Secrets of Chinese Cooking
Of all human frailties that of the gourmet is probably the gentlest and the most amiable. His very weakness marks him out as that rare thing, a man of taste and discernment.
To all gourmets I commend this book. If, in these unhappy times, they cannot come to China to see and eat for themselves, this book will build for them an easy and a pretty bridge by which, from their own homes, they can reach the simple and surprising delights of Chinese cooking.
In the matter of food, as in all else that has grace, the Chinese have long been past-masters. They put into the cooking of it all the loving care for detail, the daintiness, the spice and the wit that characterise their art and their understanding of the business of life, which is one of the chiefest of their charms.
In China every province boasts its own fashion of preparing food and claims that it is the best. When you eat you tend to admit the claim without demur. But a practised palate will tell in a twinkling whether the juiciness of a duck or the crispness of the crackling of a suckling pig is due to the craft of Cantonese, Pekinese, Szechuanese, or what you will.
For myself, I cannot pretend to so much \"expertise\". Nor does this site set out to guide you to it or to cover the vast field of Chinese cooking. It offers seventy-five straightforward recipes of every day, but none the less delicious, food which is within the reach of everyone, which calls for no expense and which will quench the passions of the greedy and enchant the finer feelings of the gourmet alike.
The authoress, Dolly Chow, is the daughter of Sir Shouson Chow, a well-known and much respected member of the Chinese community of Hongkong. She has been so kind as to give me some lessons in cooking at which I had the emotion both of finding out the secrets of the Chinese kitchen and of eating the dishes as they came off the fire. If you had seen and tasted what I did, you would agree with me that no one is better fitted than Dolly Chow to introduce you to the dressing of Chinese food.
The Chinese long ago developed a way of life which has found some favour among visitors to China. The earliest records show that Chinese of the remotest antiquity not only enjoyed the chase; they also had good methods of dealing with the fruits it yielded.
The histories do not state clearly when traditional Chinese cookery methods became fixed, but they do record, in prose and verse, the ecstasies of those men of fine discernment and taste who knew that men ate not merely in order to live.
Dr. Johnson\'s well-known observation that he could always smell a good dinner may readily find its echo from many Chinese scholars. However, only by a long process of empirical trial and error were those subtle flavours discovered which have made men long exiled from home write wistfully of the province which gave rise to a lordly dish.
From: Secrets of Chinese Cooking With Selected Recipes
<br>by Dolly Chow (Mrs. C. T. Wang)<br>
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