In the original dust jacket. Black cloth binding with red title on the spine.

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• Note: This book carries a £5.00 discount to those that subscribe to the F.B.A. mailing list

For conditions, please view our photographs. A nice clean rare copy from the library gathered by the famous Cambridge Don, computer scientist, food and wine connoisseur, Jack Arnold LANG. Jack founded the Midsummer House, Cambridge’s paramount restaurant. This dining experience is hidden amongst the grassy pastures and grazing cattle of Midsummer Common and perched on the banks of the River Cam.

Explanations of Chinese cooking techniques and tools also show how to adapt them to the contemporary American kitchen, while recipes encompass the full range of main dishes, appetizers, dim-sum, and soups.

Review:

• Barbara Tropp lived in Taiwan, where she ate and learned all about real Chinese food. Yes, real Chinese food is time consuming. Today there are shortcuts, and some shortcuts work better than others. Mom used to spend about 6 hours a day cooking (this is considered normal in Chinese families). To spend time in the kitchen to prepare nutritious balanced family meals is no small task. Needless to say, I grew up on real Chinese food. I didn’t get a chance to learn all of Mom’s cooking before she moved on, and this book managed to fill in the gaps. Barbara’s explanations are great because she starts from the point of view of a beginner, explaining everything in detail. I really like that. It is those tips (usually considered to be common knowledge, and therefore skipped by many cookbooks) that makes the difference. I wholeheartedly recommend this book. I find that many people today don’t want to spend time preparing meals that have nutrition. And Americans don’t spend enough time eating at the dinner table. Some American friends I know spend only 15-20 minutes eating dinner, just chowing down, not appreciating the food. Real food takes time to prepare from scratch. I personally believe that real food made from scratch is nourishing, the way God intended for us to eat. We are meant to enjoy our food – eating with pleasure and relish, that’s the way God intended for us. If we are meant to eat just for nutrition, why do we have taste buds and different tastes? There’s no point in that if we are not meant to enjoy food. And if God meant for us to enjoy what we eat, we should spend at least 40-50 minutes per meal eating. It takes that long to thoroughly chew our food, tasting each bite, and enjoy. It is the enjoyment, appreciation, and thoroughly chewing, that we get the maximum nutrition out of our meals. Most food (packaged, bottled, even frozen) have so much sodium benzoate, preservatives, MSG, E221 (sodium sulphites), these are all chemicals put into the food to prolong shelf life (this is a strict mandate from the FDA – foods packaged must have preservatives). Even fresh meats that are not locally produced must have preservatives in them in order to be shipped out of state. Our population is getting sicker and sicker from all these chemicals (and creating havoc with our medical system). So eat real food. Spend time preparing, eating. For those people who don’t care about eating, don’t pay any attention to this review.

• I think this a super book. However, it is definitely not a good introduction for the novice. The recipe instructions are about the clearest and (by far) the most detailed of any I have come across but the whole book has obviously been written with on assumption that the reader has a good bit of experience in the kitchen. There are no photographs in this book and, while I normally subtract stars from my ratings on that basis, the deficiency does not count for much here. What really makes this book so good is the detailed discussion about techniques and the history of certain dishes. There is a lot of interesting stuff in here and this book is definitely a gem in my collection. In particular, I was very interested to read what this author had to say about ‘fish-flavor’ dishes at page 195. I don’t recall ever seeing this explanation of how the name arose in any other book (and I am not sure I am convinced) but I think it is this sort of thing that will make the book appeal to all serious ‘foodies’. I also should add that I was pleased to see each recipe name and section heading rendered in Chinese characters (although the translations are not always direct). A great purchase all things considered.

• This is my go-to cookbook. Tropp opened a restaurant in San Francisco that was very popular, until her untimely death from breast cancer. One of two Princeton graduate students (Chinese Literature) to write wonderful Chinese Cookbooks. The other is by Robert Delfs, titled The Good Food of Szechuan.

Barbara Tropp (1948 – October 26, 2001) was an American orientalist, chef, restaurateur, and food writer. During her career, she operated China Moon restaurant in San Francisco and wrote cookbooks that popularized Chinese cuisine in America. China Moon’s accompanying cookbook is credited with being one of the first fusion cuisine cookbooks. She was the 1989 recipient of the Who’s Who of Food & Beverage in America James Beard Award. Tropp was called “the Julia Child of Chinese cooking.”