Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking and the Cantonese Home Kitchen

Eileen Yin-Fei Lo's Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking is a book of the Cantonese home kitchen, written by a cook raised in the Cantonese tradition of Guangdong and Hong Kong and addressed to cooks outside China who had no access to that table. Its ground is the Pearl River delta, with Guangzhou and its hinterland, a country of rice, fish, poultry and vegetables, and a coast open to trade for centuries.

The book belongs to a particular moment in the history of Chinese cookery in English: the generation of writers who, in the decades after the Second World War, set out to explain the cooking of China to readers in North America and Britain on the cooks' own terms. Buwei Yang Chao and Cecilia Chiang stand earlier in that line, and Yan-kit So wrote of the Cantonese kitchen from the same ground. Lo's contribution is a full and orderly account of Cantonese practice as it is carried out at home rather than in the banqueting hall. It begins with the larder and the equipment, the wok, the cleaver, the steamer and the clay pot, and proceeds to method before it reaches the recipes. The method is the subject of the book as much as the dishes. Lo teaches the Cantonese preference for freshness and for restraint, the cooking of a fish or a chicken so that its own flavour remains the centre of the plate. Steaming, quick stir-frying, the clear soup, the braise and the roast are set out as separate disciplines, each with its own control of heat and timing. The idea of wok hei, the breath of the wok, belongs to this tradition, and the cook is shown how a hot pan, a small quantity of food and brisk movement produce it. The seasonings are those of the Cantonese pantry: light and dark soy sauce, oyster sauce, Shaoxing huangjiu, ginger, spring onion, fermented black beans, dried mushrooms and dried seafood. The book treats them as a restrained set of tools instead of a mass of strong flavours, which is true to the region. It also covers the dim sum table, the festival foods and the family meal built on rice, a soup, and two or three dishes shared among all who sit down. For the reader of this book, Lo is a source for Cantonese technique and for the structure of the Cantonese meal, and she should be read beside Fuchsia Dunlop, whose own books range over other regions, and beside the Chinese-language classics such as Yuan Mei's Suiyuan Shidan, whose insistence on seasoning and on the right moment of cooking the Cantonese kitchen continues. Her work is best taken as the testimony of a practised home cook, systematic and exact, and not as a history of the cuisine; the dating of dishes and the history of Guangdong's trade are better sought elsewhere.

The Cantonese home meal is built on plain rice with a soup and two or three dishes shared at the table, chosen for contrast of texture, method and flavour. The seasoning is light, with ginger, spring onion, soy sauce and a little Shaoxing huangjiu, so that the freshness of the principal ingredient stays clear. Lo's recipes follow this pattern, and the cook who follows them learns balance across a whole meal as well as within a single dish.