Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
80 of 81 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Size Isn't Everything!, May 7, 2002
My parents are Cantonese and I grew up eating home-style food. When I left home for college in the 1980's, I lugged Miller's book with me, hoping to satisfy my ethnic belly. My dad, a professional cook who owned a restaurant, doubted the efficacy of the recipes and he was right -- they were a disappointment! It wasn't that I lacked cooking skills (I spent most of my weekends helping Dad in his kitchen, so I was competent in that way). He thought Miller's understanding of basic cooking principles was less than complete. Take her recipe for Steamed Eggs. Whenever my parents made this dish, the resulting custard was beautifully silky. But when I followed Miller's recipe to the letter, I wound up with a rubbery mat of inedible green protein. Eggs should never be overcooked, and that's what Miller's 'steam for 20-30 minutes' instructions did to them. I won't go into the gory details about the other recipes I tried. (There was always some crucial bit of knowledge missing that made a mess of a dish.) I suspect Miller didn't actually put the vast majority of her recipes to the test. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that in her zeal to amass 1000 recipes for her opus, she relied too heavily on her sources and then opted not to make the time-consuming effort of actually testing ALL the recipes herself. At the time I bought this book, it never occurred to me to question the author's accuracy or skill. The sheer mass of the book seemed to be so thorough, so complete. Well, size isn't everything! I have a puny Cantonese cookbook featuring less than 75 recipes, but every single one of them turned out dishes as tasty as anything my folks fed me. (Sadly, this book is out of print.)
Chinese cookbooks have come a long way since Miller got published, so shop around. For homestyle Cantonese cooking, I like and respect Grace Young's "The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen". Her directions and tips produce good food. She also included some folk remedy recipes I've rarely seen in print. (For those of us who remember how our moms used to drink quarts of a special tonic after giving birth to one of our sibs, well, guess what? here's your chance to find out exactly what grandma put into that evil-tasting soup!) Eileen Yin-Fei Lo also wrote some decent books. I particularly liked "From the Earth: Chinese Vegetarian Cooking". (Her method for cooking Stir-Fry Lettuce was dead on.) As for her most recent work "The Chinese Kitchen" ... well, it IS a beautiful book ... some of her recipes are suitable for every day cooking (I thought her seafood dishes were quick and easy), but a good many of the other recipes were not dishes I'd want to tackle after a long day at work, so I can't recommend these to a beginner. If, however, you are an experienced cook who likes a weekend cooking challenge, then go for it!
|
|
|
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good reference book of the most common dishes, November 16, 2001
I am a first generation chinese-american and love cooking. I bought the book hoping to get a good reference book. I do most of the cooking and was hoping there would be some of the more exotic dishes. The book provides a solid basis for beginners, but it doesn't contain regional dishes that one can find in china town in SF or monterey park in CA. If you're looking for taiwanese, cantonese or schzwan favorites, they're not in this book.
But then again, those dishes (dan dan mien, da bien, wonton noodle soup) are not typically served at your local chinese restaurant outside of CA or NY. If you're looking for an introduction to chinese cooking and don't particularly care to adventure into the exotic regional dishes, this book will serve you well. If you're a food nut like me, it will serve as a nice reference. If you want cookbooks that cover regional recipes, look at your local asian marke, they may have chinese cookbooks which also have english.
|
|
|
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Kindling for a firestorm of Chinese cooking creativity, October 21, 2001
I purchased my own copy of this wonderful cookbook after a friend lent me hers, and I realized I couldn't live without it! Yes, it's really that good. The real power and utility of this cookbook lies not in its 1,000 recipes (which is a claim I suspect is true, though I've not actually counted them). The real value here is that Miller takes the time to present the basics, and then encourages improvisation and creativity. So, for example, while there are dozens of recipes for stir-fried chicken with all manner of vegetable combinations, the reality is that you could do with just one or two of them. Then, just follow the insights presented on prep and cooking time requirements for specific vegetables in the wok, perhaps follow some of her suggested combinations, and then have a ball using what you happen to have on-hand, what's cheap, or what's in-season. For having 1,000 recipes in it, notably absent are some of the popular (perhaps "Americanized") recipes you might find in the typical Chinese restaurant. For example, there's no cashew chicken to be found. But here again, find something close, and do your own thing... Just prepare the chicken and peanuts, use cashews instead, and while you're at it, make your own picks for veggies to go in the dish (or duplicate what your favorite restaurant happens to throw in). This is bound to be one of those cookbooks that shows as evidence of its utility numerous stains of soy sauce and other ingredients on its pages...
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Betty Crocker Editors
by Martin Yan
by Wendy Hobson
by Sunset
See all Editorial Reviews
