Customer Reviews

The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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!

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.

Our family has used this book for Chinese cooking extensively since 1965. This is the most useful book on the market because it includes descriptions of all of the basic methods of Chinese cookery as well as complete information on buying and storing special ethnic ingredients. The recipes are simple to use and each method may be mastered in turn. If I had to choose one Chinese cookbook this would be it. In 1965, before everyone was cooking Chinese food, I went to a hardware store in New York's Chinatown to buy my basic equipment. I was carrying this book. The Chinese proprietor stopped me to say that he had just bought this book for his Americanized daughter so that she should not forget her heritage. He thought the book was that good. I do too.

I was packing my cookbooks in preparation for some kitchen remodeling and, for the umpteenth time I found myself paging through Gloria Miller's opus magnus on Chinese cooking. This is probably the most worn out book on the shelf - stained, dog-eared, scribbled in, and every other horrible thing that could happen to a book that is normally open when cooking. I still love this book, although I've absorbed enough knowledge over 30 or so years of using it so that it has had a chance to rest.

There are countless chapters on ingredients, techniques, tools and everything else one needs to know. And an unending supply of recipes and variations on recipes. All of this is done in a well-written, reader friendly style that engages the budding Chinese cook and unfolds a whole new world of cooking. I don't know if there really are a thousand recipes here, but I can testify that I have eaten at least a thousand meals that were cooked based on these pages.

When this cookbook was written, Chinese food stapes that we take for granted today were often hard to come by. To overcome this, Miller spends a considerable amount of time on substitutes. This is still important today, even when all the key spices are readily available on the internet. One you grasp the principles, almost anything is eligible for a trip to the wok.

This is one of those landmark cookbooks. Dating back to the beginnings of the popularity of oriental cooking, it has been the mainstay of a generation of cooks. While most cookbook's tend to alternate chitchat with recipes and a smattering of explanation, Miller's book is a primer on the theory of Chinese cooking that contains a whole spectrum or information. If you want to get past the occasional stir-fry, this is your best roadmap.

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...

`The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook' by Gloria Bley Miller is the kind of book which I am inclined to overlook, in spite of the glowingly complementary blurbs on the cover from Craig Claiborne and Ann Willan. I always expect that such books trade off quality for quantity and that with all the effort expended to make the magic number in the title, I am inclined to believe there is little energy left for quality material. This prejudice is odd, because I often refer to this book for Chinese recipes over highly celebrated and more recent volumes by Barbara Tropp (`The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking'), Virginia Lee and Craig Claiborne (`The Chinese Cookbook') and Eileen Yin-Fei Lo (`The Chinese Kitchen'). Two things lead to my overcoming my prejudice and doing a full review of the book. The first was my positive take on Michelle Scicolone's `1000 Italian Recipes' (even though I think Mario Batali's new `Molto Italiano' is somewhat better) and a warmly positive reference to Ms. Miller's tome in Sylvia Lovegren's "Fashionable Food'.

As I already said, one of the most distinctive things about Ms. Miller's book is the fact that her recipes tend to be simpler than other leading cookbooks. This is probably a good thing if you are already an experienced cook; however, I think the other authors do amateurs a great service by going into much greater detail on important architypical recipes, very similar to the model set by Julia Child in `Mastering the Art of French Cooking'. So, while the other books may have one or two detailed recipes for Lo Mein, Ms. Miller will give us twelve (12) recipes for the same dish. And, she doesn't stop there. Each recipe of the thousand are given with one, or, more likely, several variations. Thus, this legion of recipes becomes multiplied to form a great web of interlocking recipes, techniques, and menus.

Aside from the recipes, one of the most distinctive aspects of the book is the emphasis it places on the Chinese style of eating. Unlike French and Italian traditions, the Chinese meal has no `main course'. Like Korean and Japanese dining, it is based on a lot of little dishes, with relatively little meat, and certainly very little beef, if any.

For as large as the selection of recipes is, the author still takes a lot of space to discuss important Chinese techniques, ingredients, and basic preparations. I was especially interested in the section on stocks. The basic technique was indistinguishable from a common French method. In fact, it even seems to improve on some French inspired techniques. Best of all, the cooking time is reasonable, the meat is not overcooked, the vegetables are not cooked too long, and the result should be clear enough to satisfy even a moderately fussy French chef.

One of the big lessons of the book is the fact that while cooking time for a Chinese meal may be shorter than for a French meal, the prep time may be a lot longer, so, the total time comes out to be the same.

The strongest general impression I take away from this book is a confirmation of my notion that the thing which makes both Italian and Chinese cuisines so popular and so diverse is the great many ways in which a relatively simple collection of super pantry items are mixed and matched to form an immense variety of different dishes.

The only thing which turned me off about the book is the praise given to the Chinese cuisine for things which are true of every great cuisine. After reading hundreds of different cookbooks on food from around the world, rapsodies over using fresh, seasonal ingredients can leave me pretty cold.

If you want to make some Chinese dishes now and then to mix things up a bit, and you really know your way around the kitchen, this may be the best book for the job. On the other hand, if you are really interested in MASTERING Chinese cooking techniques, the newer books, especially Ms. Tropp's volume, may be better. If that is your interest, owning at least two of these four books will be a good thing.

Gloria Bley Miller shows her love of Chinese cuisene and its techniques throughout every page of this book. There are examples of every type of cooking along with many examples of substitutions so that you learn the art of Chinese cooking as you progress through the many recipes. I have been using this book as the mainstay of my Chinese kitchen and library. P My family and neighbors have all developed a taste for Chinese food now that I mainly cook in that tradition. Some of our Asian friends wouldn't believe at first that an American had cooked these dishes; they wanted to know who really cooked them. P So a tip of the hat and profound thanks to Gloria for introducing me to living to eat in a never ending adventure of the wonderful tastes awaiting in every menu new and old of this fascinating art of cooking that has spanned centuries in development. P If I could only keep one book in my cooking library, this would be it. Not just for all the valuable information in the book, but also for the fact that Gloria is a great teacher , in that the information and experience end up in your own cooking. P This is the only one out of many Chinese cookbooks I now have where all the pages are falling out from heavy use. I almost hate to buy a new one, this one is like an old friend and has notes on many of the pages

As another reviewer noted, this book is a sort of "Chinese Joy of Cooking." For years, those two books were the only two cookbooks I owned--and I owned this one before the Joy. The recipes are very simple to prepare, and are uniformly delicious. Try the recipe for Almond Cookies--a world apart from the dried-out ones you'll get after a meal in some Chinese restaurants! Between the Joy of Cooking, The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook, and Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, you could eat well for the rest of a very long life.

This is one of the most complete books about any cooking sytle I own. She not only has presented a wonderful book containing recipes. She has given you everything you need to learn chinese cooking, without the Americanized recipes. You find the best recipes here. A great foundation to learn and explorer the world of chinese cooking. A must have. Even my friends parents who grew up in asia love what I learned let me cook some of thier most loved dishes at family functions. Nothing is more enjoyable. Get this book and learn about the Art of Chinese cooking.

This was originally published in the early 70's, when I bought my first copy.As other reviewers have mentioned, my copy is stained from frequent use. I also purchased a copy for my parents, even though they prepared Chinese meals without recipes, they were reminded of other dishes and were impressed with the entire contents...the authenticity of methods and ingredients. I have given this wonderful book to many Chinese food enthusiasts and they also regard it as a sort of 'bible'. These recipes are what we eat at home! I give this collection my very highest recommendation.