Memories of China in South Wales

Useful books

The Encyclopedia of Regional Chinese Cooking

Kenneth Lo

1985

Hennerwood Publications Ltd

This book is special to me. It is the first cookbook I remember my parents cooking regularly from. Each chapter is a different region in China and the famous and most popular recipes of that area. It is divided into The North: Peking, The East: Shanghai, The South: Canton and The West: Szechuan. It includes a list of ingredients to stock your pantry with, which I remember my parents following. Regular trips to the local mini-mart would yield such exotic treasures as black bean sauce, yellow bean sauce, hoisin and oyster sauces. We would produce such culinary beauties as Shredded pork with yellow bean paste, Chow Mein, Crispy fried shredded beef, emerald fried rice and black bean beef with Ho-Fan noodles.

The recipes are easy to follow, although some require the meat to be coated in egg white and cornflour, which can be messy and some require a pint of oil for frying in a wok which can be dangerous. The sauces will stay with me forever and I often use the sauce for chow mein with other dishes. Quails' eggs on toast with mashed shrimp was a particularly tasty recipe, basically sesame prawn toasts with the addition of ham and hard boiled quails' eggs.

There are some recipes in the book I have always wanted to try but have not yet attempted. Boneless duck with eight precious stuffing looks amazing on the photograph, requiring a boned duck and a stuffing made from such Chinese delicacies as lotus seeds, dried shrimps and glutinous rice.

The chow mein, however, will always be a winner. It requires egg noodles to be first boiled and drained and then to be deposited into a clean, dry bowl to await two tablespoons of oil, heated in a separate pan, to be poured over, stirred well and then tipped back into a hot wok for a final cook. This results in incredibly crisp noodles which are placed in a warming oven waiting for the sweet, sour and meaty sauce to be spooned on top.

I loved this book so much that I 'borrowed' it to take to college with me, where it successfully helped me gain a reputation as a good cook. Dinner parties with chicken and cashew nuts and beef steak Cantonese style were a big hit and eagerly devoured before the main course of alcohol and games of: "Let's call two taxis and hide when they come"! which is the British student way.

An attempt at steamed pearl balls over Chinese mushrooms left my fellow student housemates in disbelief at two hours of cooking resulting in a sticky, over-steamed mess that was thrown away

This book was so cherished and used that eventually it began to fall apart with oil - stained pages and rips and tears at crucial ingredient lists or methods. I desperately needed a new copy and was devastated when I learned it was no longer in print. I scoured the net and found a supplier on Amazon who had a used copy which turned out to be good as new.

Now, happy and secure in the knowledge that I have a reputable, no -nonsense Chinese cookbook once again, I can create these wonders for my husband, who fondly remembers the drunken dinner parties of aromatic soy sauce, noodles and sauces thickened with cornflour and sugar.