When Engineers Cook

The Chinese Cook Book by Wallace Yee Hong

Crown Publishers 1952

Check out the attractive gray and yellow color scheme

I inherited several mid-century cookbooks on Chinese cuisine from my grandmother. I find them fascinating. Without fail, they all proclaim that they teach "real" Chinese cooking. Never mind that Chinese cuisine has serious regional differences--much can be said the same for any book on French, Italian or American cuisine. You gotta start somewhere, right?

I find Chinese books from this era to be endearing in their belief that acceptable result are possible in a Western kitchen with limited access to special ingredients, while also finding them to be unappealing in the liberal use of canned ingredients and MSG.

Hong, a restaurateur in NYC and Boston according the jacket, begins with a brief introduction, a list of purveyors of special ingredients, and a list of Recommended Chinese Restaurants.* He then jumps right into soups and shu mai and works his way through various ingredients, ending with tea and wine.

There isn't a lot of handholding here. Hong has no truck with explaining ingredients or techniques. You better already know how to stir-fry and what to stir-fry in. There are no pictures. This reads very much like the sort of recipe book a restaurant creates for its staff. Formula-based, the recipes give amounts and basic instructions, but the chef is expected to have enough experience to understand the preparation and serving of the dish.

To make matters worse, and this is what I love about this book, there is the actual syntax of the recipes. Hong loves to assign letters to his ingredients; I assume to make the actual writing of the recipes shorter and more efficient. He basically breaks all the rules of recipe writing. The result is something that will most likely make perfect sense to the engineers out there. The rest of us will have to muddle through what is distressingly like cooking instructions from IKEA.

Insert Tab A into slot B. Simmer for 10 minutes. Garnish with C.

This is also how he crams in 438 recipes in a 262 page book. He liberally uses cross-references like this:

272. Steamed Squab, West Lake Style (Si-Woo Bok Opp)

Use the same method and ingredients as in recipe No. 247, using 3 or more squabs instead of duck.

I will give this book credit for including the Chinese names of recipes in the text and index and for using mostly fresh foods and ingredients we don't see very often, including terrapin, eels, squid, and lotus root. Compare the complexity of the above recipe with a newspaper clipping I found in the book for a much more pedestrian and Westernized "Jade Empress Chicken."

Don't go crazy with that garlic salt or dry ginger!

Unfortunately nearly every recipe in The Chinese Cook Book calls for MSG--certainly every savory recipe calls for at least a teaspoon of "seasoning powder."  If this was standard operating procedure for Chinese restaurants in the day, no wonder everyone complained of headaches. I'm getting thirsty just thinking about it.

*including one in Detroit! New Life Chop Suey on Gratiot.

Gracious living

 Life is Meals: A Food Lover's Book of Days by James and Kay Salter

Alfred A. Knopf  2010

The start of a new year seems a good time to look at this charming book. A free-flowing collection of stories, recipes, trivia, food facts and memoir, there is nothing quite like it. While it can be used as a reference, it's much more a book for pleasure reading.

Arranged neatly by the days of the year, the entries are sometimes very specific to the day; at other times they nod at seasonality, and sometimes the authors abandon any strict time constraints and ramble on joyfully.

The Salters clearly have spent years compiling this collection. Interwoven among the hard facts are reminiscences of meals eaten, various dinner guests, and thoughts on food, entertaining, and the place of dining in our lives. They also have a special affinity for other writers, and there are many literary nuggets, some only tangentially related to food.

Throughout, there are sweet watercolor illustrations by Fabrice Moireau. Paging through this on a gloomy winter day, the images conjure up Paris and the Côte D'Azur. The Salters themselves seem like a Wes Anderson film family come to life. I suppose it's too late to be adopted.

If you are at all like me, then your first impulse is to read the entry for today's date before reading the entry for your birthday. Both are good examples of the range of the book. January 7 is the birthday of Ruth Cleveland, for whom the Baby Ruth is named. My birthday gives advice on the size and arrangement of dining room tables. Perhaps not one of the more exciting entries, but what do you expect for a Virgo? The Leos and Scorpios always get all the attention.

Summer time and the living is easy

Summer Cooking

by Elizabeth David

Penguin Books 1955

It's high summer in Michigan now and it's time for my annual reading of Elizabeth David's Summer Cooking. I don't remember when I first started reading it in the summer, but it has become a small ritual of the season. Sometimes I read one or more of the others in my Penguin box set: French Country Cooking, French Provincial Cooking, Italian Food or Mediterranean Food; the latter is just as timely for the season with its emphasis on warm weather crops.

But Summer Cooking is a must each year as the days get a little too warm and the threat of too much produce becomes more real. It's a slim book so it doesn't take long and it's packed with ideas on how to make the most of summer eating. Not necessarily cooking, because one of the book's strengths is David's recognition that although summer is bountiful in terms of produce, we often don't feel like cooking with a lot of heat or fussing over complicated recipes. Simpler is better in the summer and many of her recipes are ideas for salads and cold plates.

The more I read David the more I wonder at her food. Given that when she wrote these  England was barely past WWII and had only just begun to end rationing, her books must have been like a fever-dream to UK eaters. Not only did David draw on foreign cuisines, she called for ingredients that were neither in vogue or readily available to her readers including such modern staples as olive oil, red peppers, and zucchini.

Yet somehow she doesn't come off as snooty or contrived. Rather than causing anger at food that is hard to obtain, she inspired generations to reach higher. And if you couldn't get bottarga or fresh anchovies, then you could use her same focused approach on the ingredients you did have. In David's world a good cook stops complaining about what she can or cannot get and uses what is good to make something worth eating.

Summer Cooking is all over the map culinarily-speaking. Perhaps that is one of the reasons it still seems fresh. The flavors are bold, with liberal use of herbs and acids. There is an emphasis on seasonal vegetables which is useful, as well as advice that still holds up today on how to cook when on vacation. Perhaps that is because many of today's summer cottages still have kitchens equipped from the 50s.

I use this book more for ideas than for recipes. I have made some and adapted some so thoroughly that they look nothing like hers although in my head I still think of them as a Elizabeth David recipes. Take her tonnato sauce for example. For years, every summer I make this once or twice and eat it on top of green beans and/or sliced tomatoes. Traditionally tonnato is a tuna-based mayonnaise sauce that you pour over cooked veal and let chill. I'm sure that is good, but I've never bothered with the veal roast. It just sounded like it would be good as a dip/sauce for veggies so I made it.

I think I make it from David's recipe but in looking it over for this post I realize I have drifted far off course. I don't measure it anymore either, just add everything to taste. I think David would approve, but she was known for her opinionated voice, so perhaps not unconditionally.

If tonnato sauce intrigues you, feel free to play with mine:

1 5oz can of chunk light tuna (note not albacore--you want the mushy stuff for this)

2 Tbs of mayonnaise

1 lemon--you'll need ½ to all of the juice

1 Tbs water

1 Tbs olive oil

½ tsp of anchovy paste

fresh pepper. Salt if needed

Puree all ingredients in a blender. Serve with cooked green beans, tomatoes from the garden and/or hard-boiled eggs.

In contrast, here is what David's recipe says:

"Make a good cupful of mayonnaise with 2 yolks of eggs, olive oil and lemon juice. Pound or sieve about 2 oz. of best quality-tunny fish in oil, and add this to the mayonnaise."

So where did I get the rest of mine? Perhaps an amalgamation of other recipes, perhaps I stole it from Marcella Hazan? More research will be needed.