To eat a Chinese meal is to enjoy one of the truly delicious pleasures of life. The Chinese are artists when it comes to presentation, seasoning and combining, and their greatest skill is in choosing the freshest and most wholesome foods, and making the most of them. Chinese Cookery Secrets reveals exactly how the magic is accomplished. Written over fifty years ago, this is an authentic book on Chinese home cooking that is both a practical cookery book and a work of culinary history and culture that explains Chinese food preferences and describes the entire culinary process, beginning with the selection of ingredients and the best way to shop for them, preparation, Chinese utensils, the merits of different cooking methods, seasoning and menu composition before proceeding to the recipes themselves which are classified in fifteen different categories, displaying the variety of Chinese edible delights. These include recipes for meat, poultry, game, sea food, fish, noodles, vegetables and sweet-sour dishes as well as special sections on chafing dish and sandy pot cookery. The directions are thorough, and Chan includes social and historical information relating to Chinese food and cooking throughout the text, which is lavishly illustrated with line drawings of ingredients to aid identification when shopping. The variety of dishes, background knowledge and detailed instructions from start to finish introduce the reader to a golden age of Chinese home cookery.
