My Shanghai and the Shanghai Home Kitchen

Shanghai sits at the mouth of the Yangtze on the alluvial plain of the Jiangnan region, a country of canals, rice paddies and fish ponds whose produce has long fed the city. Betty Liu's My Shanghai is a modern cookbook of the family table of that city, and it rests on the home kitchen rather than the banquet hall or the restaurant. For a reference library that otherwise leans on imperial treatises and regional histories, it supplies the domestic voice of a single place.

The book is written from within a Shanghai family, and its value as an authority lies in that vantage. It records the dishes a household cooks on an ordinary day and at the festivals of the year, and it treats the city's food as a cooking of the home first. Where the great texts of the lineage, such as Yuan Mei's Suiyuan Shidan, speak to the educated gourmet, Liu speaks to the cook who feeds a family, and the two together give a fuller account of Jiangnan than either gives alone. The recipes show the habits for which Shanghai cooking is known: red-braising, or hongshao, in which pork, fish or bean curd is coloured and sweetened with soy sauce, rock sugar and Shaoxing huangjiu; the gentle cooking of vegetables in the green season; the use of cured and pickled ingredients to give depth to a plain dish; and a fondness for a measure of sweetness that sets the cooking apart from that of the inland provinces. Rice, wheat noodles, dumplings and steamed buns stand together on the Shanghai table, and the book presents them as part of one everyday repertoire. A cook reading it learns how a household orders a meal, with a few dishes shared around rice, a soup, and vegetables chosen by the season. Its place among the authorities is therefore that of a witness to continuity, showing how the long tradition of Jiangnan cooking survives in the kitchen of a family that has carried it to the present. It is best read beside Fuchsia Dunlop's Land of Fish and Rice, which sets the same region in its wider landscape and history, and the two complement one another: the one is a scholar's survey of the delta, the other the account of a single family's table within it.

The Shanghai home table is built around rice, with a few shared dishes in which the red-braised and the lightly cooked sit side by side. Soy sauce, rock sugar and Shaoxing huangjiu give the braises their dark gloss and gentle sweetness, while seasonal greens are stir-fried simply to keep their freshness. A meal is rounded off with a soup, and the balance between rich and plain dishes is what the family cook aims for.