The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen and the Family Table

Grace Young's The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen belongs to the Cantonese home table as it was carried to the United States by families from Guangdong, and it is set down by a cook who learned that table in San Francisco. Its anchor is not the banquet hall or the professional kitchen but the family kitchen, where the daily rice, the soup pot and the wok were the working instruments of a household.

Among the authorities on which this book rests, Young's work holds a particular place because it records the home cook rather than the restaurant. Where Yuan Mei in the Suiyuan Shidan (1792) wrote as a scholar-gourmet addressing the educated reader, and Hu Sihui in the Yinshan Zhengyao (1330) wrote as a court dietary official, Young writes as the granddaughter of a Cantonese family, setting down what was cooked on ordinary days and on the days that marked the year. The book is organised around the family's own habits: the rice that opens and closes the meal, the soups simmered for the household, the steamed fish brought whole to the table, and the dishes of the New Year and other festivals. The method of the book is to pair recipe with remembered practice. Her family and the older cooks she consulted are the witnesses, and the recipes are given as they are cooked rather than reformed for convenience. The Cantonese preference for freshness, for the natural taste of an ingredient lightly seasoned with ginger, spring onion and soy sauce, runs through the text, as does the Cantonese attention to wok hei, the breath of the wok, the scorched fragrance that a hot, well-seasoned wok gives to a stir-fry. The reader learns the discipline behind it: a dry, very hot pan, a small quantity of food at a time, and the order in which aromatics and main ingredients go in. The book also stands as a record of the diaspora. The pantry it describes, with dried shiitake, dried scallops, preserved vegetables, Chinese sausage and fermented bean curd, is the pantry of a household that kept its foodways while living far from Guangdong, adapting to the markets of Chinatown without surrendering the grammar of the cuisine. In this it sits beside the work of Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, whose Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking gives the Cantonese kitchen in its fuller technical range, and beside the regional surveys of Fuchsia Dunlop, which place Cantonese cooking among the other cuisines of China. For the cook, Young's chief lesson is that technique and pantry matter more than elaboration. The tradition she records treats a few ingredients, well chosen and correctly handled, as the basis of a good meal, and it treats the sharing of that meal as the point of the cooking. That is the sense in which the book is a work of wisdom as its title has it: knowledge held in a family and handed on through use, written down so that it may be used again.

The Cantonese family meal that Young describes is built around plain rice, with a steamed or quickly stir-fried dish, a soup and vegetables, seasoned lightly so that the freshness of the main ingredient is the principal flavour. Wok hei, ginger, spring onion and a little soy sauce give the stir-fries their savour, while the soups are cooked slowly and served as a regular part of the household's meals. On the days of the New Year and other festivals the table is set with dishes whose names and ingredients carry auspicious associations in Cantonese custom.