Great reading; great recipes; just wanted more

The Seventh Daughter

My Culinary Journey from Beijing to San Francisco

 

by Cecilia Chiang, Lisa Weiss

Yes, it's a recipe book and yes, I knew that when I bought it.  But it's also a beautiful, touching memoir.  Cecilia Chiang speaks of her childhood in Bejing, her harrowing journey to live with her uncle in Chongquing during the Japanese occupation of China.  (Chongquing was the war capital of Chiang Kai-shek's exiled government.)  Then she tells of fleeing to Tokyo during the communist revolution and eventually opening a Chinese restaurant there with a group of other expatriates.  Then, last and first, opening The Mandarin in San Francisco.

If these are the kinds of recipes she served there, I want to eat them!  So imagine my disappointment when I realized, they all have meat in them!  Okay, not all.  Of the first eleven recipes in the book, nine have meat in them. One had shrimp and one is a dessert.

I shouldn't have been surprised. For one thing, many of them are restaurant dishes. And for another, she grew up in a very wealthy family. Her mother observed the rules for certain days (holy days?) to eat only vegetables, but she didn't impose them on her husband or children.  Before the war, I imagine that they ate meat and fish every day. The quantities of it were small compared to the SAD (standard American diet) of today.

Now that I have sources for free-range meat, I should be able to cook a few of them. But I'm not sure about the "good country ham from Smithfield, Virginia" that she says you can substitute for Yunnan ham.

Back to the book--it's a keeper and a re-reader. Often.