Chop Suey

Cookbooks tell stories, and so it is fi tting to begin this chapter on Chinese cook- books with a cookbook story.

A few years ago, after learning about my research, my mother showed me her modest cookbook collection. One, in a blue plastic cover, immediately caught my eye. As I opened the book, a few pieces of paper—handwritten recipes and food- ration coupons—slipped out from between the pages, resurfacing from an in- creasingly distant past.

It was one of the fi rst few cookbooks I had seen my mother use. She got it in the early 1970s, when we had our fi rst real kitchen and no longer had to cook in the passageway in front of our two-room apartment. The book added a few dishes to her repertoire, such as pan-fried eggplant and steamed pork with ground rice, but for the most part my mother used it for her reading pleasure and occasionally for keeping things like recipe notes. 1 In those days of food short- ages, many ingredients mentioned in the 496-page book were beyond our reach, and some—such as spaghetti, cream, bear’s paw, shark’s fi n, and deer antler— my mother had never even seen or heard of. In sharp contrast to the asceticism of the Cultural Revolution, which demanded self-sacrifi ce, the book promotes good eating and gives detailed instructions on such issues as nutrition and food hygiene, which concern the well-being of the individual. Although the authors still had to justify the cookbook in the name of the revolution by inserting fi ve

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C o p y r i g h t 2 0 1 4 . C o l u m b i a U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/22/2022 4:11 PM via HOUSTON COMMUNITY COLLEGE SYSTEM AN: 871562 ; Yong Chen.; Chop Suey, USA : The Story of Chinese Food in America Account: s9009160.main.eds