Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking Author: Visit Amazon's Fuchsia Dunlop Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0393089045 | Format: PDF
Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking Description
Review
“It's a home cook's cookbook, and it shows how with some good produce, a decent pantry, and some basic technique, Chinese cooking is no harder or more foreign than making a plate of pasta or building a salad.”
“[A] workhorse of a book for everyday Chinese cooking... There are so many treasures in here, you can hardly go wrong.”
“The diversity of the dishes—and their simplicity—makes this a remarkable book.”
“Masterly…a non-stop parade of easy-to-execute dishes.”
“Fascinating…brimming with important information…. Trust me, this is gold!”
About the Author
Fuchsia Dunlop was the first Westerner to train at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine, and has been travelling around China collecting recipes for nearly two decades. She writes for the Financial Times, the New Yorker and the Observer, among others. Her previous books include the award-winning Sichuan Cookery and Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper. www.fuchsiadunlop.com / @fuchsiadunlop
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
- Hardcover: 352 pages
- Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (February 4, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0393089045
- ISBN-13: 978-0393089042
- Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 7.5 x 1.4 inches
- Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
I am a long-time Dunlop fan (my "Land of Plenty" is falling apart at this point). Given how much I adore her Sichuan and Hunan cookbooks, I really, really wanted to love this book -- I literally ordered it within five minutes of knowing about its existence! Having explored this book for the last couple of weeks, however, I am very sad to admit that I feel quite "meh" about it.
Most obviously (and as other reviewers have already pointed out), many recipes are repetitions or variants of those contained in her previous books. While this might make the book more complete as a stand-alone cookbook, it gets quite tedious for those of us with complete Dunlop collections.
This book has some minor annoyances, including weight measurements for small amounts of peanuts, ginger, etc. -- I find the teaspoon/tablespoon/ballpark approach from her previous books far more practical. Also, some directions are quite strange: wilting spinach before stir-frying seemed like an interesting idea, but yielded no practical difference (in my opinion).
More disturbingly, I have found that many of the dishes in this book just don't taste that good and/or are very uninteresting. Out of the dishes I've cooked from this book so far, I'd say that about 40% were "meh" (required additional soy sauce/vinegar/sesame oil/chicken powder to be palatable -- probably wouldn't cook them again), 40% were "alright" (will cook them once in a while), and only 20% were "great" (loved it -- will add to my list of frequently repeated favorites). In contrast, I would put the breakdown for Dunlop's other cookbooks at about 5% "meh", 25% "alright" and 70% "great".
I'm a pretty big fan of Fuchsias, having discovered her cookbooks when going through some nasty chinese food withdrawals in Texas after a move from NYC. Having been a chef, and not finding the Chinese food I craved, I set out to create, myself, what I needed. Ms Dunlop's books were by far above and beyond the other books I tried. Unlike most people, I preferred her second book Revolutionary chinese cookbook (Hunan recipes) over Land of Plenty (Sichuan), and when her first new book in seven years was coming out I pre-ordered it asap. It arrived two weeks before its release date (!) and I opened it up to...a recipe I already knew??
General Tso's chicken, on page 122, I didn't need. First of all it's already on page 120 of Revolutionary, and I know it by heart, having cooked it about eight times a year for years. The next recipe I see is Pock-Marked Old Woman's Tofu...Hmm, I know that one too. It's on page 313 of Land of Plenty. Then I read the introduction and she's retelling a story that's in her memoir Shark's fin and Sichuan pepper! Damn, her third cookbook is a greatest hits?
Not quiet. I was shocked at first, but the Pock-Marked tofu was a new vegetarian version, the book is a lot thicker than the last two (and I needed to dig more, I guess), and her General Tso's chicken is so good, it's ok to publish it twice. She noted in the end of her memoir she was thinking of going vegetarian, and a lot of these recipes are light on meat, or none at all. But the main emphases in this book are on lighter, healthier, more cost effective Chinese recipes, not on her own personal diet.
I've already cooked a few recipes, and have read a bunch more, I'm impressed. A lot of work has gone into this book.
Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking Preview
Link
Please Wait...