#02 Simple Chinese Cooking by Kwong

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

Amazon info here. 

I have been putting this review off.  I love Chinese food and I wanted to read a cookbook by someone of Chinese heritage, especially for homestyle Chinese cooking.  I love homestyle Chinese cooking.  I have several recipes or two from friends and there is a neighborhood restaurant that does a few homestyle dishes. 

I had heard that this book was good, but doable, and not banquet style fancy food.  It is written by Kylie Kwong, an Australian with Chinese heritage. 

Unfortunately, I just didn't enjoy the recipes in this book.  It is huge (actually much too large and heavy to be a comfortable cookbook and is awkward to use) and full of very glossy finished recipes.  That can be motivational, but I mostly wound up frustrated, because while the food looked good, I found the results to be rather boring and bland.  There aren't very many recipes, actually, and one particular method of cooking (a sort of sweet ginger sauce) was shown in pork, beef, chicken, tofu, and so on.  It would have been nice if instead of wasting all those pages on a repeat of the same recipe, if she'd shown something different and simply said: substitute pork, beef, etc.  I felt that for such a large book (it's huge and weighs a ton) it should have had more recipes.  Many of the meat types just have a couple methods of cooking them. 

It's not a bad book.  The recipes are just...bland.  Boring.  Things I could get off the internet at About.com Chinese Cooking.  Er.  I feel terrible saying that.  But it's true, at least for me, that there wasn't anything in this book that I felt was especially noteworthy or tasty.  The writing wasn't especially good, either, and I feel very bad for saying that. 

It got good reviews at Amazon, so some people do like it.  It didn't work for me.  What it did make me realize, though, is that most of the books that were recommended to me about Chinese food were written by non-Chinese folks.  I ended up scouring Amazon some more and have acquired Breath of the Wok and a few others.  It was more effort than I expected to find Chinese cookbooks written by people of Chinese descent. 

Comments

[daedala.livejournal.com]

Have you tried Irene Kuo's Key to Chinese Cooking? It's an older book, but really good, and explains a lot of technique.

I don't have my copy on hand to check author bios, but The Chinese Cookbook by Virginia Lee and Craig Claiborne may qualify, and it's definitely good.

Chowhound and similar have good threads on the topic, though it can be hard to tell from just the author's name.

I was not impressed with Lin-Liu's recipes in Serve the People, and it doesn't work very well as a cookbook either, so I can't recommend it for the recipes. It's pretty good for context and such, though.

ETA: The library should have these!

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

I haven't tried those. Thank you so much for the suggestions! And I love when I can get it at the library first. Yay!!

[loligo.livejournal.com]

My mom has Helen Chen's Chinese Home Cooking; I've made a few recipes from it while visiting her, and they all turned out fantastic, but I can't say I've explored the book in-depth. I do remember, though, that it was sprinkled with anecdotes about cooking with her mother (chef Joyce Chen) while growing up, and I really enjoyed that aspect of it.

[stephiepenguin.livejournal.com]

I remember reading one of Cecilia Chiang's books a while back and really enjoying it. There was more focus on her stories but there were definitely quite a few recipes.

[pene.livejournal.com]

Just to be contrary, I'll put my voice in for loving Kylie Kwong's Simple Chinese Cooking.

I am not an experienced cook but I've spent the last two years cooking frequently for small or medium groups. Kwong's book is one I return to probably fortnightly, and my partner and friends and I are always excited to eat from it. Seriously, my favourite foods ever come from this book. I most often cook tofu with black beans, tofu with (vege) oyster sauce (adapted), steamed tofu with ginger and shallots, prawns with ginger and shallots. I've adapted some recipes for vegetarians (or vegequarians really). Kwong really changed my cooking repertoire.

Kwong's flavours are known for their subtlety and simplicity and she's pragmatic and fascinated by flavours. Her restaurant in Sydney is unpretentious and all organic (and of the probably five times I've been there I've seen her eating there with her partner twice which was sweet. Though not really relevant to the book.)

I am laughing a bit because I am kind of obsessed with her recipes. Which all goes to show that we all respond to food differently. I think that part of the reason this might not have been to your taste is the big difference between US-ian Chinese food and Australian Chinese food.