Cookbook Review: "The Fine Art of Chinese Cooking", by Dr. Lee Su Jan

 

Modern cookbooks are a marvel of marketing and engineering. Awash with elegantly placed photos and pathos-steeped stories, all punctuated by just enough recipes to attempt at justifying the expense. They all too often see service as coffee table books or shelf decor, and little more besides. A shame.

As someone who takes cooking fairly seriously, what I look for in a cookbook is honestly quite simple. I want recipes, and I want the foundations from which they are built. The latter often includes solid amounts of context, be it from other recipes, the industry itself, or just history in general. I suppose you could get away with calling it 'flavor text'. Ahem.

The classic, best-known example is Julia Child's 1961 compilation, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking". Full to the brim with hundreds of recipes that have been deftly sectioned, each with a foreword to add background and useful bits of information about how to combine or modify the recipes for your audience of choice.

A book much more modern that does similar things is Tom Collichio's "Think Like A Chef". One of the cornerstones of my personal collection -when I had room to keep it, at least-, it teaches a home cook how to think about and prepare food in a manner akin to that of a professional while still imparting large amounts of useful information. These include flavor combinations, seasonality, and alternative or unconventional ways to use ingredients, all of which are fundamentals in a chef's arsenal.

But. We must return to the past, to make a vital note. There is another book. One that did everything Julia's book did for French food... but for China. This is "The Fine Art of Chinese Cooking", by Dr. Lee Su Jan. Published in 1963, it takes a no-nonsense approach to outlining the fundamentals of what has come to be thought of as contemporary Chinese-American cuisine. Realizing that the Kennedy-era American cook would never be able to find the wealth of authentic ingredients Chinese food needed, the author turned to recipes that used the basics. In doing so, he taught not only ways to prepare dinner, but the fundamentals of Chinese cooking technique, and the philosophy behind those techniques.

Seeing the pattern here?

There is virtually nothing of the author itself in the book, which tells strongly of his academic leanings. Most all modern cookbooks are heavy with anecdotes and vignettes to fill space and keep the casual buyer interested. The first third of this book has no recipes at all! But it lays the foundation of thousands of years of Chinese history, and reads most engagingly, each chapter discussing a new and vitally important part of Chinese cooking while providing background and encouraging further independent research.

Brilliantly informative even today, the book has upwards of two hundred recipes, a worthy note on its own considering the manuscript has all of 234 pages. Admittedly many of them are derivative, but that was almost certainly intentional. The underlying purpose was to show versatility- that a simple preparation can be nudged in many directions to please many audiences without harming flavor or legitimacy (I do try to avoid using 'authenticity', it being a painfully loaded word these days). Doing this would have given readers confidence to experiment and improve their recipes- something many cooks of the era would have hesitated to consider. Some of the recipes might be intimidating. Don't let them scare you. Everything I've tried works.

The primary drawback to this book is that it's A: hard to find, and B: dated. At many points the author makes substitutions for authentic ingredients, citing their inaccessibility- things like scallions, ginger, and sesame oil. Don't laugh! The modern cook has access to more ingredients than the author would ever have imagined.

Where I live in California, I have my pick of half a dozen Asian or Indian specialty grocery stores within a ten minute drive. in 1963's California, I would likely have had to drive from here to San Francisco's Chinatown to procure those same things! And that's in a state that's had a massive Asian population since the days of the intercontinental railroad. Imagine what a Midwestern housewife would have had to go through!

I recommend finding this book if you can. Try your libraries first- I haven't found it online except for a handful of secondhand copies. Really, though- any serious cook, anyone with an academic bent or a love of food, anyone who wants to learn how to cook Chinese style, and anyone who wants to appreciate how far the world has come in embracing other cultures will find this book a precious gem.