet place then, but by wandering its labyrinth of alleys and side streets, I discovered not just the home-style dishes and street snacks of the local Taiwanese and Hakka people, but also delicacies imported by Mainlanders from Shandong in the north down to Guangdong in the south, and from Shanghai in the east out to China’s Muslim west.

“What had happened was this: in the wake of China’s communist revolution in 1949, millions of Nationalist sympathizers from all across the country retreated to Taiwan. This huge influx made the island into a microcosm of China’s cuisines. By the time I arrived, there was no better place to be eating Chinese food.”

Many lovers of Chinese food talk about the country’s five “great” cuisines, but Phillips argues that gives short shrift to the food of many regions.

Select Voice

Choose your listening speed

Get through articles 2x faster

1.25x

250 WPM

Slow

Average

Fast

00:0000:00

1.25x