Students at Baba’s Cooking School in Washington, D.C., will learn the Chinese style of cooking a whole lobster. / Photo courtesy of Katy Chang
Baba knows best. Kimchi maker Katy Chang found a cookbook in a used-book store that proved it once and for all.
The nearly 70-year-old, out-of-print “How to Cook and Eat in Chinese” reinforced what Chang learned as a child in the kitchen of her father (baba in several languages) and in the intervening years as a home cook and maker of fermented foods.
The book was written by Buwei Yang Chao, who spoke little English yet coined the terms “stir fry” and “pot sticker.” The author was a doctor who became a cookbook writer. Chang was a vegan and a lawyer about to open a cooking school and food-business incubator. They were kindred spirits.
Chang found the book on what she called “an auspicious day.” She had just closed a deal on a building in Washington, D.C., for Baba’s Cooking School and EatsPlace. It was her birthday. She and her husband were in a used-book store, he bumped into a shelf and “How to Cook and Eat Chinese” literally fell at her feet.
The cookbook, initially published in 1945, is considered one of the first to present authentic Chinese cooking, rather than a Westernized version, to the American public.
“To get the feeling of true Chinese food, read Mrs. Buwei Yang Chao’s delightful ‘How to Cook and Eat in Chinese,’ ” the 1967 edition of “Joy of Cooking” recommended in introducing a recipe for “chop suey or chow mein,” calling them “vaguely Chinese dishes.”
Chao’s book includes more than 200 recipes and more than a little sociology (“Most people who are poor eat much rice … as the main food”), lifestyle insights (“The dishes only accompany the rice. So they are the opposite of the American eating system, in which bread accompanies the dish.”) and regional differences (there is a “three-meal system” in Hunan and a “two-meal system” in China’s South and West).
Chao lived in Cambridge, Mass., and then Berkeley, Calif., with her husband Yuen Ren Chao, a linguistics professor. Chao spoke little English. Her recipes and comments were written down by her daughter, Rulan, then tweaked by her husband, who didn’t think his daughter’s English word choices sounded Chinese enough.
The result is quirky — sometimes charming, sometimes eccentric. Some food was “uneatable” and her husband insisted that their daughter not change “mushrooms stir shrimps” to “shrimps fried with mushrooms.” He argued that “if Mr. Smith can go to Town [sic] in a movie, why can’t mushrooms stir shrimps in a dish?”
This book includes a discussion of Chinese dim sum, small meals between meals, uncommon in 1945 America. In Chinese, this is called tien-hsin, or “dot hearts.” Chang says it literally means something that touches the heart.
Katy Chang / Photo courtesy Katy Chang
“The turns of phrase make sense to me,” says Chang, who speaks fluent Mandarin. “They are literal translations. I like that she calls dumplings ‘wraplings’ – its literal translation would be something closer to ‘mixlings,’ because the filling is all mixed together.” Chang recalls that in her childhood in Rockville, Md., “we made dumplings as a family every Sunday afternoon.”
The book’s whole approach makes sense to Chang, whose parents came to D.C. from Taiwan in the late 1970s. She learned about Chinese cooking in her father’s kitchen at home and in the restaurants he owned in the Washington, D.C., suburbs.
Trained as an electrical engineer in China, Chan-Min Chang became a mechanic in the U.S. because he couldn’t speak English. He shifted to restaurants, ultimately working his way up from dishwasher to owner. “Food is an easy way for immigrants to gain economic independence,” his daughter says.
The restaurateur learned to cater to Western tastes but also had the “two-menu system” used in many American Chinese restaurants, Chang says. The authentic food was on a menu written in Chinese. The more Americanized menu was in English.
Chan-Min Chang / Photo courtesy of Katy Chang
Chang and her two siblings thought their father’s ideas about cooking were “wacky.” He used preservation techniques such as “wind-cured chicken,” hanging poultry outside, she says, where the neighborhood dogs would line up “and stare transfixed.” He made glutinous rice balls simmered in homemade red wine “that looked like a Martian landscape.”
“This book really resonated with me,” says Chang of Chao’s work. “It has reinforced a lot of the lessons I learned from my dad.” Now she appreciates the wind-cured chicken’s “simplicity and concentration of flavors,” she says. Like her father, Chang says, Chao was “an intuitive cook.”
Chang has been using her father’s recipes as the basis for what she’ll use in her cooking school. “This book seemed like another way of taking these lessons,” she says.
When Chang showed “How to Cook and Eat Chinese” to her father, he was dismissive. He didn’t see how one book could capture the varied regional cooking of a country as large as China. He also was suspicious of anything published in America. “He came here in the ’70s, a time of chop suey, when garlic was considered an exotic ingredient,” Chang says.
She began to cook her way through Chao’s book, and eventually her father moved from
a grudging acceptance of the recipes to a realization that Chao was writing about authentic food.
“It’s opened up all these memories I had as a child cooking with my dad,” Chang says. She found a recipe for steamed bread like she used to make at home and form into little bear shapes. She showed her father the recipe and he suggested some adaptations. She made an egg custard from the book but modified it by adding the salted eggs her father taught her to make.
Chao’s recipes are not complicated. They were designed for American housewives in the 1940s and include descriptions of cooking methods, utensils and supplies.
Chang also likes the flexibility of Chao’s recipes. They allow cooks to use what they have at home, what’s in season, what makes sense.
Now Chang gets requests from people in China who have forgotten the old ways. She’s making a series of videos in both English and Mandarin.
Chang’s father is retired but still cooks for his family. While they have been going out for dim sum in recent years for Chinese new year, this year Chang says her dad will cook. They always have a feast, full of lucky foods – long noodles for long life, lots of eggs because of their gold color, whole fish because the Mandarin word for fish also sounds like the word for wealth and riches. They also love to have longxia (lobster — literally “dragon shrimp”) for Chinese new year, she says. “Lobster is a good example of Chinese-American food since not many people in China eat it, but we’re lucky to have Maine lobsters here.”
The third edition of Chao’s book contains a preface by Pearl S. Buck, the American author of “The Good Earth,” who spent much of her life in China. Buck wrote that she would nominate Chao for the Nobel Peace Prize. “For what better road to universal peace is there than to gather around the table where new and delicious dishes are set forth … What better road to friendship, upon which alone the peace can stand? I consider this cookbook a contribution to international understanding.”
One of the many things Katy Chang admires about "How to Cook and Eat in Chinese" by Buwei Yang Chao (Random House, 1945), is its flexibility. A list of filling options are offered in Chao's recipe for steamed custard. The recipe calls for 10 eggs. Chang uses 7 eggs and 3 salted duck eggs to give the dish "a deep umami flavor." The yolks, she says, become a rich yellow when cooked and look like gold bullion (see photo). A perfect dish for Chinese New Year.
Ingredients
- 10 large eggs
- 3 cups water
- 2 teaspoons salt
- 2 tablespoons sherry
- 1/2 pound ground meat or,
- 1/2 pound ground cod or,
- 1/2 pound ground shrimp or,
- 1/4 pint ground or chopped clam or,
- 1/4 pint ground oyster or,
- 1 dozen razor clams, ground, or,
- 1/4 pound lobster meat (cut into 1/2-inch cubes)
Instructions
Beat together eggs, water salt and sherry. Add meat and beat again. Pour mixture into pyrex or other casserole that can go on the stovetop.
Now you need a pot 2 inches wider than the casserole and big enough to hold it on a stand. Place the casserole on a stand over 2 inches of hot water, cover the pot and turn the flame to high. Steam for 20 minutes. Serve immediately.
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Just wow. I read this 3 times. Once focusing on food chat, then enjoying the social history, and finally relishing a great dad story. I am flabbergasted that some Chinese ‘old ways’ can be outsourced from the US. That Bucks a trend.
What a cool cookbook. I just love reading them and savoring on the past.
Wonderful post, Bonny. I am left imaging Buwei Yang Chao, Pearl Buck, and Irma Rombauer as the celebrity judges of a 1940s radio version of Iron Chef. Had you already thought of that?
Strangely, I hadn’t thought of that but what an image!
Imagining, that is
Nice article by Katy Chang, but if her father found it difficult to presenting Chinese cooking in the 70′s “when garlic was an exotic ingredient,” imagine those many restaurants before then. My parents took over probably the first Chinese restaurant in western Massachusetts in 1954. This was a time when Catholics did not eat meat on Friday, when tuna only came in a can, as did button mushrooms. Asparagus came in a can. Our place became very popular and I remember some vivid scenes: sudden screaming from a child in a high chair at one table. It’s mother had thought the vivid yellow sauce in the little dish that came with the egg rolls was “Chinese custard” and stuffed a spoonful in the child’s mouth. Someone screaming at my dad about being cheated with his order of Chinese Spare Ribs…….because they were then unfamiliar baby-back ribs. And most: a group of the town’s notable, asked my parent to give give a grand example of a meal for Chinese New Years. They took up the whole place. Realize, in those days, there were no Interstates roads, so any and all provisions came from Boston, where we went every Monday to stock up. Everything. Even fresh noodles we had to fry to make those crispy noodles that now are like chips. My mom carried out a huge platter of fried appetizer. People were buzzed. They ordered another platter. Then another. One lady asked what they were. The word “calamari” was not used then. I remember seeing the woman rush to the ladies room, forget to shut the door, and we all heard her reaction.
I remember eating all sorts of “normal” things taken to school for lunch, like blue cheese and driving everyone out of the room. How do you tell when Blue Cheese has gone bad? And I had one teacher totally baffled when she thought what I was eating smelled and tasted great, and heard it was “red-cooked” chicken gizzards. “Offal” is a delightful homonym.
The trouble with this cuisine to a second generation child is: what is authentic and what is new country? Moo Goo Gai Pen is a classic dish that if all the techniques are properly done, is a gem of a delicate dish. One of my favorites was something my parents put on the menu (trying to spell the sound of) as “Care Jip Har.” Well, “Care” sound like “care” in “Fun Care” – (Toishan) Cantonese for tomatoe, “Jip” I took for “jahp” or “sauce.” “Har” is shrimp – so it was tomatoe sauce shrimp. For some reason, I never made this at home, but I kept describing it to friends as this wonderful dish with garlic, ginger, shrimp, and a tomatoe sauce, until one day, well into my thirties, I was describing it again, and suddenly, had an image of my father shaking a ketchup bottle over the wok. “Care Jip” was catsup. The dish does not exist in China.
As I became more interested in cooking, I began pouring over my parents’ extensive collection of cookbooks and files. They found and made Beef Wellington. We tried goose liver. Mom grew up in a mixed nationality neighborhood in Boston and made a killer Baclava. So one day, I find this odd book in their cache, THE CHINESE COOK BOOK, by Wallace Yee Hong. It’s still available through Abe Books. Dad says this man probably taught most of the cooks on the East Coast. It’s and interesting book (but hard to cook from as ingredient list is oddly laid out) in that in the author’s mind, there is no separation from the “regular” menu and the “American menu” – he had to list them all. He even has a recipe for making your own soy sauce, and, that now ubiquitous (but never quality) “duck sauce.” My mother made a wonderful one that had……ingredients from Iraq!! Years later I realized how unique it is.
The modification Katy Chang makes with adding salted duck eggs to regular eggs for the custard dish – that is a common dish in my extended family.
Further, use of a highly spiced, salty, or umami ingredient is common in many (poor) cuisines; one fills up on a filler starch, savoried with morsels. Pickles, kim chee, salted duck eggs steamed and splattered with hot fat (to further fill palate by making it “whaht” – smooth and rich, like butter or olive oil) and divided six ways with huge bowls of rice, Italian pasta with lots or red pepper and sauteed bread crumbs if they cannot afford cheese, etc. My brother and I would think nothing of at least three bowls or rice. But like other cultures, American abundance takes a toll, and the starch becomes not the filler, but the counterpoint to a now cheap, abundance of rich, fatty, salty, sweet cuts – salt pork, fresh bacon, lardo, etc.
And for a final universalist note: she talks of the “Wind Cured Chicken.” I found recipe in a book of great European recipes called “Snipe Like My Grandfather Made.” It called for one getting fresh shot snipe, not cleaning them, and hanging them, still feathered, in a “cool and airy spot” for up to two weeks until “it developed an incomparable aroma.” Then clean, remove feathers, roast, (saving the liver to stir into pan sauce).
But, do people today really know what is being done when they get really good dry-aged beef?
Another very helpful book is THE ASIAN GROCERY STORE DEMYSTIFIED by Lydia Bladholm. The author did the leg work in connecting a Chinese name for an ingredient with a drawing of such AND, in some cases, a scientific name. Very helpful when one goes to grocery store.
Robert — thank you so much for this wonderful response. This is exactly what makes “American” cuisine — your parents’ traditional recipes and cooking styles and their learning about ketchup and baklava. It is amazing how far we’ve come in understanding Chinese food since they started out in the American restaurant business.
As we’ve traveled more and welcomed immigrants from so many countries, our minds have opened and out tastes become more adventurous. When I was growing up in the Midwest, there were simply “Chinese” restaurants. When I was in college we were introduced to Sichuan and Hunan. Now stir frying (a term invented by the author of “How to Cook and Eat in Chinese) is as common as sauteeing (something we learned from the French.
Thanks so much for sharing these wonderful, telling stories. (I can’t get the image of the screaming child who ate the spoonful of mustard out of my mind!)
Thanks Bonnie, this made for a captivating and highly enjoyable read, as did Roberts erudite response. I liked them both even more the second time round
It certainly got me thinking of where does one cuisine end and another begin?
The Chinese food I grew up eating in London was, as you said Bonnie, simply classed as “Chinese”. But we had a large contingent of Hong Kong Chinese in the UK so Chinese food was often Hong Kong Cantonese by and large, though you’d never see a restaurant labeled as such.
It seems to be food that adapts to its surroundings. When I came over here first, there were so many dishes I didn’t even recognize on the American Chinese menu, like Moo Goo Gai Pan which as Robert said can be diamond if done right, and those that I did identify were substantially different in execution. Wontons in London were almost always a combination of pork and shrimp wrapped in a gossamer skin, whereas here they were much larger, thicker and entirely porky. That being said, I lived in Aberdeen Scotland for many years, a country known for deep frying everything from Milky Ways to slices of pizza, and the regional variations there often left you with more batter than food.
So is it possible to compare authentic Chinese, of which there are so many variations already, to American Chinese to English Chinese or even Aberdonian Chinese, or have they become so unique in their own right that it’s now apples to oranges? Certainly they have all introduced me to dishes over the years that I could now never do without. Well, except the stuff from Aberdeen perhaps.
And Gong Hey Fat Choi everyone!
Another interesting perspective and a good existential question. Obviously, we’ll need to look into this further. Thanks so much for your thoughts.
This is such an interesting thread, and it reminds me of the discussion that took place in the comments section of the Feast of Seven Fishes story comparing Italian and Italian-American dishes and customs and debating where traditions originated. It’s all intertwined and confusing and, most of all, fascinating.
In small-town central Wisconsin in the 1960s, “Chinese food” meant La Choy. That was my experience. Thanks for sharing yours — and for your cookbook recommendations. Wonderful!