Long Underappreciated, Cecilia Chiang Releases Charming Cookbook
Alice Waters said of Cecilia Chiang that she did for Chinese cuisine in America what Julia Child did for French. Each relished her role as ambassador of deliciousness, broadening the collective culinary horizons of America in the '60s. There are other similarities: Both worked for the OSS during World War II, both stumbled into their culinary careers, both did so at a relatively advanced age in an era when for a woman, being a homemaker was far more common than being an entrepreneur (Child was 37 when she started to cook and closer to 40 when she started to teach cooking; Chiang was 36 when she opened her first restaurant). But Child is a revered and well-known figure, whereas Chiang doesn't even show up in Wikipedia results. How is it that a woman this influential (she introduced America to high-end Chinese cuisine and continues to consult on restaurant menus at 87 years old) is so beneath the radar?
Chiang's memoir-cum-cookbook, The Seventh Daughter: My Culinary Journey from Beijing to San Francisco
Each chapter begins with a reflective essay that gives an account of her journey, proceeds to give shopping advice and background on main ingredients, and then presents well-crafted recipes for Chinese restaurant classics introduced at The Mandarin as well as some of Chiang's homier favorites.
The recipe introductions are particularly wonderful. They explain the foods Chiang loves as well as give a more impressionistic view of her biography. The result is a cross-section view of her entire experience, from her gracious childhood to her years of struggle to her success in America. An example of this brushstroke approach is the introduction to her Hot-and-Sour Cabbage recipe:
If you come to my house tomorrow and look in my refrigerator you'll be sure to find this Hot-and-Sour Cabbage. My mother made a version that was more sour than hot to help us get through the cold Beijing winters. Later on, during the Japanese occupation, cabbage, both dried and pickled as in this recipe, helped keep us fed. Then, when I lived in Sichuan, I discovered preserved cabbage that was similar to what my mother made, but bathed in chili oil. At the Mandarin we used to serve Hot-and-Sour Cabbage as a small dish or starter. It pairs nicely with Champagne.
The ring-a-ding-ding end note to this recipe introduction—for cabbage—cracked me up, but after making it at home, I understood why this cabbage was a constant in her life. It is simple, keeps for a long time, and is a healthy snack option. And for the sake of research, I tried it: It does pair nicely with Champagne! Another recipe I made with tasty results was Clams in Black Bean Sauce.
From Chinese New Year buffets to wartime rations to Champagne, The Seventh Daughter is a good resource for familiarly exotic tastes as well as a charming read about a woman whose influence on American restaurant culture has yet to be fully appreciated.
Add a comment:
Previewing your comment:
HTML Hints
Some HTML is OK: <a href="URL">link</a>, <strong>strong</strong>, <em>em</em>
Comment Guidelines
Post whatever you want, just keep it seriously about eats, seriously. We reserve the right to delete off-topic or inflammatory comments. Learn more at our Comment Policy page.
If you see something not so nice, please, report an inappropriate comment.
8 Comments:
My favorite sort of food reading: real life and meaningful recipes. Thanks. I'll order it immediately.
islandexile at 8:57PM on 10/19/07
Islandexile -- I like Seventh Daughter, but if you can get your hands on it, I'd recommend even more highly Chiang's earlier book, The Mandarin Way, now unfortunately out of print. As in Seventh Daughter, the recipes are for fairly standard dishes -- with the exception of Chiang's Chinese take on gaoma-ae (developed during the years she lived and ran a restaurant in Tokyo), there was nothing for which I didn't already have multiple recipes, courtesy of Grace Young, Ken Hom, Fuschia Dunlop, Irene Kuo, Eileen Yin Fei-Lo, etc. But the personal context in which she places the recipes, and her personal history, is absolutely fascinating.
maggiesara at 12:50AM on 10/20/07
Actually -- and much as I genuinely like Chiang's books -- I think Alice Waters is guilty of some kind of spectacular home-town myopia here: Cecilia Chiang is NOT the "Julia Child of Chinese food." She owned one restaurant in one city. Until "Seventh Daughter," she had produced one cookbook. She did not have any kind of national audience -- she didn't have a television show or a radio show or a newspaper column. Her restaurant may have been influential in the Northern California food scene but, with all due respect to Ms. Waters, that's a far cry from being Julia Child.
In thinking of Ms. Waters' confusion of San Francisco celebrity with national stature, I can't help thinking of the SF Chronicle's article about her recent book tour to Chicago, and her rather stunned reaction when only a handful of people show up for her book signing. She may be a big name in Northern California, but in the midwest...not so much. And I don't mean to diss Northern California: There are certainly plenty of chefs -- Daniel Boulud, say, or Eric Ripert, or Jean-Georges Vongerichten -- who loom very large in the NYC food scene but have no national platform and thus zero national celebrity.
maggiesara at 1:07AM on 10/20/07
I've heard good things about "Seventh Daughter" and should add it to my list of Things To Read.
The socio-cultural (sorry, horrid word but can't think of any way to replace it at the moment) history of Chinese food in the United States and particularly of the women who have influenced how it became "mainstreamed" into the culture is fascinating study as it's a double whammy sort of thing to look at considering the roles expected of women in each culture and the challenges met and overcome both in a business sense and a personal one.
There is a chapter addressing all this specifically focusing on Chinese food in the United States in the book "Secret Ingredients - Race Gender and Class at the Dinner Table" by Sherrie Inness. A review of the book with further discussion extending the scope to further areas is here for those interested in that sort of thing.
Your comment on Alice Water's scope of celebrity is interesting, maggiesara. Yesterday something happened which showed something similar to me about Michael Pollan, whom I thought the world knew, that simply everyone had been exposed to him. I went to the annual YMCA "used booksale" (a big thing in this university town) and inbetween almost hitting people with my handbag in order to accrue the titles I thought were waiting specifically for me on the tables, I went to the table designated for donations that were earmarked for profits to go to a culinary university library fund, where I'd donated two brand new Pollan books, unread, hardcover. A woman was poking at them, saying to the lady behind the table, "What's this? There's no recipes here. What sort of cookbook is this?" The lady said, Oh oh oh. He is Michael Pollan. YOU know. The other woman did not know. After listening for several more seconds (I had no time to engage in full-fledged fighting though I would have loved to but books were waiting for me to scoop up) I snarled: "Food politics. Food politics. Do you know what that is? That's Michael Pollan" and I flew off into the crowd as she looked at me as if I were the Enemy. You know. The Enemy is the one who does not provide recipes.
No, many people do not know Alice Waters or Michael Pollan - surprisingly enough.
Karen Resta at 10:01AM on 10/21/07
Hey maggiesara - you clearly have lots of knowledge about cooking Chinese food - thanks for the cookbook author leads. Chiang's book rekindled a many-years dormant desire to practice making some of these things at home.
Jenn Smith at 5:16PM on 10/21/07
(laughing) I don't know about lots of knowledge, Jenn; I have lots of cookbooks, which is not at all the same thing. And actually, if you're starting out cooking Asian food, I would probably most highly recommend Barbara Tropp's first book, "The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking," which has recently been reissued. Her discussion of technique is very clear and thorough, and in my experience, her recipes always work. I remember making her (MAJOR pain-in-the-butt) smoked chicken and bringing it to a potluck (it reheats really well and easily); one of the guests was a Taiwanese grad student who hadn't been able to afford to go home for several years, and when he ate the chicken he actually started crying and said it tasted like his grandmother's.
maggiesara at 3:12AM on 10/22/07
Thank you so much for the Inness recommendation, Karen. That's exactly the kind of book that interests me -- I'm a huge Laura Shapiro fan.
Re the role of women, when I first started writing about China, about 15 years ago, one of the things that interested me a lot was that many of the CEOs I was meeting -- the people in charge of some of the country's largest companies -- were women. Coming from the U.S., this was incredible to me. Some time later I spent a long afternoon sitting out a Hong Kong rainstorm and yacking with a Chinese designer who had spent several years living in Canada, mostly in a Jewish neighborhood in Montreal. We were talking about why I, as a New York Jew, felt so oddly comfortable in China, and why he had felt so comfortable in a Jewish enclave, and one of the things we discussed was the traditional division of labor: In both Jewish and Chinese households, it was common for the wife to run the business while the husband spent his time in scholarly pursuits. Scholarship, rather than business, was where the status was, so the business -- the store, the restaurant -- was turned over to the women.
maggiesara at 3:23AM on 10/22/07
Interesting commentary, maggiesara. And an astute observation of a commonality. It makes sense, doesn't it.
If you haven't already read it, there's a first-rate story with a Chinese-American-Woman-Between-Cultures theme in Molly O'Neill's anthology "American Food Writing" titled "Fifth Chinese Daughter" by Jade Snow Wong (written in 1950). Borrowing from something I wrote elsewhere soon after reading this memoir
The details of "Fifth Chinese Daughter" were mesmerizing, and the way the story ends with the scene drawn of the rice pack being opened by the father, the bamboo straps saved, the terrible moment shown of how "who we are", so tightly bound to this food, this reality that is both something known, desired, something to be proud of and then at times something that is both painful and frightening, inescapable and pre-ordained. But in the larger scheme of things, it seemed it was not pre-ordained, finally, forever, in this "new world", as we gaze along with the writer's eyes at a time close yet past.
Can't say more about the story without adding a "spoiler" but suffice to say that I'd buy this anthology just for this story alone. (And there's tons more good stuff in it, too.)
...............................................
I find Barbra Tropp's cookbooks excellent also, though do agree there are some major PITB recipes included. China Moon was one of the most wonderful restaurants I've ever dined at, though. If food could be considered jewel-like in taste - with a clarity and warm shining glow from within - that was China Moon.
Karen Resta at 8:33AM on 10/22/07