30 DAYS OPEN PURCHASEChina: The Cookbook rests on a simple but underestimated premise. Chinese food is not one cuisine but several dozen, and they have less in common with one another than French and Italian cuisine do.
Kei Lum Chan is a third generation food writer from Hong Kong and writes together with Diora Fong Chan. Together they are among China's bestselling cookbook authors, and this is the body of work Phaidon has brought together here.
The book starts with the eight great culinary traditions and then divides the country into 33 regions and subregions. The differences become immediately clear. Cantonese cooking relies on steaming and on letting ingredients taste of themselves. Sichuan cooking uses Sichuan pepper, which is not hot but numbing, combining it with chilli to create something entirely its own. Hunan, by contrast, is straightforwardly hot without the numbing effect, a distinction few people outside China know. In the north, wheat dominates in the form of noodles, dumplings and steamed breads, while in the south everything rests on rice.
This is home cooking throughout rather than restaurant food. The 650 recipes are the kind prepared in ordinary kitchens with ordinary equipment, making the book considerably more useful than its size might suggest.
Alongside the recipes are guides to the Chinese pantry, including the different types of soy sauce, rice wine, fermented bean pastes, dried mushrooms and chilli products, as well as the fundamental techniques of wok cooking, steaming and slow cooking.
Seven hundred and twenty pages. This is the book you reach for when you want to know what something actually is, and the only one in English that covers the country as a whole.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 720
Number of recipes: 650
Publisher: Phaidon
ISBN: 9781838669225
Language: English
First published: 2016, this edition: 2025
