Customer Reviews

Mrs. Chiang's Szechwan Cookbook: Szechwan Home Cooking

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I bought Mrs. Chiang's Szechuan Cookbook when it first came out. It immediately became and remains my favorite Chinese cookbook. In fact, I have used it so much that I have worn it out! I take good care of my books, but years of kitchen use have put numerous stains on the pages and have broken the binding, never mind the total destruction of the dust cover! I have given this book as gifts to several friends who have enjoyed my Chinese meals (based on this book), and they are using it too.
You can also get Szechuan Home Cooking. It is just a later edition of the same book, and the only changes are in the introductory material.
Do yourself a favor and get this fabulous book before it disappears forever.
By the way, I finally replaced my worn-out copy, but have kept the old one stored sentimentally alongside--it's full of notes, like "excellent recipe", "Marc [husband] raves", "fabulous and easy."

We've been cooking Chinese food one to five times per week for 25 years, and most of it according to Mrs. Chaing. The first copy fell apart from use. I will miss the easy opening to favorite dishes and the memorabe stains, but enough is enough. We have about 30 Chinese cookbooks and use all of them from time to time but Mrs. Chaing's cookbook has staying power, helpful hints, reliable recipies, and a wide range of cooking styles.

I bought this book when it first came out in 1976...it is simply the best cookbook of its kind ! Whether you are a novice or an expert in "szechwan cooking"...this book has something for you. The "Grand Duke Chicken" is food for the God's...I added green beans to her wonderful "red cooked shrimp". Want a dish that has the delicate flavor of butter (but no butter) try the
"Shrimp with ginger and wine" * if you can get fresh crawfish tails it will be even better !

I adore Chinese food and have had a great deal of on-the-spot experience with all regions of Chinese cuisine. Szechuan (Szechwan, Sichuan), is a landlocked province in Western China that has some of the most distinctive food in China (and also the most poorly represented in US Chinese Restaurants, slightly less so in the UK).

There are (to my knowledge) three authentic Szechuan cookbooks available in English:

Mrs. Chiang's Szechwan Cookbook, The Good Food of Szechwan (by Robert Delfs), and more recently Fuchsia Dunlop's Land of Plenty. All three are excellent.

Mrs. Chiang's, despite its age, is (as one reviewer already mentioned) the Szechuan equivalent of Julia Child's Mastering the Art.... There is nothing she neglects to address, and her recipes are foolproof! You think you like Szechuan food now? After cooking from this book, you'll become addicted!

For those who really want to get steeped in Szechuan's cuisine, I recommend getting all the three cookbooks mentioned above.

The Robert Delfs book (The Good Food of Szechwan) is not the easiest to find, but I've been cooking from it for 30 years or so and everything has turned out wonderfully.

The Dunlop book, too, is very authentic, very thorough and I definitely recommend it as well.

My only caveat regarding Land of Plenty is, like most contemporary cookbooks, it's a bit too 'scientific' for my taste. Cooking is a lively art and the general tendency is to make cookbooks too scientific. I'm not by any means against detailed recipes, even some hand-holding, but I don't want to know so much of the 'why', I'd rather know what to look for and when. But that's a personal quibble. Buy all three of these Szechuan cookbooks and you'll be very happy indeed.

I am ethnic Chinese, but we grew up on spaghetti and tacos. My only memories of home-cooked Chinese food was the two years my grandmother lived with us when I was a teen. Nevertheless, she set the standard for me in the area of Chinese home cooking. I bought this book when I graduated from college 27 years go, my first cookbook and one of the first non-textbooks I bought--at full price, no less. It was a big investment for someone neck-deep in student loans, but I knew enough to recognize authenticity when I saw it. I literally learned to cook Chinese food using Mrs. Chiang's book. The recipes turn out dishes that taste just like my grandmother's did. I have since bought many other books on Chinese cooking, but none have been as reliable or authentic as Mrs. Chiang's. The only thing I alter is the amount of oil called for.

Man, I love this book. The recipies are kinda long, but it's easy enough to follow. My fav in the book - 'Pock Marked Ma's Bean Curd'. The one recipie that opened my eyes to the fact tofu can be really, really tastey when the dish is well spiced and given the time to absorb the flavors around it (I think its even better and hotter the next day.)

The hot and sour soup is also excellent -- more like a stew and completely unlike anything I've had in a run of the mill 'chinese food' place.

My sister picked this book up first and one thing she regularly altered was cutting the oil in the recipies, about in half in most instances. Also, for recipies that ask for ground pork, grinding pork loin steaks (fat trimmed) gets you excellent flavor but less fat.

When a recipie asks for fresh water chestnuts, I'd suggest not using canned. The flavor is completely different. Fresh jicima might be a better substitute if you can't get fresh water chestnuts.

I wanted more from this book. It may be because the book concentrates on one region of China, but I thought the recipes were all very similar. I did, however, enjoy reading the stories of Mrs. Chiang's growing up in China. I would be interested in seeing what this book would look like if it were updated, since lots of items are now more readily available than when the book was originally published.

A cooking friend loaned me this cookbook when the first edition was printed in the mid-1970s. I had experimented with Szechwan cooking beginning a few yeas earlier when I bought Robert Delfs' "Good Food of Szechwan" (another amazing book, last reprinted 25 years ago). By the time I got around to buying "Mrs. Chiang," it was gone--and I photocopied virtually the whole borrowed book and used (and shared) the stained, dogeared pages for a decade.

Ten years later and half a continent away, I found it in a stack of remaindered books and bought a pile of them--kept one and gave the rest away to close friends. There are some great recipes in here, particularly "Grand Duke Chicken with Peanuts" and the Ma-Po Dofu recipe mentioned by another reviewer. If you're interested in Szechwan cooking, this is a book you have to have.

I have been looking for a really good Sichuanese cook book for years since I returned from a study abroad adventure from that province years ago. First found the Land of Plenty book that is a newer book, but in reading those reviews, I stumbled upon Mrs. Chiang's Szechwan Cookbook that sounded more authentic. I actually found a first edition of this book at a local used book store (during a sale to boot!) and quickly purchased it. I am thoroughly pleased with this book, and the recipes are reminiscent of my time in Chengdu and having dinner a a friend's house as her mother created some of these dishes. I have to admit though that I tend to make my dishes a lot spicer than her recipes recommend and tend to omit the salt as I live on a low sodium diet (plus the sauces really do have enough salt!) My fiance's favorite dish in the book? The spicy beef noodle stew. Try it if you buy it! ;)

I love this book it has many stains and well read and used. When is the next one comming out!