Customer Reviews

The Chinese Kitchen: A Book of Essential Ingredients with Over 200 Easy and Authentic Recipes

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Deh-Ta Hsiung is a British-based mainland-trained chef whose polite opinions keep this nicely organized and illustrated book interesting. Although he ignores much of the Cantonese-style cooking that is prevalent in many Chinese cookbooks available in the US, his information is traditional, accurate, and all of the 10 or so recipes I've tried so far have been good. Ingredients such as tofu, oyster sauce, malt sugar, five-spice powder, and Sichuan peppercorns are presented individually with Chinese characters, Pinyin, English, and Latin (for the plants) and photographs of the ingredient and recipes and photos of one or two representative dishes. There's also information provided on how the ingredient grows or is produced or packaged, what it looks and tastes like, how to buy and store it, some basic medicinal uses,...and recipes! I like to use the book in combination with Nina Simonds' and Eileen Yin-Fei Lo's books--taking the best of each.

I have always enjoyed Deh Ta-Hsiung's recipes. They are simple to follow & difficult to get wrong, even for a novice cook like me! The recipes he shares range from tasty family dishes to making your own Peking duck or roasting your own barbeque pork which are difficult to come by in most Chinese cook books. Mr Deh also takes time to explain how different types of ingredients come together, and offers to the uninitiated, methods of preparing an ingredient, and photographs which makes me want to dog-ear all the pages with the recipes I plan to try! Most of all, Deh's cooking leads to the most authentic tasting Chinese food!I'm glad the author has finally released an US edition!My only complaint is there just aren't enough recipes!

This book presents all the basic ingredients for a Chinese kitchen. If you think you "kinda know" but not really, here is your reference book. The three things that strike me are the accurate descriptions, beautiful photos and pragmatic use of each of the items.
The recipes factually represent authentic old time use.
I would buy this book for the younger Chinese so that they won't forget "what, why and how".

There are probably books with more recipes - recipes aren't really the focus of this book. It's a treatise on the ingredients that go into Chinese cooking, an encyclopedia of what goes into the food and how to find it, how to use it, and where it comes from. I found it delightful reading, and I can now go to the local markets without always feeling that I have no idea what I'm looking at. I bought it as a gift for my son, read it before handing it over, and think I'm probably going to have to get one for myself. It's beautiful to look at, too.

Chinese Cuisine goes way beyond cooking: it's a gastronomical philosophy in itself. What to eat when, how and why. One has to realize this if the goal is something other than fixing chop suey or egg foo young (which by the way, are not Chinese!). If so, this is the book to start with. Take it along to the supermarket if you have to. Check out every spice and tool before buying. And then start cooking and enjoy yourself. The recipes themselves are surprisingly quite easy; its their context what makes the difference, giving you the criteria -and the confidence- to go further.

Mànmàn chď!

I quite often enjoy browsing through this book. A great selection of Chinese culinary ingredients are described and the extensive pictures which accompany each entry are excellent. Some ingredients are discussed in a single page, others in two, while a few, such as rice, merit four whole pages. There is a good description of every item, a recipe or two illustrating its use, information on storage and handling, and good information on the general function of the entry as both a food and a medicine. I especially appreciate that the book lists the Chinese characters for each ingredient along with the pronunciation in parentheses. Unfortunately, one criticism I have is that the pronunciation provided is sometimes Cantonese and sometimes Mandarin and the transliteration is decidedly non-standard... Gong Bao Chicken, for instance, is given in the common restaurant rendering, 'Kung Pao Chicken'.

I also have to say that most of the recipes provided are really not that particularly interesting... As this is not a recipe book, though, I did not particularly care but I was very surprised when I recently purchased another book by this author, and found the same thing again - great pictures but mediocre recipes!

Still... as I say, I did not buy this book as a recipe book and I love flipping through its pages. I am glad to own it.

The background and recipes are quite good but the paper back book is a disgrace. My copy is less than a year old but nearly every page has separated from the "perfect" binding. The publisher should give a[...]to anyone who has bought this. Five stars for the author, [...], so a two overall.