If you just want authentically Chinese recipes you can find them everywhere now, especially on line. Read this book if you want what the title offers: a sense of Chinese cooking and dining. It is a cultural treasure written by a family who had a great role in the 20th century American reception of things Chinese. As one amusing example, this book created the term "stir frying." On the surprisingly complex question of who in the family actually wrote this book see the author's note.
In the 1970s I began reading about Chinese food, and pestering Chinese restaurant owners in Cleveland Ohio for the real Chinese food. (One place had sea cucumbers on the menu -- and flatly refused to sell them to anyone who had not been in China!) Then, over the past 10 years, I've gotten to China many times,working with Chinese colleagues. I keep reading too but never heard of this book until last summer.
I have to say even the most recent books on food and etiquette in China are generally very limited. They tend to have a narrow range of topics and present things that indeed can be done in China, as if they were the rules for how things are always done there. By all means read many web sites and books if you want to know about such things. Only be sure to include this older book. It covers very many more topics, and has a wider view of what all happens in China, and in Chinese communities overseas, and how these things change over time, than any other food book I know.
The book is extremely witty, in a 1940s Cole Porter or Robert Benchley way (not quite Dorothy Parker, since there is no even slightly mean humor). It is also vastly well informed by decades of travel across China where the father, Yuan Ren Chao, collected linguistic information and the mother Dr. Buwei Yang Chao, collected cooking tips.
A few of the observations on Chinese ways are bit dated now, but the scope and subtlety more than makes up for this. For example, while few people alive today were educated in missionary schools in China, the gist of this remark on cultural inhibitions is still relevant today: "missionary-educated Chinese students hesitate to go [fully] Chinese before Americans ... I share some of this feeling myself, because I was partly missionary-educated" (p. 13).
In fact this book has similar cosmopolitan confidence, and smartness, and sophistication to Julia Child, since it comes from much the same milieu as Julia Child. Like her, this Chao family lived in very comfortable (not quite wealthy) elite academic circles in the US. The father, Yuan Ren Chao, was central to Chinese and Japanese language instruction for the US military and intelligence during WW II -- while Julia Child and her husband were in Intelligence.
This is a book about food, for sure. It is all about food. It teaches far more of what American should know about Chinese food than any other book I have seen, because it teaches a vast amount about the whole encounter of China and the US which is still relevant today.
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how to cook and eat in chinese collectible 1945
this cool, campy little book has the cache of the era it came from and the ease of reading from this simpler time period. Recipes are easy to follow and its fun to learn with this book.
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