Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A spirited new history of Chinese food told through an account of the remarkable life of Fu Pei-mei, the woman who brought Chinese cooking to the world.
In 1949, a young Chinese housewife arrived in Taiwan and transformed herself from a novice to a natural in the kitchen. She launched a career as a cookbook author and television cooking instructor that would last four decades. Years later, in America, flipping through her mother’s copies of Fu Pei-mei’s Chinese cookbooks, historian Michelle T. King discovered more than the recipes to meals of her childhood. She found, in Fu’s story and in her food, a vivid portal to another time, when a generation of middle-class, female home cooks navigated the tremendous postwar transformations taking place across the world.
In Chop Fry Watch Learn, King weaves together stories from her own family and contemporary oral history to present a remarkable argument for how understanding the story of Fu’s life enables us to see Chinese food as both an inheritance of tradition and a truly modern creation, influenced by the historical phenomena of the postwar era. These include a dramatic increase in the number of women working outside the home, a new proliferation of mass media, the arrival of innovative kitchen tools, and the shifting diplomatic fortunes of China and Taiwan. King reveals how and why, for audiences in Taiwan and around the world, Fu became the ultimate culinary touchstone: the figure against whom all other cooking authorities were measured.
And Fu’s legacy continues. Her cookbooks have become beloved emblems of cultural memory, passed from parent to child, wherever diasporic Chinese have landed. Informed by the voices of fans across generations, King illuminates the story of Chinese food from the inside: at home, around the family dinner table. The result is a revelatory work, a rich banquet of past and present tastes that will resonate deeply for all of us looking for our histories in the kitchen.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
UNC Chapel Hill history professor King interweaves biography, memoir, and culinary history in her delicious debut. Fu Pei-mei (1931–2004) was a cook and culinary teacher, whose long-running show on Taiwanese television led the New York Times to label her "the Julia Child of Chinese cooking." She and her husband arrived in Taiwan in 1949 as refugees from the Chinese civil war. As a young bride, Fu struggled to make dishes that appealed to her husband's tastes, and turned to neighbors and friends for help in the kitchen. She parlayed her newfound skills into cooking classes that she taught in her backyard, and in the early 1960s one of Fu's students recommended her to a TV producer who was seeking cooking show hosts. Fu went on to host her own show for more than four decades and author more than a dozen cookbooks. King interweaves the narrative's main biographical thread and "kitchen conversations" with people influenced by Fu's career, including poignant sections about her own mother, who transformed from "non-cook to home cook" with Fu's help. This tasty ode to an undersung chef satisfies.