Cookbook: Everything You Want to Know About Chinese Cooking

With the title of the cookbook, Everything You Want to Know About Chinese Cooking, the authors have set expectations very high. Really – everything I want to know? That’s a lot.

So, I decided to scour the book for recipes of dishes I’ve always wanted to make. Gold coin chicken? Check. There’s a recipe for it, and it’s the version I like, with marinated and roasted pork fat, pork meat and chicken livers on steamed Chinese bread (which the book also gives a recipe for). Eight treasures rice? Check. The savoury version is in there, although the sweet one isn’t. Smoked duck? Check. There’s also a short but excellent section on Chinese breads and pastries and detailed black-and-white photos of techniques, such as the Chinese method for cutting up a cooked chicken and pleating dumplings and shaping spring rolls.

So, the book might not have everything, but it covers quite a lot, especially when you take into consideration the year it was published (1983) and the audience it was targeting (Americans). That’s probably the reason why the authors give just a cursory description of sea cucumber, without any recipes, writing, “It is a pity that most Americans find their slippery, gelatinous texture objectionable,” while in the recipe for mock bird’s nest soup, they explain why they don’t use the real thing: “Some diners may not cherish the fact that bird’s nest is actually the dried saliva of South Sea swallows”.

Pearl Kong Chen, who died in 2014, was considered one of the foremost authorities on Cantonese cuisine. In the introduction, the authors write: “The Chinese culture has been in existence for over ten thousand years. Chinese cookery has always been a special enjoyment to the Chinese people and serves to bind them together, keep them healthy and help them overcome calamities, natural or man-made. It is thus understandable that some Chinese may become so proud of their food as to think that Chinese cookery has long [since] reached perfection in total isolation, and is both unchanging and unchangeable. Serious scholarship disputes this extremist view.