A Seminal Era
Throughout most of the 1960s, members of the non-Chinese dining public who hoped to understand—and possibly cook at home—marvels tantalizingly glimpsed at some acclaimed dining spot had very few printed sources of guidance. How to Cook and Eat in Chinese, the Chao family’s pioneering 1945 effort, had done about as much to make the unintelligible intelligible to English speakers as could be accomplished with language alone. But it hadn’t magically abolished the chasm between Chinese and Western ways of “seeing,” “hearing,” and otherwise comprehending either language or food. How to convert Chinese characters into either phonetic spellings or English translations, how to make reader-cooks grasp the logical relationships between different parts of an ingredients list or crucial stages in a sequence of directions, were problems that continued to stymie hardworking minds.
Luckily the postwar and Cold War Chinese restaurant craze happened to overlap with two reinforcing trends: an American cooking-class fad that soon attracted capable Chinese-born instructors, and a fascination on the part of leading cookbook editors with expanding the instructional potential of recipes through inventive use of page design, recipe format, illustrations, and perhaps even photography. Their experiments with what could be called supraverbal innovations would especially affect English-language Chinese cookbooks because so much of the above-mentioned chasm wasn’t amenable to purely verbal bridging strategies.
At the same time as these developments, Washington policy wonks were paying intense attention to the one nation that the United States officially recognized as “China”: Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China (ROC), in exile on Taiwan. Of course, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had been almost completely invisible to the so-called free world since 1949. By default, the ROC now represented Chinese life and civilization to many Americans, including food lovers. In fact, Taiwan’s role as a fount of culinary knowledge, insight, and inspiration for Americans is complex enough to deserve a book in itself. A great number of the advances in understanding Chinese cuisine that took place during the postwar rise of glamorous big-city dining spots owed something to Taiwanese influence or example—or at a slightly later stage, actual immigration in a form previously unimaginable.
“Little Dragon”‐Superpower Interchanges
For a heady interval after the PRC–ROC split, Washington poured millions of dollars into the coffers of its tiny Cold War ally. The ROC swiftly achieved independent prosperity under Chiang Kai-shek and, after his death in 1975, his son Chiang Ching-kuo. While the PRC remained largely turned in on itself, the transplanted mainlanders made Taiwan into the biggest and richest among the four “little dragons,” or newly industrialized states, surging to the economic forefront of the Far East. (The other three were South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore.) This success was partly built on the backs of the Hokkien-speaking ethnic majority who had been just recovering from half a century of Japanese occupation when the Nationalist army swarmed in, bringing with it a state of martial law that would last almost forty years.
Taiwan—at least the Mandarin-speaking elite—soon became a sophisticated, affluent consumer society intent on business growth and technological progress. Restaurants offering fine versions of the major mainland regional cuisines flourished in Taipei and other Taiwanese cities. Modern communications kept abreast (or sometimes ahead) of those in First World nations. The culture evolved into a high-powered mixture of Eastern and Western imperatives, though actual Western cooking would not have a dramatic popular impact until the 1980s.
Among many programs for rapid modernization, education for both sexes was a central priority. The National Taiwan University became one of the greatest institutions of higher learning anywhere in Asia, forging ties with scholarly communities in America. At the same time, what might be called lifestyle education—instruction in hobby-and-leisure activities or the domestic arts—was enjoying as great a spurt of growth on Taiwan as in the United States.
The daughters of affluent, educated families flocked to new classes in accomplishments that they would previously have learned at home. Aggressive modernization was helping to create a generation of young women who often had more in common with American businessmen’s daughters and wives than with mainland-reared mothers and grandmothers. Mother–daughter example was no longer enough to equip girls with up-to-date—meaning increasingly Westernized and sometimes Japanized—domestic skills. Imparting these in classrooms became a growth industry that naturally produced a demand for printed instruction as well. Before the war, cookbooks resembling any Western model would have been useless articles in any Chinese household. Now, however, Taiwanese women could admire American cookbooks as tokens of modernity.
Academic studies also fostered international exchange in the booming new Taiwan. Taipei received an influx of American college or graduate students drawn by the National Taiwan University or an expanding crop of language schools. Many young Westerners fell in love with the Chinese food of diverse regions as cooked by and for Chinese on Taiwan. They recognized at once that this experience had nothing to do with eating in either old-style American Chinatown restaurants or hifalutin new “Szechuan” and “Mandarin” places with menus cleverly aimed at stylish Washington or New York consumers. Some devotees returned to U.S. campuses obsessed with trying to find or recreate anything half as good as the fare they had regularly devoured from Taipei street carts, holes in the wall, or famous restaurants. For a time, Princeton’s Department of Far Eastern Studies was a small hotbed of informal Chinese gastronomic activity, a few of whose instigators would later go on to write cookbooks.
Some Americans also became aware that pioneering experiments in televised as well as classroom instruction were taking place on Taiwan. A pretty young woman named Fu Pei Mei or Pei Mei Fu began teaching cooking over Taiwan’s first television station in 1962—the year that also saw Julia Child’s first French Chef appearance, and decades before superior hair, teeth, and charm became standard values on American TV cooking programs.1
Meanwhile, the Hotai Chemical Corporation, one branch of a Taiwanese family business empire, morphed into a food manufacturing and distribution concern called the Wei-Chuan Foods Corporation. Wei-Chuan quickly set up a home economics department with a school that offered courses in makeup, flower arranging, sewing, and cooking.2 At about the same time that Pei Mei Fu’s broadcasting career was being launched, the cooking part of the Wei-Chuan agenda was split off into a school of its own under another attractive young instructor, Huang Su-Huei or Su-Huei Huang, the daughter of the Hotai founder.
As the economies of the Far Eastern “little dragons” as well as postwar Japan grew, they became important publishing centers, addressing home-grown audiences while also doing increasing amounts of book printing and photographic reproduction for Western publishers. It was inevitable that how-to books loosely corresponding to American models would find a home on Taiwan. Wei-Chuan was an early leader. The school soon acquired a publishing arm and began issuing books by Ms. Huang while the company weighed the idea of English-language or bilingual editions to appeal to potential buyers on Taiwan and even in America itself.
These developments coincided with the start of stateside French, “Continental,” and other cooking schools; an upswing in English-language Chinese cookbooks; and some early transpacific exchanges of media influence. If Taiwan was becoming daily more Americanized, it was also true that American students and others returning from Taiwan might well have seen a cooking program by Fu Pei Mei (a household name to television viewers everywhere on the island) or found out about a Wei-Chuan cooking class while shopping for food. By the same token, Taiwanese students were arriving at American universities in increasing numbers, usually missing the excellent Chinese cooking that they had grown up taking for granted and not finding English-language cookbooks well matched to their innate culinary reflexes.
Increasing interchange also exposed the island’s modern-minded consumers and communicators to supposedly mouth-watering, profit-stimulating American magazine and advertising photography depicting roast meats, layer cakes, and so forth. Local talent took a while to catch up with American professional standards, but Taiwanese publishers soon saw that photography might be deployed to sell consumers on the Western-inspired publishing novelty of cookbooks. In today’s age of digital cameras and YouTube videos, food mavens may not instantly grasp that because of production costs, photographs—especially in color—were used either very sparingly or not at all in most American cookbooks until the mid-1970s. Taiwan got into the game a little earlier.
The first cookbook spinoff of Fu Pei Mei’s television program, Pei Mei’s Chinese Cook Book [Pei Mei Shi Pu], was published in Taipei in 1969.3 (Two additional volumes would follow in 1974 and 1979.) It contained representative dishes from all parts of mainland China organized by region (east, south, west, north) as well as a chapter on dim sum. The two most conspicuous selling points were a bilingual presentation, with Chinese text and rough, sketchy English translations of all recipes on facing pages, and copious use of color photography. There were five substantial color inserts that included studio shots of every dish. All were crude and unimaginative by American as well as later Taiwanese standards, but they point to the growing wants of a market that was also about to acquire international dimensions.
The Wei-Chuan Corporation, meanwhile, began preparing for overseas expansion spurred by the first hints of new Taiwanese outposts that would soon materialize in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles. At or slightly before 1970, a small cluster of Chinese homes in the San Gabriel town of Monterey Park set wheels spinning in the head of a Chinese-born newcomer with an instinct for real estate speculation. Word went out to Taiwan, where members of the mainlander elite were starting to fear the consequences to themselves of a possible Washington-Beijing rapprochement. Within a few years Monterey Park and several neighboring San Gabriel towns were attracting a strong influx of educated, ambitious Taiwanese professionals along with scatterings of Hong Kong émigrés, ethnic Chinese from Southeast Asia, and refugees from the dwindling Los Angeles Chinatown. In the past forty years these communities have come to occupy a twenty-five-mile east–west stretch of sprawling and for the most part wealthy Taiwanese-dominated settlements so unlike the old city ghettos that they have earned a sociological label of their own: “ethnoburbs.”4 Monterey Park, the original nucleus, is now home to one of America’s largest cookbook publishers, a branch of the Wei-Chuan empire established when Huang Su-Huei and the corporation set their sights on a potential English-language market.
Part of the story began in 1970, when the Wei-Chuan cooking school in Taipei acquired a determined nineteen-year-old pupil named Nina Simonds, a New Englander who had dropped out of the University of Wisconsin in order to study Chinese cooking as close as possible to actual Chinese soil.5 She had arrived with a somewhat limited command of Mandarin but was also intensively studying the language between sessions at Wei-Chuan. Soon she was playing a part in Ms. Huang’s plans for an English-language or bilingual Chinese cookbook.
The English-language attempt was published in 1972 as Chinese Cuisine: Wei-Chuan Cooking Book, with Simonds and other people receiving brief credit for help with translation.6 In hindsight, it was an astute if linguistically shaky effort by a well-organized team, auguring well for future marketing aims. A larger English edition with drastically rearranged contents followed in 1974.7 In this version, Nina Simonds—by now proficient in Mandarin—was listed as translator, as also in the first (and still more thoroughly revised and expanded) bilingual edition in 1976.8
It is improbable that the small community of Americans then engaged in language or other Chinese studies in Taipei could have formed a dependable clientele for these initially clumsy ventures. Neither Chinese Cuisine nor another bilingual production by Ms. Huang, Chinese Snacks (also translated by Simonds and published in 1974), was primarily addressed to either stateside American cookbook buyers or temporary Taiwan residents.9 The longer-term audience was the growing body of Chinese professionals looking to move from Taiwan to the San Gabriel Valley and a few other North American ethnoburbs (especially in the vicinity of Houston and Vancouver), often equipped with educational advantages like some command of English that their Cantonese peasant predecessors on Gold Mountain had not possessed.
The Huang family had taken aim at this market as early as 1972 by founding an American branch of Wei-Chuan Foods in Los Angeles. (Today it is one of the chief domestic manufacturers of frozen dumplings, spring rolls, Chinese-style entrees, and many other products.) In 1978 Huang Su-Huei, now married to an American, came to the region to set up Wei-Chuan Publishing in Alhambra and Monterey Park, the biggest new Taiwanese American settlements. A branch of the cooking school had already opened in Alhambra.10
Wei-Chuan Publishing also had offices on Taiwan, where most of the actual book printing was done. The American-produced Wei-Chuan cookbook list has grown to number in the dozens, addressing any subject from decorative garnishes to “international baking delights.” Bilingual Chinese–English editions, with more professional expertise pumped into the English translations, were soon joined by Chinese–Spanish editions for the Latino market and even a couple of trilingual Chinese–English–Spanish volumes.
The signal feature of the Wei-Chuan books was and is a format that enables every page to be printed with a glamorous close-up color photograph of a finished dish above the recipe-directions. The design requires the recipes to be presented as compactly as possible in order to fit the restricted space. It has been somewhat refined over the years but still relies on the same basic device. The ingredients are arranged in groups marked off by numbered brackets, with the numbers serving as cues at different stages of the execution. Thus, number [1] might include four or five ingredients that need to be stir-fried in a particular sequence; [2] the elements of a starch-and-water slurry; [3] a few final seasonings. The mixing and cooking directions would then say something like “Add [1] in the order listed,” “Add [2] and stir to thicken,” and “Sprinkle with [3].”
The reason for the method’s popularity with Chinese cooks is that they were already used to mentally grouping ingredients by structural role. To recognize how 1, 2, and so forth fitted into the action at just the right moment was no stretch of understanding for them. Westerners on Taiwan or back home were inclined to find the format awkward or distracting but often hoped to learn enough from the recipes to buy the books anyhow. Those who persevered acquired insights into Chinese kitchen thinking that usual American recipe formats could not convey. The Wei-Chuan books, which soon found their way into bookstores and variety stores in big-city Chinatowns, vary greatly in quality but represent a vigorous and too-little-noticed intersection of East–West culinary approaches in this country.
A Teachable Moment: Chinese Instructors Find an American Audience
Decades before the San Gabriel Valley phenomenon, mainland-born and Mandarin-speaking representatives of the Chinese upper crust began reaching the United States through Washington’s alliance with the ROC—and in some cases thinking of food as a promising career option in postwar America.
Unlike the Cantonese predecessors who had founded chop suey restaurants during the Exclusion era, they were not driven to the choice as a last-ditch defense against deportation. Another difference was that women figured proudly among the newcomers. (Not for nothing had Soong Mei-ling—Madame Chiang Kai-shek—made herself into the extravagantly admired public face of the Nationalist regime in America during World War II.) At the outset, virtually all the people who took advantage of a welcoming climate to start new restaurants were highly trained professional cooks—a category virtually limited to men. But their success encouraged sophisticated Chinese-born diplomats’, generals’, and businessmen’s wives or daughters to consider culinary careers of their own. Some would eventually manage to invade the all-male club of restaurateurs. But the field that first opened up to them was culinary instruction.
Cooking schools dedicated to French or other European cuisines had become wildly popular in many American cities. Like their Taiwanese counterparts, they addressed stylish postwar hobby-cooks. The arriving Mandarin speakers were a natural fit with these aspirants to chic, accomplished kitchen globetrotting. Many of them had learned English either at elite schools in prewar China or through years at American private schools and colleges. (From the turn of the twentieth century, sons and daughters of some wealthy, powerful families had attended exclusive U.S. schools quite independently of the Boxer Indemnity scholarship program described in chapter 6.) They were well equipped to capitalize on the new prestige of non-Cantonese cuisine. Whether or not they had grown up with hands-on mastery of Chinese home cooking, they understood its principles well enough to demonstrate them to others.
These women had the self-confidence to stand in front of nervous neophytes and patiently, gracefully show them how to handle cleaver and wok, making sense out of the previously unfathomable for people who couldn’t speak Chinese. Their status as teachers would have been far outside the reach of earlier, humbler immigrants from Toisan. And unlike Ed Schoenfeld, most of their American pupils would never have dared to walk into restaurant kitchens and stick around long enough to detect the method in a clamorous whirl of lightning-fast preparations.
Of course, cooking has always been learned more reliably from repeated firsthand example (mother to daughter, master cook to apprentice) than the written word. The close-up sight of a sharp knife at work or a sauce taking on the right consistency cannot be equaled for bringing the essentials to life. This is especially true of Chinese cuisine. Stir-frying in particular resists being explained on paper to the inexperienced about as stubbornly as downhill skiing. It is still poorly grasped by most American cooks. But long before cooking videos, the first American-based teachers gave rise to a generation of communicators who have made it somewhat better understood.
The seeds of the movement were sown at the New York–based China Institute in America, an educational foundation established in 1926 through the efforts of a binational committee including the Chaos’ friend Hu Shih and his old Columbia University professor John Dewey. The organizers had managed to get a part of the Boxer Indemnity scholarship fund allocated to setting up a nonprofit cultural center offering language courses and other activities. Eventually the center attracted the support of Henry Luce, the Shandong-born missionary’s son and resolute Nationalist supporter who had founded Time, Life, and Fortune magazines. It was the Luce Foundation that in 1944 presented the institute with “China House,” a four-story townhouse on East 65th Street, to serve as new headquarters.
In 1955 someone at the institute decided that a cooking class at China House might appeal to a spectrum of New Yorkers. After a search for an instructor, the post was offered to Grace Zia Chu.11 This elegant, virtually bilingual woman, always called “Madame Chu,” belonged to the corps of Chinese military and diplomatic wives who had spent the war years in the United States. Originally from Shanghai, she had graduated in 1924 from Wellesley (also the alma mater of her acquaintance Madame Chiang Kai-shek, class of 1917) and married an officer in the Nationalist army who was eventually posted to Washington as a military attaché. The couple had broken up after the war, and Madame Chu had tried her hand at several ventures to support herself and her two sons in America before accepting the China Institute position.
Her classes were an instant success. The restless Ed Schoenfeld attended briefly but soon saw that he would be happier in the rough-and-tumble of real restaurant activity. But eager American hobby-cooks, nearly all women, flocked in droves to Madame Chu’s China House sessions. In a few years the institute had to hire a second instructor to cope with the tide of applicants, while Madame Chu also began offering classes at other venues, including her own apartment.
Her new colleague at the institute was Florence Lin, who was—like Buwei Yang Chao and Madame Chu—a native of the Jiangnan region, specifically, Ningbo, an ancient silk-trading city about eighty miles east of Hangzhou. She had come to New York in 1947 with her husband, a stockbroker who happened to be a nephew of the writer Lin Yutang.12 The couple entertained a lot, having entree to various cultural as well as financial circles.
Florence Lin began teaching at the institute in 1960. For some years the two women shared the job of instructor, until Madame Chu set up on her own as founder and principal teacher of Madame Chu’s Chinese Cooking School. Lin succeeded her as head of the institute’s cooking program, which grew to include several more instructors under her direction.
Classroom instruction in cooking has its limitations. But information conveyed in the presence of students registers in the memory differently from words on a page—especially English words launched across the incredible distance that separates Western cooks from the sui generis “language” of Chinese cuisine. There is no doubt that the live (if artificial) experience of addressing non-Chinese students in teaching kitchens helped cooking instructors recognize other Americans’ greatest failures of understanding and seek ways to overcome them through cookbooks—that is, to communicate nonverbal cues on the page for what is after all an intrinsically nonverbal activity.
Other Chinese-born people and a few American-born Chinese began offering cooking classes during the 1960s. New York was the biggest center of activity, but not the only one. A handful of restaurateurs got in on the act: Joyce Chen began teaching Chinese cooking in Boston; Johnny Kan, in San Francisco. Chinese kitchenware shops started to attract white cooking students. A particular favorite in Manhattan’s Chinatown was the Oriental Country Store on Mott Street, owned by an entrepreneur named Mailan Lee who had a handful of business ventures. Her mother, Virginia Lee, had some reputation as an accomplished cook. In 1970 Mailan installed a demonstration kitchen above the shop, where Virginia was just about to launch her own cooking course when Craig Claiborne—having heard of her “virtues and talents”—called from the New York Times asking to arrange an interview. The resulting article appeared in early September.13
Claiborne was already preparing to leave the Times, with an eye to starting a food newsletter in partnership with Pierre Franey. The encounter with Virginia Lee gave him a further idea: to study Chinese cuisine to serious purpose. He had already visited and reported on several of the city’s Chinese cooking schools. Now, however, he appointed himself a member of Virginia Lee’s first series of classes and attended sessions along with her other students. Manhattan food-writing circles were soon rocked by the news that the two were planning to write a cookbook together.
Claiborne’s choice of Virginia Lee for coauthor perhaps owed something to the fact that, unlike Madame Chu or Florence Lin, she was his “discovery” rather than an already illustrious figure. The two reigning instructors enjoyed great name recognition. They commanded a large network of contacts and influences in their own right. Through their most eager students, they helped the teaching of Chinese cooking diffuse outward from a handful of privileged big-city fans into a larger, more democratic American white community.
The process began almost at once. Chu’s and Lin’s most apt students regularly returned for more courses, often becoming assistants to the instructor before seeking their own venues for teaching Chinese cooking. Margaret Spader, a consumer affairs consultant at the Gas Appliance Manufacturers Association who had studied with both women, soaked up all the instruction she could get and eventually started teaching beginner courses for fun in her apartment one evening a week.14 She also helped Madame Chu and the China Institute team make further contacts at the gas association, a natural ally in promoting Chinese cooking methods. One of Madame Chu’s students, Karen Lee (not Chinese, despite the name), founded a well-respected Chinese cooking school of her own. Others secured cooking-demonstration gigs at department stores. Many taught at adult-education centers or in programs run by educational church programs or university extension services. At least half a dozen of Madame Chu’s students were hired to conduct live Chinese cooking demonstrations on board the Queen Elizabeth 2 in the early 1970s.15 These examples show how broadly the idea of at least dipping into the easier shallows of Chinese cuisine appealed to American hobby-cooks. Instruction in the subject was, if not a growth industry, at least a box-office draw that in one way or another reached a wide public.
The Unique Challenges of “Cooking in Chinese”
For some time, developments in English-language Chinese cookbooks lagged behind those in cooking classes. One reason was the sheer awkwardness of representing crucial words and ideas on paper. The Chaos had been given their head by the one American trade publisher able to appreciate their command of language issues. They had brilliantly addressed the intractable problems of “translating” between Chinese and English kitchen mentalities, problems that had no real counterpart in English-language cookbooks on French, Italian, or Scandinavian cooking. They had come up with wonderful coinages like “stir-fry” and “pot-sticker.” But they had not permanently abolished the many remaining pitfalls of finding English terms for either the “language” formed by the cuisine itself or any actual Chinese language.
In the first place, written Chinese differs from Japanese, Korean, Hindi, and other major East Asian languages in being essentially impossible to convert to any alphabet-based phonetic system. (Today’s official pinyin is only the latest in a series of very imperfect attempts.) Though it does have phonetic elements, these are unintelligible unless one already knows the meaning and pronunciation of the characters in one or another Han language. For this reason, postwar writers on Chinese food could not blithely give English equivalents and phonetic pronunciations of even some fairly simple terms. Of course, prewar writers had faced the same obstacle, but it became more egregious as American authors and editors increasingly realized how inadequate the very words “Chinese language” were to the real situation.
Most people had previously taken “Cantonese” and “Chinese” to be synonymous. The arrival of a prominent Mandarin-speaking contingent revealed the error of this idea. Just as Chinese food was acquiring new prestige among movers and shakers, finding ways to represent what was being talked about with the Roman alphabet as basic tool became more confusing.
At the time, many American publishers had adopted the Wade-Giles system for approximating Mandarin pronunciation, along with a slew of hit-or-miss efforts for Cantonese and any other Han Chinese language. Of course no system came very close to actual Mandarin pronunciation (which in any case was not one uniform system) or could correctly indicate the four “sung” Mandarin tones without some further mark over or after each syllable. (Since tone-indications were a useless refinement for Western readers ignorant of how “sung” pitch might affect meaning, only scholarly publications bothered with them.) Where the original language was Cantonese, with its seven or more “sung” tones and an incredible farrago of local sublanguages and dialects, nobody could agree on how to proceed.
One author might elect to transliterate the name of a popular Cantonese American duck dish as “wo sieu ngaap” while another plumped for “wor shu opp” (the most usual spelling on American restaurant menus). Mandarin speakers, meanwhile, would render it as something like “wo shao ya.” The lime-treated eggs sometimes known as “thousand-year” or “hundred-year eggs” might appear in a cookbook as “pay daan,” “pei don,” or (the Mandarin pronunciation) “pi dan.” Simply translating the whole name into English didn’t necessarily improve matters. In the case of the duck dish, the last word was the only one with an unmistakable English equivalent—“duck.” The first two could be variously rendered as “nestled-roasted,” “pressed-braised,” or a few other hazy approximations of concepts not easy to smuggle across language boundaries. The literal English translation of “pay daan” and so forth was “skin eggs,” which was no help to anybody.
Downplaying phonetic spellings (or dispensing with them) and giving the most informative possible English translations accompanied by names in Chinese characters cleared things up for those who could read the latter. It also offered those who couldn’t the option of taking the book on dining or shopping excursions and showing the page to waiters or clerks. But it involved extra production expenses and other complexities—for instance, selecting a Chinese typeface or hiring someone to do calligraphy, deciding between traditional Chinese characters as used in American Chinatowns and the simplified forms now being introduced in the People’s Republic, and carefully proofreading Chinese against English names. Few cookbook editors at leading publishing houses cared to adopt this procedure in the years when the Chinese market was starting to warm up.
A whole other set of problems revolved around the terrible fit between American recipe conventions and the Chinese cooking mentality. Writers had to set down incredible amounts of information—second nature to Chinese cooks but like differential calculus to anybody new to the proper literal and figurative kitchen “vocabulary”—without drawing out every recipe to ridiculous length. For their part, the users had to make sense out of the shaping concepts on the page, detail by detail, at every moment of a race to the finish line between hauling out the wok and putting a completed dish on the table.
Lists of ingredients were an awful headache. Chinese people understood the structure of Chinese cooking (as shown by the Wei-Chuan books). They knew that even simple dishes often involved several kinds of pre-preparations that had to be sitting at hand, ready to be incorporated, well before the real assembly of elements began. There might be a mixture of egg white, starch, and a little oil for coating and marinating pieces of meat or poultry; some amount of oil to (briefly) fry the meat; a little more oil for a final stir-frying; another mixture involving liquid and starch to bind the pan sauce; and a handful of other seasonings tossed in at the end. All these elements listed in one unbroken sequence had as much structural coherence as an excerpt from the city telephone book.
Telling cooks what to do with the assembled ingredients also imposed a painful stretch on the familiar recipe framework. It was fatally easy to issue a long string of instructions that amounted to directing hikers past one tree after another, ad infinitum, without helping them to gauge their progress through the forest.
More mental exertions would be necessary on the part of trade cookbook editors and publishers before they could adequately deal with the Chinese puzzle in all its interlocked dimensions. Unfortunately, during the first postwar decades these professionals would have been out of their depth in addressing the puzzle even if they hadn’t been loath to risk pushing potential buyers beyond received notions of an average housewife’s comfort zone. Pearl Buck and Richard Walsh had had not only the rare understanding to grasp the excellence of the Chaos’ pathbreaking effort but the guts to throw the John Day / Asia Press resources behind it. For the time being, their example was lost on other publishers. (In a depressing sign of shrunken horizons, Random House would delete the entire fifteen-page bilingual table of recipes from its 1963 reissue of How to Cook and Eat in Chinese.)
An Inspired Amateur
Given the circumstances, it is little wonder that only one English-language Chinese cookbook displaying anything like the brains of the Chaos’ 1945 breakthrough appeared for more than fifteen years. Nor should it be surprising that the work had been dreamed up and executed a couple of thousand miles from usual American trade book publishing channels. It was published in 1950 under the supposed imprimatur of Greenberg: Publisher, a longtime New York cookbook specialist. Greenberg’s role, however, really was only that of distributor.
The Joy of Chinese Cooking had been written, produced, and printed in Mexico City. (The authors of The Joy of Cooking were anything but pleased by the title.) Its begetter was Doreen Yen Hung Feng, the twenty-seven-year-old daughter of the Nationalist Chinese ambassador to Mexico. At the time, she was a rich playgirl given to exotic hairstyles and expensive amusements such as amateur bullfighting.16
The young woman clearly had plunged into the task with toreador-like bravado. Unlike most of the New York star chefs and teachers, she came from a Cantonese family and placed little emphasis on specialties of other regions. Feng was as interesting company on the page as Buwei Yang Chao, though with more of a bent for color and atmosphere than brass tacks. Hers was the first important English-language culinary work to dwell at length on Chinese symbolism, cosmology, and myths. She had created a prettier, more evocative volume than the no-nonsense How to Cook and Eat in Chinese, copiously illustrated with her own attractive line drawings and instructional diagrams.
The book was something of a vanity production, and all the better for it. Feng barged ahead on her own inspired amateur agenda, unhampered by sage editorial advice about popular appeal. She gave all recipe titles in English, romanized Cantonese pronunciations, and Chinese characters. She also used Chinese characters to identify important methods and ingredients. (Mexico City had its own small Chinese barrio, with shops stocking crucial imports.) The line drawings of major edible plants, including unfamiliar items like cloud ears or bitter melon, were a handsome shopping aid; a section on the chief annual festivals introduced some ten dishes associated with them.
Feng’s Latin American background (she had been born in Peru) can be glimpsed in some of her comments: “Chinese parsley” resembles the “variety called cilantro, found in Mexico”; “a water plant called jicama” can do duty for for water chestnuts or bamboo shoots.17 Occasionally her command of English betrayed her into writing something like “tissue paper” (instead of waxed paper or kitchen parchment) in the “paper-wrapped chicken” recipe.18 The amateurish index is woefully unhelpful to English speakers. But the work’s charm and insight are unmistakable even today.
Feng was not the first author of an American-published cookbook to mention the cooking vessel that she called a “wock.” As far as I know, that honor goes to Katherine Bazore, who described “a shallow round-bottomed frying pan called a wak” in her seminal Hawaiian and Pacific Foods, published in 1940 by the New York firm of M. Barrows.19 But Feng seems to have been the first to present a drawing of it—in fact, two.20 Unfortunately, she could not suggest how to use it on an American home stove.
After a few years of distribution by Greenberg, Feng arrived at an arrangement with another American publisher, Grosset & Dunlap.21 The book must have sold very reliably, because the Grosset & Dunlap version remained in print until the late 1970s. The Joy of Chinese Cooking was thus many American cooks’ first introduction to the subject over a period of more than twenty-five years—and actually enjoyed another lease on life in 1992 when it was reissued by Hippocrene Books.22 It still stands as one of the most genuinely original explorations of Chinese cuisine in the English language.
The field remained fairly untroubled by original thinking for about another dozen years. One mother–daughter team of authors should be mentioned: Tsuifeng Lin and Hsiangju Lin, the wife and youngest daughter of Lin Yutang. In 1956 Prentice-Hall published their maiden effort, Cooking with the Chinese Flavor.23 Certainly the Lin name promised something fresh and unusual. But sadly, neither this work nor an expanded version published in 1960 as Secrets of Chinese Cooking aspired to be much more than an amiable quasi-Chinese hodgepodge mostly featuring dishes (from crab soufflé or beef curry to tea-dyed eggs) based on readily available ingredients; a shorter section of “recipes calling for Chinese ingredients” was a little livelier but equally uninformative about the ideas underlying the cuisine.24
The Transitional Sixties
An expanded role for Chinese cookbooks was nonetheless starting to take shape. The 1960s, a time of vast political and cultural disruption everywhere in America, also ushered in some serious attempts to awaken the cookbook-buying public to the glory of Chinese cooking. As enrollment in cooking classes swelled along with the excited buzz surrounding new high-end Chinese restaurants, writers, editors, and publishers alike began to make less timid efforts at reading the market.
Three works that appeared in quick succession during the first years of the decade show changing ideas of what the cookbook-buying public might be interested in. All not only mention but picture the two most truly Chinese pieces of cooking equipment: kitchen cleavers (with detailed explanations of how particular ways of slicing and cutting affect final results) and woks (with support rings to adapt them to American gas stoves, though only one of the books seriously argued for cooking with woks). Merely identifying these items as major though partly replaceable cogs in a functioning Chinese kitchen system was in itself a serious advance in culinary “translation.”
The first of the new teaching stars to secure a cookbook contract with a major publisher was Grace Zia Chu, whose The Pleasures of Chinese Cooking was released by Simon & Schuster in 1962.25 Her reputation at the China Institute, and later her own school, guaranteed the modest-sized work a warm reception and a long afterlife in paperback reprints.
Either Madame Chu or Simon & Schuster chose to avoid challenging reader-cooks by dwelling on factors that set Chinese kitchen civilization apart from other foreign cuisines. All parties seem to have agreed on planing off difficult conceptual edges, ignoring awkward conundrums like Chinese characters, and converting about one hundred dishes into conventional, highly organized formulas accompanied by serving or preparation tips.
These were undoubtedly helpful choices for a large audience, though the book’s ambitions look decidedly fainthearted today. Madame Chu knew how to put nervous non-Chinese beginners at ease. She wrote graceful, enjoyable English. Everything about the effort bespeaks a gentle, well-gauged pitch to just the sort of hobby-cooks who might have showed up for the China Institute’s first classes.
Menus for orthodox American-style meals (a starch, a meat dish or two, a vegetable dish or two, a dessert) were the backbone of the book. After a brief guide to ingredients, techniques, and other basics, the recipe section encouragingly began with a chapter on familiar Chinese American restaurant standbys like beef chop suey and egg drop soup. Madame Chu worked hard to provide serviceable versions of some good, simple Chinese dishes (steamed fish, plain rice, stir-fried pork shreds with cellophane noodles) but also heavily emphasized a selection of items that reader-cooks could present as cocktail-party nibbles. In fact, ingredients like hoisin sauce got pressed into service as flavorings for sour cream or cream cheese dips and spreads.
The Pleasures of Chinese Cooking certainly did not represent Madame Chu’s own ideas of excellence. The main thing that middle-class white women (less frequently, men) wanted from cooking classes like hers was a collection of conversation-worthy new dishes for entertaining guests, together with advice about menus and stratagems for carrying off a dinner or cocktail party. If her way of providing value for their money involved canned or frozen products such as Scandinavian fish balls and prepackaged biscuit or piecrust doughs, no one was complaining at this stage of the game.
The year 1962 also brought a book as rough-edged and clumsy as The Pleasures of Chinese Cooking was smoothly sanded down. Joyce Chen Cook Book, meant to exploit the success of Chen’s Cambridge restaurant, was an outgrowth of her cooking classes at several Boston-area adult-education centers.26 Apparently the inexperienced author had approached trade publishers expecting to dictate her own terms about design details, including photographs (then an impractical expense for most cookbooks) and the use of Chinese characters to bolster English recipe titles and names of ingredients. When no one was willing to meet her demands, she produced and published the book herself. Only then did the old Philadelphia-based firm of Lippincott agree to distribute it to bookstores.
Chen’s naïve overconfidence undercut her effort in many ways. Unlike Buwei Yang Chao, she had no Harvard lecturers in the family to remedy the obvious deficiencies of her English. Professional editorial guidance and production supervision would have spared the book various printing errors, stylistic infelicities, mysteries like “heavy liquid” or “fine hair of bird,” and the all-but-unreadable recipe chart that appeared in lieu of an index.27
The recipes cover the usual ground that restaurant-goers of the day expected from places advertised as “Mandarin.” Some Cantonese American favorites like egg drop soup, shrimp with lobster sauce, and fu yung shared space with dishes ascribed to Shanghai, Peking, Chungking (Chongqing, the wartime capital in Sichuan), Yangzhou, and Hangzhou. Probably the most attractive selections were several whole fish presentations (red-cooked, steamed, sweet-and-sour) and simple vegetable dishes (choy sum cooked in chicken fat, plain wilted spinach, an appetizer of red-cooked dried shiitake mushrooms). Carefully and perhaps accurately second-guessing her audience’s preferences and prejudices, Chen eschewed “messy” things like shrimp cooked and served in the shell. She deferred to medical opinion of the day by rejecting Chinese pork belly dishes as “too fat.”28 But she was no trained market researcher. She seemed unsure whether people would be buying a preplucked chicken or “live killed pullet” for best flavor, but on the other hand expected them to start with frozen birds for Peking duck.29 Her recipe instructed cooks to rub the duck with a mixture of corn syrup, red food coloring, and “brown gravy syrup” (the “pearl sauce” or “bead molasses” that Cantonese restaurateurs had long used to dye gravies and fried rice to American tastes). She got desperately bogged down in trying to explain a roasting method for the bird involving “the rotisserie on your stove,” though most household ranges lacked such a device.30
To this day, Peking duck remains a feat very difficult to attempt in American home kitchens, though some writers have since managed to work out semipractical methods. The awkward effort to replicate something essentially unsuited to Joyce Chen fans’ resources suggests how tricky it was to supply fashion-conscious cookbook readers with what they thought they wanted. Unfortunately, the ambitious Chen was beyond her depth as manual-writer and recipe-scenarist.
Eight Immortal Flavors: Secrets of Cantonese Cookery by Johnny Kan with Charles L. Leong was certainly the most meaningful contribution of the three books.31 Published in 1963 by Howell-North Books, a Berkeley-based specialist in California-linked histories, it was the most spirited entry in the field since Doreen Yen Hung Feng’s. It was also the first (and remains almost the only) English-language Chinese cookbook tinged with some sense of racial and cultural injustice.
Kan, a veteran San Francisco Chinatown restaurateur, and Leong, a pioneering Bay Area newsman, were both American-born and bilingual from the cradle in Cantonese and English. They and the book’s illustrator, Jake Lee, shared a great allegiance to the Cantonese American community—more specifically San Francisco Chinatown, the oldest of America’s big-city Chinatowns, and then as now the one most deeply rooted in Gold Mountain history. A few years earlier, Lee had contributed a dozen water-color paintings to the Gum Shan or “Gold Mountain” Room of Kan’s Grant Avenue restaurant, chronicling Chinese life on Gold Mountain from climbing off the boat to building railroads, tending Sonoma County vineyards, and preparing whole pigs for roasting in big cylindrical brick ovens in a former Chinatown close to the gold mining town of Nevada City, California.32 The Gum Shan Room paintings reflected both a deeply Chinese homage to forebears and an American immigrant patriotism that was not only forthright but defiant. The cookbook partook of the same spirit.
To celebrate America’s Cantonese-descended culinary traditions certainly was not chic in 1963. By now, white cognoscenti unable to read Chinese or speak any form of it confidently belittled Chinatown restaurant fare as the coarse fodder of people who—unlike themselves—didn’t know real Chinese food. The scene appeared bleak in other ways for descendants of Pearl River Delta pioneers. The economic underpinnings of San Francisco Chinatown and counterparts elsewhere were rapidly crumbling. Young American-born Cantonese Californians, though better assured of the benefits of citizenship than “paper son” grandparents and sometimes parents had been in the Exclusion era, found those benefits appallingly curtailed by what amounted to latter-day exclusion under the blind, unacknowledged racism of the larger society.
It was either the best or the worst of times for three Cantonese-speaking sons of San Francisco Chinatown to explore a cuisine that, as James Beard’s foreword pointed out, “antedates the French.” As a child, Kan had occasionally visited Portland cousins who were playmates of Beard’s. The two had remained friends, and Beard regarded Kan’s celebrated establishment as “the outstanding Chinese restaurant today.”33
The authors sailed in ebulliently, assuming some brains and enterprise on the part of users. They disdained the sops to timid palates or supposed nutritional authority offered by other writers addressing non-Chinese home cooks. It is true that Kan’s food used many stratagems widely deplored today. Monosodium glutamate was an almost ubiquitous seasoning, and the sweet-and-sour sauces (like those in most Cantonese American restaurants) relied heavily on tomato catsup. Nonetheless, some kind of intellectual curiosity, proud culinary ethos, and social conscience spoke from these pages.
Kan made woks (with support rings) sound like “the most practical cooking utensil ever invented by man,” not near kin to flying saucers.34 He took it for granted that non-Chinese could easily learn to appreciate the unique flavor of, say, thousand-year eggs. He expected people to cook with fermented bean curd, salt fish, shrimp paste, dried scallops or squid, bean milk skin, different kinds of preserved vegetables, and other ingredients that Joyce Chen had hesitated to use and Madame Chu had introduced with some circumspection.
The authors offset their romantic images of Chinese cuisine as the rarefied delight of one-time emperors by noting that in the same imperial China, “a simple yet tasty meal of noodles and greens cooked with a pinch of salt and oil” was the daily fare of “a peasant and his family.”35 They tried to convey how certain basic flavors, of which Kan chose eight, form a structural underpinning of all Chinese dishes. As they explained, this holds true whether the menu is “village style” (i.e., simple and modest), “dinner style,” or “banquet style.”36 They were as enlightening as the Chaos on the technique of stir-frying—a term that Kan disdained, persuasively arguing for “toss-cooking” as a more graphic translation that helped you see the wok as “a large, hot salad bowl, blending ingredients over intense heat.”37
The roughly 150 recipes, written in a format adapted from The Joy of Cooking, were mostly but not exclusively Cantonese in focus; Kan and Leung pointedly noted that “there is no such thing as ‘Mandarin food.’”38 Their directions weren’t always polished or exact by professional food editors’ standards, but they conveyed what was important about cooking processes. Realists about what home cooks should or shouldn’t attempt, they were content with a rhapsodical description of Peking duck “whereby we hope you will understand our reasons for ‘no recipe.’”39 On the other hand, they didn’t hesitate to include scenarios for dishes involving time and dedication rather than far-fetched resources. Among the most appealing were a fire pot meal (“Winter Chafing Dish”) and “Yee Sang,” the same celebratory raw fish dinner that had received a far less intelligible presentation in 1917 by Shiu Wong Chan (see chapter 5).40
Even though the excellent guide to major ingredients contained only meager snippets of bilingual information identifying a few plants or seasonings by line drawings matched to Chinese characters and English names, Eight Immortal Flavors was and is one of the most treasurable documents of Chinese American cooking. It went through a dozen printings in as many years, and in fact was posthumously reissued by the Kan estate in 1982.41 More than fifty years later, no latter-day Kans and Leongs have appeared to follow up their tribute to Cantonese American food, though Eileen Yin-Fei Lo has championed the cooking of Guangdong Province in several valuable books, and Ken Hom has commented on the split-personality cooking of Cantonese American restaurants addressing insider and outsider clienteles in Easy Family Recipes from a Chinese-American Childhood.42
Popular interest in Chinese cooking continued to grow throughout the 1960s. Informed standards did not always keep pace. In 1966 Atheneum Books—enthusiastically equating size with importance—entered the field with a wildly uneven nine-hundred-page effort by Gloria Bley Miller, priced at a then-formidable $20 and titled The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook.43 Miller, who seems to have known no Chinese, had indiscriminately bundled together staggering amounts of information, misinformation, and recipes. Many of the latter had been picked up—without attribution—from Buwei Yang Chao, Doreen Yen Hung Feng, and other writers. Simply by the law of averages, hopeful cooks could usually find some recipes that they liked and ignore what they didn’t. The huge anthology of treasures and junk sold well for years.
An entirely more distinguished contribution—another instance of adventurous thinking taking place at a remove from the American trade publishing mainstream—was Chinese Gastronomy (1969) produced and copyrighted by the British-American firm of Thomas M. Nelson.44 Printed in Great Britain and distributed by Hastings House in the United States, it bespeaks a very large production budget for elegant page design and abundant uncredited artwork (lovely, subtle pen-and-ink drawings as well as color-plate sections with photographs of food-related art objects from museums in London and Taipei). The text was by Hsiangju Lin and Tsuifeng Lin, who had made a complete turnaround from the approach of their earlier books.
The Lins were interested less in leading Westerners through cooking scripts than in making them grasp what was unique about the Chinese culinary esthetic. In thoughtfully meandering essays, they introduced and sought to define much of the crucial terminology, for which they supplied Chinese characters. They were the first English-language authors to linger analytically over older Chinese culinary treatises and muse about important national cooking practices in historical context. Their emphasis on rarefied nuances made most competing works look corn-fed. They could be given to pretentious vocabulary, odd lapses of taste like the use of canned consommé in the extremely delicate Chinese version of simple poached chicken, and haughty dismissals of what rubbed against their subjective prejudices.45 (As birthright Fujianese cooks, they announced that Cantonese cooks’ “handling of flavour lacked the depth which comes from much thought on gastronomy.”46) And the publisher had provided almost no navigational aids—not even an index—to their intricately organized text. But among English-language Chinese cookbooks of the twentieth century, Chinese Gastronomy still stands out for an unexampled quality of mental stimulation. It was a book to be lived with and thought about, not casually mined for dinner party triumphs.
From Idea to Page: The Cookbook Design Revolution
By now the world of American cookbook publishing was beginning to split into many differentiated market niches while editorial experimenters weighed the entire question of how to convey information most clearly to the people they envisioned as buyers.
At the high end of the spectrum, the 1962 success of Alfred A. Knopf and the editor Judith Jones with Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle, and Julia Child had started many other editors examining some of its novel features. What was most revolutionary about the actual, physical book was not the recipes per se but the visual experience of using them. The Knopf production team had turned every aspect of page design, recipe format, and illustrations into elaborately marked coordinates for start-to-finish travel maps of all dishes. Different elements (e.g., lists of ingredients or headings to serve as signposts where a new stage of preparation began) were assigned different typographical cues such as boldface or lightface roman or italic type in various point sizes, within a scheme more complex and detailed than anything yet attempted in a cookbook. This was why the recipe for cassoulet occupied six, and boneless stuffed duck seven, roomy pages with leisurely vistas of white space.
Mastering the Art heralded much general rethinking of recipe format and page design. No branch of cooking stood to benefit more from such efforts than Chinese cuisine. As cannot be stressed too often, something transcending words is called for in conveying its processes to Western understanding.
By the mid-1960s, the big trade cookbook editors and publishers had followed the Mastering the Art example far enough to try several departures from older recipe formats. The usual strategies involved the use of double columns (ingredients lined up on one side of a page, procedures forming a running sequence on the other side), with some boldface/lightface, roman/italic cues introduced to help a reader’s eye interpret what it was seeing on the page of an English-language French, Moroccan, Mexican, or perhaps international-gourmet cookbook. Another means of bypassing the limits of verbal instruction was just becoming practical for U.S. publishers with the advent of more affordable color photography and photographic reproduction toward the end of the 1960s.
Making Essentials Visible
Strangely enough, the first serious cookbook breakthrough in the visual presentation of Chinese cooking for Americans came from a source now often regarded as the embodiment of slick, soulless mass-market publishing: the Time-Life “Foods of the World” cookbook series launched in 1968. All entries were large-format volumes heavily illustrated with photographs, mostly in color and mostly shot by Life magazine staff photojournalists. Small auxiliary spiral-bound recipe booklets contained all the recipes for each book, though a sizable selection also appeared in the larger volumes.
The fact that The Cooking of China was chosen as one of the inaugural 1968 offerings in the ambitious series shows the rising repute of Chinese cuisine among mainstream food authorities. (It may also have owed something to Henry Luce’s ties with the Nationalist regime on Taiwan as well as his influence in the China Institute at its China House headquarters.) The marketing apparatus of Time-Life (the book division of Time, Inc.) guaranteed it wider nationwide sales than any prior Chinese cookbook. Luckily the result justified this unprecedented exposure.
The twenty-seven-book series was bankrolled by a vast Americanas-Velveeta corporate machine. Every volume was to a greater or lesser extent a horse designed by a committee, presenting something like the elaborate intertwining of verbal and visual values in a Life magazine photoessay with the further complication of recipes. These elements could compete awkwardly for the title of forequarters, midsection, or hindquarters. But in the best books—like this—they were united with some success.
The principal text had been assigned to Emily Hahn, a clever and seasoned observer who had been one of the most prominent American journalists in China from the turbulent late 1930s through World War II. A team of Time-Life researchers and editors had collected a great range of materials for her to work with and imposed an overall organization. The result was the first English-language attempt to survey Chinese cuisine as a reflection of the larger civilization in the light of history and geography. In a set of provocative, wide-ranging essays, Hahn and the Time-Life apparatchiks steered adroitly from one aspect to another of Chinese food by way of strategic anecdotes. T. T. Wang (of the Shun Lee empire), recalled how as a teenaged apprentice at a Shanghai restaurant he was eventually promoted from no salary to one bag of rice a month.47 Hahn noted the instant reappearance of xiang banfa survival instincts in wartime Hong Kong when the Japanese occupation swept away British ordinances about properly kept streets:
Then the old regulations were void. Famine threatened, and literally overnight the city was transformed. Every Chinese who could lay claim to a scrap of ground, even if it was no larger than a handkerchief, began to cultivate it. . . . Bankers, lawyers, doctors and art dealers were all in it together. Soon crops were growing on every hand, and chickens roamed the streets.48
The basic culinary information came chiefly from Florence Lin; Grace Zia Chu was also a consultant. American signs of the times are evident in the comments on rice cookers (which had taken off in Japan in the late 1950s), several mentions of dim sum with a handsome photograph showing eight varieties, and cautions about going easy on monosodium glutamate.49
Like other books in the series, The Cooking of China owed much to a large Time-Life test kitchen set up for recipe-developing. This was done under Lin’s direction with the aid of Madame Chu and the series’s consulting editor, the influential cooking-school teacher and writer Michael Field. Presumably Lin and Madame Chu had made most of the decisions about what dishes and information to include.
The roughly 110 recipes strike a reasonable balance among selections with proven Western appeal (shrimp toast, sweet-and-sour pork, a somewhat simplified home-oven version of Peking duck) and ones that more adventurous non-Chinese eaters were now enjoying in regional restaurants (five-spice beef, steamed Chinese breads, Sichuan-style steamed and deep-fried duck). Field had done or supervised the actual recipe writing. He was known for obsessively dotting and crossing all possible i’s and t’s—no small task in a job that presupposed much head-banging among Lin, Madame Chu, and a crew of non-Chinese testers steeped in American culinary assumptions. The amount of numerical detail crammed into the recipes can seem cumbrous but was meant for extra insurance: “Set a 12-inch wok or 8-inch skillet over high heat for 30 seconds. Pour in 1 tablespoon of oil, swirl it about in the pan and heat for another 30 seconds, turning the heat down if the oil begins to smoke. Add the shrimp and stir-fry for 1 minute, or until they are firm and light pink.”50
Considering how new this terrain was to the Foods of the World editors and testers, the recipes are surprisingly un–watered down despite occasional compromises like a liquid smoke marinade for “smoked eggs” instead of real smoking, or Tabasco sauce replacing dried chile peppers in a cold cucumber dish. The information on equipment, ingredients, and techniques is as useful as that in the book’s 1960s competitors, and is strengthened by the inclusion of Chinese characters. Recipe titles are given in Chinese, Wade-Giles romanizations, and English translations.
But the real leap forward was in the deployment of visual information. Only the Foods of the World publishing and marketing resources, including the parent company’s experience with photographic reproduction, could have gotten large, heavily pictorial books printed on coated stock ready to distribute to mail-order series subscribers (and a few large bookstores) at anything but exorbitant prices. At the time, trade publishers simply could not compete.
Most of the photographs were by Michael Rougier, a Life staffer. Since the Chinese mainland was largely off-limits to Westerners, the location shots of dinner gatherings, markets, fishing grounds, food stalls, and so forth that crucially figured in all Foods of the World books had had to be rethought. Perhaps this difficulty had encouraged the book’s strong reliance on wonderful historical images from museum collections, showing food-related scenes in woodcuts or silk-screen paintings. (For the same reason, Hahn’s descriptions of Chinese culinary culture depended heavily on her prewar and wartime memories of Shanghai and Hong Kong.) The location shooting had almost all been done in Hong Kong and Taiwan; a few pictures taken in the PRC by a Swedish photographer eked out the asymmetrical coverage.
But the images that really pointed the way to the future had been shot in the test kitchen and studios at Foods of the World headquarters. Taking important cues from the work being done at Gourmet and some of the women’s “service” magazines, the art teams for all volumes focused heavily on studio photographs of finished dishes with suitable props and instructional sequences, sometimes buttressed by diagrams or line drawings. In some books of the series, the food photography was not particularly eye-opening. But because Chinese culinary concepts require so much nonverbal “translating,” even today The Cooking of China has some concrete advantages as a learning tool over many later English-language competitors.
As is often the case, the studio images of theoretically tempting dishes were the least convincing part of the whole. But the instructional shots (both color and black and white) demonstrated a grasp of both what couldn’t be conveyed by words alone and how to bring it to life through step-by-step photographs—for instance, wrapping different kinds of wontons and dumplings, or using a cleaver to cut carrots or beef into particular shapes or to reduce chicken breast to a near-puree. No one had previously used such means to address the terrible problems of communicating Chinese culinary notions and skills to Westerners. Apparently Lin and Madame Chu had managed to give Rougier and the art directors, Field and the other editors, and the American test kitchen cooks enough insight into the fundamentals of cutting, dicing, stir-frying, and the crucial principles of the cuisine to inspire them to particularly apt efforts.
An American Superstar in the Chinese Kitchen
The next headline-making contribution to the field was The Chinese Cookbook by Craig Claiborne and Virginia Lee. A sizable collection with about 240 recipes drawn from different facets of Chinese cuisine, it appeared a few months after Nixon’s 1972 trip to China had electrified the American public. Since the book had been in the works for a while, this coincidence couldn’t have been foreseen. But the timing was providential. No name was more luminously visible to fashion-conscious cooks and diners than that of Claiborne. No Chinese cookbook of the postwar era attracted more eager attention or more widespread praise. Nonetheless, it was not an especially well-executed piece of work.
Considering the formidable dimensions of the subject and the fact that one of the authors knew no Chinese, the work had been banged out in record time. Claiborne was already frequenting many of the newer Manhattan Chinese restaurants and had visited a number of Chinese cooking schools. But by his own account he had never thought of seriously “cooking Chinese” until he met Lee in the fall of 1970 and signed up for her cooking classes, initiating the “two-year involvement with Chinese cooking” that produced the book.51 The actual time he and Lee spent working on the manuscript was more like a year and a half, during which Claiborne was also fulfilling his usual food columnist’s duties at the New York Times.
A year and a half is an improbably short time for a novice—even one without another full-time job—to not only master the major concepts of Chinese cooking and acquire real technical proficiency but also collaborate on testing and writing up more than two hundred recipes. The Chinese Cookbook certainly was not a resource to go to for a thoughtfully planned education in Chinese culinary whys and wherefores. It conveys the impression not of considered planning but of an attempt to get as many formulas onto the page as quickly as possible. The publisher, Lippincott, doesn’t seem to have worried greatly about fact-checking (at one point, hoisin sauce is described as being made from pumpkin).52
Claiborne and Lee cooked everything together in the kitchen of his Long Island home, with Claiborne tracking measurements and timings and pounding out recipes on his typewriter. But it is not clear how they arrived at some joint culinary and editorial decisions.
By comparison with the Time-Life effort, the authors gave short shrift to the various Chinese cooking methods. They discussed the crucial hand-cutting techniques only briefly and relied more heavily on blender-pureed mixtures than any predecessor. They gave no reason for choices like using crushed cornflakes as a binder in “Lion’s Head” meatballs; they finessed the question of using or forgoing monosodium glutamate (already the subject of much debate) by making it optional in dozens of recipes without bothering to discuss the issue.53
Judged simply as a recipe anthology, the book offered some pleasures. Many of Claiborne and Lee’s recipes were attractive, straightforward choices like “turnip cake” (a well-known dim sum specialty made from daikon radish), cold spiced eggplant, chicken congee, and Mongolian barbecue. But their sloppiness about basic principles and procedures was amazing. Their recipes routinely called for heating oil in a wok, neglecting to explain the correct procedure of first getting the wok very hot. (The preheated surface keeps food from sticking.) And no well-schooled Chinese cook would have unceremoniously thrown two pounds of sliced meat at once into a home-sized wok as required for one of their Sichuan-style stir-fry beef dishes; that amount of meat will limply stew in its own juice instead of cooking with proper chao bravura and intensity.54
The Claiborne-Lee Chinese Cookbook was neither the best nor the worst in a swiftly burgeoning field. Certainly it was rushed into print with very poor preparation. Its real importance was not its quality but the fact that at the height of his fame, the most prestigious American tastemaker of the time had decided to undertake such a project. Whatever the book’s failings, the Claiborne name helped decisively establish Chinese cuisine as part of the ongoing gourmet revolution in the eyes of white American reader-cooks. Coming as it did during the publicity fallout from Nixon’s mission to China, the work was luckily positioned to send many non-Chinese cooks to bookstores, Chinatown food shops, and kitchen stoves.
An entirely more enlightening window on Chinese food and civilization appeared a couple of years later: The Mandarin Way (1974) by Cecilia Chiang (or, as she proudly styled herself on the title page, Cecilia Sun Yun Chiang) with Allan Carr, the collaborator to whom she had dictated many decades’ worth of reminiscences. It was a foretaste of a genre that still didn’t exist: the food-centered memoir sprinkled with recipes. Between them, Chiang and Carr had managed to impose a semblance of order on a heterogeneous heap of memories and about sixty recipes. A determined user could have extracted valuable information about food by ransacking different corners of the work, but it really hadn’t been designed as a cooking manual. It was a brilliant reconstruction of a small, leisured, privileged cosmos as viewed by the young Sun Yun from her family’s palace complex in 1920s and 1930s Beijing. Using the changing phases of the lunar year as framing device, the fiftyish Chiang uncannily evoked the whole tone and texture of a strongly woven, apparently inviolable life made possible by phalanxes of servants—or, as she acknowledged, quasi-slaves.
She recalled family cats and dogs greeting spring sunshine on verandas and courtyard stones; trains of laden camels reaching the city from the Gobi Desert in early mornings; the methodical folding of last season’s clothes in preparation for the next season; servants beating trees to bring down the chestnuts for special harvest-moon festival dishes; the restaurant master chef hired to put on an elaborate family banquet at home lugging in cookstoves “like large oil drums, thickly lined with mud, for fear the ones he found on arrival would not produce the heat he needed.” Such exquisitely etched detail made it all the clearer that she was chronicling a way of life lost beyond all restoring: “The last ten years have completed its destruction.”55 The freshness and contemplative clarity of this wonderfully told life story form a stark contrast with the undigested prattle that now fills most food memoirs.
In the wake of Virginia Lee’s collaboration with Claiborne, cooking-school teachers got a stronger foothold in cookbook publishing. Grace Zia Chu’s second work, Madame Chu’s Chinese Cooking School, appeared in 1975.56 Like the Lins, she was now ready to tackle the enterprise in a bolder spirit. She called for a more adventurous range of ingredients as being both important and available (e.g., amaranth, dried jellyfish, bitter melon, preserved duck). Chinese characters supplemented English names throughout. The scope of recipes had been greatly enlarged since the first book; in the intervening thirteen years, Madame Chu’s students clearly had come to welcome dishes like Wu Sih- (Wuxi-) style spareribs or soup with hog’s maw, tree ears, and dried bean curd.57 A chapter with a dozen recipes developed by students suggested how quickly non-Chinese participants in cooking classes were finding their own wings as teachers and caterers.
The year 1975 also saw the first cookbook by Florence Lin. Now the head instructor at the China Institute, she had been working for some years with the institute’s perennial student and well-wisher Margaret Spader on what Claiborne, in a New York Times article in 1969, called “a definitive book on Chinese cooking.”58 For unknown reasons, the work never appeared. Instead, Lin on her own began a series of books about specialized aspects of Chinese cuisine, starting with Florence Lin’s Chinese Regional Cookbook.59 The title itself points to the power of her name as a fixture in the New York gastronomic pantheon. Hawthorn Books, her publisher at the time, quickly followed up with Florence Lin’s Vegetarian Chinese Cookbook (1976), Florence Lin’s Chinese One-Dish Meals (1978), and Florence Lin’s Cooking with Fire Pots (1979).60
All these works were notable pioneers in the field. Lin’s was the first Chinese vegetarian cookbook, opportunely addressing a market that had been bolstered by growing numbers of sometime or fully committed vegetarians. Cooking with Fire Pots was a clever Chinese-themed addition to the ranks of specialty-appliance manuals. The one-dish meals book was well matched to a certain reaction setting in against extravagant chef-d’oeuvres—whether French, Russian, or Chinese—that might leave a cook contemplating more dirty saucepans than there were windows in the house. But the regional cookbook remains the most important of the four. It was the first English-language work to take on a daunting but long-overdue mapping job.
Since the implementation of the Hart-Celler Act in 1968, mainland-born Chinese nationals arriving in American Chinatowns via Taiwan or Hong Kong had started clustering in communities of fellow provincials, or speakers of particular languages, from various corners of China. Unlike the confident newcomers streaming from Taiwan to destinations like the San Gabriel Valley, they were seldom primed for success in the affluent new ethnoburbs. At least in the short term, they could not hope for lucrative professional positions.
These newcomers represented only a tiny foreshadowing of the deluge to come after the liberalization of Chinese emigration policy in the 1980s. But restaurants owned by and aimed at them multiplied quickly enough to draw notice beyond the Chinese community. Unlike the more upscale “Szechuan” or “Mandarin” establishments frequented by white urban sophisticates in desirable neighborhoods, they were often staffed by brusque waiters who spoke no English, and perhaps neither Cantonese nor Mandarin. English menus, if any, might omit the best dishes. Other Chinese might be strangers to the “new” (or newly arrived) cuisines, though, unlike white patrons, they usually had at least a general idea of their place in the larger Chinese culinary geography.
American restaurant reviewers like Greene and Sokolov were hampered by the lack of any English-language guidance to that overall geography. Within China itself, pundits had never unanimously agreed on one fixed scheme of classification. The task was less like categorizing the regional cuisines of France or Italy than imposing some shape on the food of all Western Europe, both within and across language groupings and national boundaries. Besides, factors like Southeast Asian borrowings and the roles of the Yangzi River and the Grand Canal in linking western and eastern, northern and southern kitchens made classifications especially slippery.
Lin did not try to explore every corner of a very complex map. Like most Chinese writers, she grouped the regional cuisines into the four broad categories of north (Beijing, along with Shandong, Hebei, and Henan Provinces), east (Jiangsu and Zhejiang Provinces, embracing the Jiangnan cities of Shanghai, Suzhou, Yangzhou, Hangzhou, and her native Ningbo as well as the hard-to-pigeonhole Fujian Province), south (Guangdong Province), and west (Sichuan and Hunan Provinces). She followed conventional Chinese gastronomic classifiers in mostly ignoring the far northwestern and northeastern provinces, which until some years later would remain as outlandish to the standard authorities as Britain might have seemed to a second-century Roman epicure. (In any case, very few immigrants from these regions had trickled into the United States by 1975.)
Introductory charts in each recipe chapter indicating the origin of individual dishes allowed users to get at least some idea of regional characteristics. For instance, one could compare Cantonese rice congee with the archaic but still-beloved millet congee of the north (a tradition predating the Chinese adoption of rice). Four different noodle dishes showed off the contrasting styles of Guangdong (roast pork lo mein), Fujian (rice noodles from the city of Amoy [Xiamen], Beijing (zha jiang mian, or noodles with fried meat sauce), and either Shanghai or Sichuan (represented by cold noodle salad with either a simple soy-vinegar or a spicy peanut-sesame dressing). Dishes like drunken crab, Yunnan-style steamed chicken, fish maw soup, braised spareribs with black beans, or fried fish fillets wrapped in soybean-milk skin could be seen in regional context.
Since the publication of this work, non-Chinese lovers of Chinese food have gotten more accustomed to weighing the vast influence of regional cultures and geographical factors on the many schools of Chinese cuisine. But in the last forty years only a few cookbooks tracing remote or little-known Chinese culinary byways have opened up any frontiers not touched on in Lin’s book; it is still the single best collection of regional dishes.
More Ways to Convey More Insights
By the time of Florence Lin’s introductions to Chinese regional and vegetarian cuisine, American cookbooks in general were some years into the exploratory design vogue mentioned earlier, inaugurated by Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Recipes in prestigious books were getting longer, fed by a wishful supposition that piling on verbal detail made them more foolproof. Few publishers had failed to conclude that at least some discreet juggling of the formerly standard ingredients list / cooking directions sequence could more clearly focus a user’s eye and brain on the dovetailing bits of a logical process.
As yet, images were not a dominant teaching element; where they existed, they were usually line drawings, which still tended to be clearer, more informative, and usually more attractive than photographs. (The latter were also beyond most budgets.) Few editors cared to emulate the exorbitant use of page space in Mastering the Art, but almost everybody picked up on some of its innovations in design and recipe format. The Time-Life book designers introduced a fairly compact double-column recipe format for dishes in the photographic volumes, with unobtrusive typographical cues like subheadings in small capitals marking off stages of the process (PREPARE AHEAD; TO COOK).
Chinese recipes, which needed all the help they could get, benefited from selective use of such devices. At Hawthorn, Florence Lin and her editor, Elizabeth Backman, used a few simple and soon-to-be-standard touches like italicized headings to break the work into stages (Preparation, Cooking the Filling, Wrapping and Filling) for the regional and vegetarian books. In 1974 the Japanese publisher Kodansha, now making inroads on the mainstream U.S. market, achieved a subtle, graceful double-column and numbered-step recipe presentation with directions separated into “To Prepare” and “To Cook” stages for the first serious English-language exploration of Sichuanese cuisine, The Good Food of Szechwan by Robert A. Delfs.61 This was a slim but far from superficial volume with some intelligent attention to cooking and preparation basics and a pleasant selection of recipes that actually drew on several regional cuisines.
Two years later at Harper & Row, another Sichuanese cookbook overseen by the innovative editor Frances McCullough used a lengthier double-column format in which the right-hand column spelled out the directions at length (also marking them off into “Preparation” and “Cooking” stages) while the list of ingredients inched along in step, a few at a time, in the left-hand column.62
Both of the Sichuanese books had arisen from American graduate students’ gastronomic adventures on Taiwan. Delfs, who had begun by studying Mandarin at Stanford, had later become fascinated by the many excellent Sichuan restaurants on the island and enrolled in cooking classes at the Wei-Chuan school.63 The Harper & Row contribution, Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook, had a more tangled parentage. Ellen Schrecker had written the text with the help of her husband, John. It recorded the actual cooking of the Sichuan-born Chiang Jung-feng, whom the couple had hired as cook-housekeeper in 1969 when John Schrecker’s study of Chinese brought them and their two young children to Taiwan.64 Mrs. Chiang and Ellen Schrecker shared the copyright.
The Schreckers had previously lived and studied on Taiwan long enough to realize just how disappointing the usual run of Chinese American restaurant fare was. During their next stay, Mrs. Chiang’s cooking not only revived their memories of Chinese food in its glory but inspired them to suggest that she come with them when John Schrecker returned to study at Princeton. The bunch of Princeton graduate students who swapped Chinese cooking lore and investigated promising restaurants during the 1970s included the Schreckers, Delfs, and a young woman named Barbara Tropp, who shortly followed in their Taiwanese footsteps.
People like Delfs and the Schreckers could never have written cookbooks before the world of Taiwan-style academe had opened up to American scholars. The role of insider-outsider observer—the most invaluable qualification for literally and figuratively translating Chinese cuisine to Westerners—had previously been reserved for Chinese-born culinary interpreters and a few American-born Chinese. The two Sichuanese books pointed to a new state of international exchange in which young Americans could directly immerse themselves in many aspects of Chinese life, including its cuisine, rather than picking up information at a remove through supposed authorities. A one-way street was becoming a two-way street littered with fewer educational roadblocks than in the past.
Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook exemplified the new possibilities of exchange. Ellen Schrecker’s attempts to learn what Mrs. Chiang could teach her about Chinese cooking seven thousand miles from China had been the seed of the book. Since the two women had no common language, John Schrecker had been (as his wife wrote) “our translator, goad, and guide.”65 At Harper & Row, McCullough had understood the threesome’s goal of bringing truly relevant information into focus while communicating the spirit behind the details. As a bicultural collaboration, the book was everything that the Claiborne-Lee Chinese Cookbook was not. Chiang Jung-feng did not aspire to sudden glory in New York gastronomic circles. Nor was Ellen Schrecker a culinary superstar seeking to dazzle such circles by a dramatic debut in a new repertoire. The aim of the participants was to get things right, not to squeeze every possible recipe between endpapers.
A still richer example of an advancing East–West reciprocity in the culinary teaching-learning process was The Key to Chinese Cooking by Irene Kuo, published by Knopf in 1978. To this day it is often considered the best of all English-language Chinese cookbooks.66 Kuo, a Shanghai-born Barnard College graduate with a fine command of English, owned two successful Manhattan restaurants. Her proposal for a general Chinese cookbook reached the desk of Judith Jones, the era’s reigning cookbook editor, at around 1971.
Jones had a history of putting together team efforts demanding the utmost from everybody. She was famed for extremely personal, intuition-driven notions of what constituted promise in a writer or a project, refusal to accept anything that didn’t chime with her instincts, and stubborn resolve in achieving the result she wanted, no matter how long it took. As she later wrote, she was struck by Kuo’s flair for “explosively vivid language” that conjured up the flashing physical energy of Chinese hands and reflexes at work in the kitchen.67 But she did not expect instant results. The book that came into being more than six years later depended on many complexly meshing contributions, made to look spontaneous and effortless.
The page design was a triumph of subtlety and apparent simplicity. For the recipe format, the Knopf design team had hit on something akin to the Wei-Chuan books’ use of brackets (though more graceful-looking and without the number system) that helped lucidly sort out different structural elements. For the names of dishes printed in Chinese characters next to the English recipe titles, someone had found a Chinese typeface beautifully matching the Palatino face of the text. Jones, who would be known for her loyalty to the art of illustration long into the color photography era, had hired the illustrator Carolyn Moy to create a wealth of pen-and-ink drawings that combined extreme delicacy with the sense of purposeful motion.
The actual contents represented a great investment of time and thought. Jones had foreseen that in this case an adequate insider-outsider perspective would require close, prolonged interchange between Kuo and a sounding board. She had recruited Suzi Arensberg, a former Knopf copy editor who had just set up as a freelancer. Arensberg thoroughly understood the nuts and bolts of clear, effective recipe writing but had no special knowledge of Chinese cooking. Her invaluable contribution was a willingness to enter into Kuo’s thinking as much as any non-Chinese cook could while keeping a clear eye fixed on what was or wasn’t being convincingly communicated.
The manuscript that emerged from this partnership was anything but a rush job. For three and a half years Kuo and Arensberg met every week to discuss and polish pieces of chapters in progress. When they thought they had finished, Jones went through the manuscript and announced that it didn’t have the right organization for guiding American cooks from basic culinary concepts to execution. Kuo and Arensberg had to spend another strenuous year and a half taking apart the book and putting it together again in a more shapely manner.68 The solidity and integrated quality of the final work justify the years spent on fitting everything into its proper place.
The selection of dishes is large (about three hundred recipes) and intelligently planned to include both the obvious and the recherché, the classic and the playful, as well as a range of specialties from every region of China. Kuo is eager to convey what’s needed to physically engage with the ingredients:
Holding a pair of chopsticks as a whisk or using a wooden spoon, stir the shrimp rapidly in a circular, whipping fashion for 1 minute so that all the shrimp skid, bounce, and turn against the side of the bowl.69
Add the noodles and immediately slide a spatula from the side of the pan beneath the noodles, meat, and vegetables. Scoop them up in the air, shake, and shower them back into the pan; repeat these fast sweeping motions in rapid-fire succession from all directions for 3 minutes, until the noodles are heated through, evenly tinted by the sauce, and well mingled with the meat and vegetables.70
She loves bringing out the possibilities of humble ingredients (sweet-and-sour cucumber skins, fried chicken gizzards) and singing the praises of regional specialties such as the spaetzle-like Northern-style “dough knots” made by shaving off with a knife blade bits of a soft “marshmal-lowish dough” into boiling water.71 But probably the major triumph of the book is a preliminary section that she and Arensberg quarried out of the main recipe chapters at Judith Jones’s behest.
This nearly one-hundred-page section is virtually a mini-cookbook in itself. In four chapters on major techniques, the section outlines the principles of four broad categories. They are cooking in liquid (various forms of poaching, simmering, red-cooking, and “flavor-potting”—this last meaning lu, or cooking in a richly aromatic “master sauce”), cooking in oil (i.e., stir-frying, shallow-frying, deep-frying), wet-heat cooking (i.e., steaming), and dry-heat cooking (Chinese methods of roasting, smoking, and “barbecuing”). Each important method is accompanied by painstaking notes on general rules and illustrated by at least one “master recipe” that can serve as a procedural guide for tackling any dish from the remaining more conventionally organized subsequent recipe chapters. The patiently and intricately arranged opening chapters lift the book above any predecessor, and most successors, as a one-volume composite of conceptual immersion-course, practical guide, and plentiful recipe anthology.
The Wok as Lifestyle Statement
If The Key to Chinese Cooking marked Chinese cuisine’s now-unquestioned stature among affluent U.S. tastemakers at the close of the nonrecognition epoch, equal triumphs were being registered among a very different demography. Just at this time, American students and idealistic counterculturalists were wandering to far corners of the globe either with the aid of backpack and sandals or via the kitchen stove. Many were eager to investigate non-Western or non-Eurocentric cuisines that by their lights embodied age-old wisdom, or at least an antidote to modern American food hucksterism.
Some of these young seekers aimed to cook their way through works like Diana Kennedy’s The Cuisines of Mexico (1972), Madhur Jaffrey’s An Invitation to Indian Cooking (1973), and Paula Wolfert’s Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco (1973) as devotedly as an earlier class of upscale fashion-followers had cooked their way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking or Claiborne’s New York Times Cookbook in the 1960s. Book publishers now recognized fans of “exotic” third-world cuisines as a promising market segment, picking up on clues like the new success of wok manufacturers.
For the young, adventurous, and unmoneyed, lathe-spun sheet-steel woks exactly like those used in thousands of Chinese American households were an ideal cooking vessel. A wok cost a fraction of what a Julia Child disciple might spend on even one mid-sized enameled cast iron or tinned copper saucepan and was said (by fans) to be the only pan you’d ever need. Even if the truth turned out to be a little less simple, a wok made a fine lifestyle statement.
Non-Chinese cooking experts began praising woks in the late 1960s. The 1975 Joy of Cooking edition mentioned them, in a newly added description of stir-frying, as a common addition to the “Christmas wish list” of a typical American housewife.72 Two San Francisco manufacturers, the Atlas Metal Spinning Company and Taylor & Ng, were the leading U.S. suppliers. By 1980 the Chicago Tribune food section could report, in a major feature about the pan’s new stardom, that Taylor & Ng had sold more than a million since 1968.73 Taylor & Ng were especially clever marketers. They distributed woks to department stores and cookware shops throughout the country, often as part of boxed gift sets including support rings and such other accessories as a domed lid, a Chinese wok spatula and ladle, and a wooden rice paddle.
The 1980 Tribune lead article noted that flat-bottomed models were available. These represented a reasonable compromise between traditional bowl-shaped woks and the kind of surface that best distributed heat on American stove burners. (As The Joy of Cooking noted, Chinese American cooks often preferred Western skillets.) It is not clear who first came up with a successful design. Though Joyce Chen is often credited with having introduced flat-bottomed woks, the shape of the one for which she received a patent in 1971 is conspicuously un-woklike, quite unrelated to the wider, less steeply angled pans that rapidly became the most popular alternative to round-bottomed woks.74 In the true American spirit, various manufacturers began adding other supposed improvements that did nothing but ruin woks for heavy-duty use. Stainless steel and nonstick woks were successfully palmed off on cooks who knew no better; electric woks with self-regulating—in effect, self-defeating—thermostats racked up impressive sales.
From the start of the 1970s, the free-spirited younger wing of the cooking public happily took to its own ideas of wok cooking, with or without any grounding in Chinese technique. Stir-frying or something that went by that name was a favorite method of post-hippies dedicated to simple one-dish meals, though for them it often was synonymous with throwing a bunch of rice (preferably brown) and vegetables into the wok at one fell swoop and letting nature take its soggy course.
Publishers were already addressing age-of-self-discovery cooks through inexpensive paperbacks in funky-looking formats. Wok cookbooks quickly joined the ranks. In California, Nitty Gritty Productions led off the parade in 1970 with The Wok (text by Gary Lee, abundant illustrations by Mike Nelson).75 Yerba Buena Press followed in 1972 with Wokcraft (text by Charles Schafer and Violet Schafer, illustrations by Win Ng, a member of the Taylor & Ng firm).76 Neither was rigorously designed for careful tutoring in Chinese culinary principles and the chao method, though a cook already acquainted with these could have prepared some fine Chinese dishes from either book.
Through manufacturers’ aggressive promotion campaigns and the 1970s drift of a few post-hippie cults into respectable fashion, woks acquired some standing as a handy tool in any kitchen. Mainstream cooking authorities began praising their aptness for non-Chinese cooking purposes, and recipe developers took up the cause. The Beard Glaser Wolf (James Beard, Milton Glaser, and Burt Wolf) publishing team responsible for the “Great Cooks’ Guide” series of small paperback cookbooks on specialized subjects during the 1970s also addressed woks and other Chinese implements in the Chinese section (overseen by Florence Lin) of their big 1977 compilation The International Cooks’ Catologue.77 Their recasting of the material for the paperback series appeared in the same year under the title The Great Cooks’ Guide to Woks, Steamers & Fire Pots.78 It contained an eclectic selection of recipes by two dozen well-known cooking teachers and writers whose ideas ran a gamut from simple stir-fried vegetables to Greek-style tarama (carp roe) croquettes or “ribbons of veal with cognac, mushrooms and cream.” In 1978 Sunset magazine published a wok cookbook embracing such diverse purposes as popcorn, fish and chips, “wilted salads in a wok,” camp cookery, and pasta carbonara.79 But leaving no doubt about their own priorities, the Sunset team firmly emphasized the special advantages of the stir-fry method for cooking vegetables to a “tender-crisp” state, whether in the Chinese or Mediterranean spirit.80
For a time, woks enjoyed crossover popularity in many up-to-date kitchens. But like many of the age’s lifestyle discoveries, they eventually stopped making headlines as the elite and popular vanguards moved on to newer thrills. Indeed, the notice paid to Chinese food by leading tastemakers waned somewhat after the early 1980s. Food writers less often pointed out the unique virtues of Chinese cooking methods and materials. In 1984 Julia Child would authoritatively tell a New York Times columnist that the very idea of vegetables being cooked “crisp-tender” was nonsense.81 No one wrote back to comment that properly stir-fried vegetables proved the exact opposite. A certain phase of relations between Mandarin-speaking Chinese cooks and the white audience that they had successfully addressed was coming to a close.