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.
“I rued the fact that I had never tried to learn how to cook before I went to college. I begged my mum for cooking lessons. At first, my mum was a bit confused – how do you teach someone how to cook?
“When my mum was growing up, she lived in a complex with four or five other families, sharing a central communal kitchen. Families cooked together, shared the same pans and knives, exchanged recipes and celebrated holidays together. She picked up the basics just by watching, helping out and taking on every role in that kitchen. She learned by doing.
“So, I did what she had done – I observed. While home on college breaks, I would make my way to the kitchen, looking to see what was simmering on the stove and peppering my mum with a million questions (in fact, this hasn’t changed – I still call her to ask questions as I’m cooking). I watched how she mixed spices and paired ingredients.
“I learned how to make small, simple dishes. Eventually I learned how to make one of my favourites, Mum’s Shanghai Red-Braised Pork Belly. With its fragrant caramelised pork; thick, glistening sauce; and tofu knots to soak it all up, this dish is legend in our family. It was a moment of personal triumph.”
In her book, Liu gives the recipe for that enticing dish, and many others, grouping them by season. They include pumpkin rice cakes, hairy crab tofu, chestnut chicken, red-braised fish, shepherd’s purse and tofu soup, Suzhou pork belly noodle soup, lion’s head meatballs, flowering chives and pork slivers, soy-braised duck legs, oil-exploded shrimp, xiaolongbao, scallion pancakes and qing tuan (mugwort-flavoured glutinous rice flour dumplings).
