I’ve been on a self-imposed book-buying moratorium since April, back when I knew we’d be making this cross-country move and as I started packing up every single one of my cherished but HEAVY tomes. In the course of packing I vowed never to buy anything ever again (ha ha ha ha). (Here I am reminded of a line from Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping” where a character hazards a guess that keeping a home is really just the act of acquiring and rearranging objects around a room.) While I was packing I cursed all my possessions, wanted to set fire to everything I owned, which I felt certain owned ME.
Well, I’ve acquired six books since April. This is one of them!
Give me half an hour in a used bookstore and I’ll always spend 20 of those minutes in the cookbook section. Turns out I’ve got a particular interest in vintage Chinese cooking books, and give bonus points to those with great illustrations of cooking techniques. The Key to Chinese Cooking by Irene Kuo has got both.
The dust jacket was gone, but that let me see the cover’s charming illustrations of canned bamboo shoots, black beans, Napa cabbage, wood ear mushrooms, cilantro, and star anise, their names written in Chinese. If I know anything in Cantonese, it’s food, and I had fun naming ingredients and looking to the Chinese to see if I’d gotten it right.
If a cover alone can sell a book, this one nearly did. I spent half an hour in the bookstore with the book, reading Kuo’s 1977 take on Chinese food. Look at that portrait! Doesn’t she look like the sleek, stern, exacting perfectionist 1970s Chinese auntie you never had?
I heard once from someone who was trying to manage their already overflowing cookbook shelves that they wouldn’t buy a new cookbook unless they intended to make at least half a dozen recipes from it, and it’s a rule of thumb that I’ve tried to adopt for myself, with mixed results. (Will I be buying Chrissy Teigen’s cookbook, even though I’m not fond of cheese-based dishes and I completely disagree that Tim’s Cascade Snacks make the best jalapeno-flavored kettle chips? Likely yes.) So that’s what I looked for the moment I pulled this down from the shelf. Really it was more like “Quick, find six recipes you want to make.”
The editing (by Judith Jones, natch) was crisp, Kuo’s instructions thorough, and the writing almost literary. Of a brewing chicken stock, Kuo writes, “Turn heat low and with a large spoon wrapped in cheesecloth skim off the foam with the motion of a bird gliding over a lake, darting and dipping in wherever this foam appears.” Uhhhh, sold.
Luckily, it turns out that Kuo’s also great at capturing the timeless dishes that Chinese people ain’t ever gonna stop eating and the more trendy dishes that are definitely from another era (”bacon-wrapped chicken-liver rolls,” oof). If your Chinese family is still making and eating this, please contact me ASAP. The recipes range from the fairly simple–pork meatball and vermicelli soup–to the more gourmet, like pressed duck.
I think what I love most though is how seriously Kuo takes the home cook. This is not Pioneer Woman, bless her accessible soul. Irene Kuo is for people who are serious about approaching what might be an otherwise foreign cuisine and approximating it in their own home kitchen. But neither is it Momofuku-esque either, with four subrecipes and a sous vide section. It’s you, your big ass Chinese cleaver and a chopping board turning basic, everyday ingredients into comforting, soul-satisfying Chinese dinner magic. Recipes are long, and extremely detailed, but careful.
I’m still assembling my kitchen in our new apartment (more on that soon) but for now, I’m content enough to read Kuo’s recipes in all her delicious detail. That’s almost as good as I hope the actual cooking, and eating, will be.