Grandma Grandpa Cook Chief editor: Yeung Yang
One of my biggest regrets in life is not having learned more about classic Chinese cooking from my grandmother, who regularly cooked for 20 or more people at family dinners. She was willing to teach me but, when I was young, I wasn't interested in helping out in the kitchen. So I was happy to discover that somebody has had the foresight to learn from the older generation before it is too late.
This book, 'dedicated to all grandmas and grandpas', is a compilation of humble, family-style Chinese dishes. Many of the recipes will be familiar to people of Chinese descent no matter where they were raised: pork belly with taro, carrot and green turnip soup; steamed fish with spring onion and ginger; steamed chicken with dried lily flowers and black fungus; and silken bean curd dessert. Other dishes, such as chilli crab and mo mo cha cha (a Malaysian dessert of taro, sago and beans cooked with sugar and coconut) are regional.
But what makes this book special are the grandparents behind the dishes - each recipe is accompanied by a first-person account of what life was like 'back in the day'. Some of them encountered extreme hardship - Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation; being sold into virtual slavery by unscrupulous family members - while others had childhoods that sound like fairytales. The recipes and stories are accompanied by photographs of the writers as they were in their youth and as they are now.