Homesick Chinese-American’s cooking disasters led her to mum’s kitchen to learn the basics - now she’s showing us how to make Shanghai dishes
- Betty Liu missed her mother’s homestyle Chinese cooking so much that she tried making it herself in her college dorm – with disastrous results
- While home for the holidays, she would pepper her mum ‘with a million questions’. Now she has a cookbook full of the homestyle Shanghai food she ate growing up
Like so many young students who leave their parents’ house for the first time and head off to university (myself included), Betty Liu missed her mother’s homestyle Chinese cooking so much that she tried making it herself in her college dorm.
“Cooking wasn’t fancy. There were no expensive kitchen appliances. Instead, they ate and cooked simply, as had been the norm for centuries.
“When my parents moved to Oregon for graduate school, they brought their culinary traditions with them: they foraged along the coast for wild mussels and crabs. They planted bamboo and dug up the young shoots in the winter. They cooked with what was in season. This is the homestyle Shanghai food that I ate growing up.
“It was only when I moved across the country to St Louis for college that I realised how much I had taken my parents’ food for granted.