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paperback £14.99
Penguin Books Ltd
Paddyfield.com
hardcover $45.00
Ten Speed Press
Paddyfield.com
Powells.com (USA)
hardback £25.00
Anova Books
Paddyfield.com
paperback HK$195
Hong Kong University Press
Paddyfield.com
More reviews by Jane Ram
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
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Sichuan Cookery by Fuchsia Dunlop
Thai Food by David Thompson
Taste of Macau: Portuguese Cuisine on the China Coast by Annabel Jackson
When a cookbook conveys the nature of the country and its culture as much as the aromas, colours, textures and flavours of the food, then it's more than just a cookbook.
Elizabeth David did this for provincial French cooking in the 1950s and more recently Sri Owen has done the same for her native Indonesia. And now, three new books each in very different ways serve Sichuan, Thai and Macanese food.
Even if you never tackle anything more ambitious than boiling an egg or wielding the occasional tin opener, you would be seduced by SICHUAN COOKERY by FUCHSIA DUNLOP, newly releaed in paperback.
Dunlop went to Sichuan's capital, Chengdu, on a British Council scholarship. In between her studies of the Chinese language, she enrolled for private classes in the local cooking school, deepening her passion for the "rich flavours and warm colours of the local food". She took every opportunity to chat with chefs and restaurateurs as she ate her way around the city. As she was planning her return to England at the end of her language course, she was paid the supreme compliment of being invited to be the first foreign student to enroll as a regular student on a professional training course in the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine.
After that there was no turning back and she has revisited Chengdu many times for research and further study, more exploration of restaurants and markets, and sheer gastronomic enjoyment. Her book is a distillation of intense experience.
Authentic Sichuan food is rare in Hong Kong, but with Dunlop's guidance it is relatively simple to make many of the more interesting and unusual family style recipes as well as some of the fancier fare. She writes with the ease of the genuine enthusiast, setting the recipes in their context and in the process introducing one of China's most interesting and diverse provinces. She is scholarly as well as literate and provides Chinese names and pin yin spelling for ingredients, names of dishes and cooking methods, making SICHUAN COOKERY an invaluable reference tool and at 266 pages plus index, it's an impressive tome.
THAI FOOD by DAVID THOMPSON, also newly out as a paperback, is even heftier at 673 pages.
A professional chef, Thompson says he went to Thailand by mistake, although it is a mistake that he has never regretted -- and readers of his book are the beneficiaries. Soon after his arrival, he was fortunate enough to be taken under the wing of "an heir to Thailand's ancient tradition of cooking, where fine craftsmanship and sharply honed skills were prime considerations."
He became fascinated by the entire topic of Thai cooking with its many regional variations, its traditions and its seasons. He spent years writing this encyclopedic volume, using his classical European training to capture the minute detail of what Thai cooks do by instinct. He says he wanted to "describe this ancient cuisine, in English, before it is eroded, altered and modernized... to acknowledge the generations of Thai who have evolved a unique style of cooking that is, I believe, among the world's great cuisines."
The result is a triumph of a very special kind. Not many casual readers will try the more challenging recipes, but others are simple and easy to follow, especially in Hong Kong, where most of the ingredients are readily available.
Like Dunlop's book, this is a great volume for browsing. And, alas, even more than Dunlop's, this is such a substantial tome that it is impossible as a bedside book -- perhaps just as well in both cases as all those chillies might lead to some unusually vivid dreams.
By comparison, ANNABEL JACKSON's TASTE OF MACAU: PORTUGUESE CUISINE ON THE CHINA COAST is slight, but her 118 pages also represent a labour of love as she records the culture and the context in which traditional Macanese cuisine evolved. Unlike the other two books, this one is lavishly illustrated by photographs.
It must have taken infinite patience to assemble these recipes. In the introduction Jackson writes, "Macanese recipes are closely guarded and rarely given away, and those which are shared are often incomplete. One friend has yet to be given her family's recipes by her father: apparently he is convinced she would share them too generously."
From the outset she says she was keen "to get real recipes from real people, rather than writing them myself, and many recipes have a `story' behind them which is included alongside. In cases where more than one family gave me the recipe for a dish, I have selected the one I find the most delicious."
As with the other two books, you can cook from these pages or just browse through them for the pleasure of remembering delicious meals of the past and dreaming of future delights.
Jane Ram
11/11/2003
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Widely-published writer and photographer Jane Ram is a long-time Hong Kong resident. In between travel assignments she is an enthusiastic cook, relying heavily on the many varieties of chillies that she grows in her own garden. |
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