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Every Grain of Rice: A Taste of Our Chinese Childhood in America |
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Author:
Ellen Leong Blonder,
Annabel Low
By Clarkson Potter
Average Customer Rating:  
List Price: $25.00
Our Price: $125.00
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Product Description
Fried Green Tomatoes with Flank Steak. Pan-Fried Prawns in Ketchup Sauce. “Stand Back” Chicken. Turkey Jook. Sticky Rice with Sausage and Taro Root. These are the foods that say “family” and “home” to Ellen Blonder and Annabel Low. In Every Grain of Rice they have collected more than 120 outstanding recipes for the delicious homestyle and special occasion dishes they remember so vividly from their childhoods but have rarely found in conventional Chinese cookbooks. Studded with recollections from their years as part of an extended Chinese-American family and with Ellen Blonder’s exquisite watercolor drawings, it is a remarkable debut from two major new talents on the culinary scene.
An aunt and niece who are separated in age by only 16 days, Annabel and Ellen were raised virtually as sisters, dividing their time between Ellen’s family farm and the renowned cafe where Annabel’s father was chef/proprietor. From him, and from their mothers, aunts, and uncles, Ellen and Annabel learned to make such satisfying everyday fare as Steamed Minced Pork, Wonton Soup, and Uncle Bill’s Chow Mein, as well as more elaborate dishes as Sweet-and-Sour Whole Fish and festive bamboo-leaf-wrapped Jeng. Special occasions and family gatherings were marked by steaming trays of dim sum and pork-filled Bao, Low Hop Joe’s glistening Soy Sauce Chicken, and the magnificent Boned Stuffed Duck. In chapters ranging from “Comfort in a Bowl” on soups and jooks to “Fish and Seafood” and “Bearing Gifts,” which features foods for holidays and family celebrations, the authors cover the range of traditional Chinese cooking as it was prepared in their childhood homes. The more than 120 recipes and variations offer careful explanations of unfamiliar techniques along with suggestions for replacing hard-to-find ingredients and lowering the fat count of many dishes, and each recipe and story is illustrated with Ellen’s delightful watercolor paintings.
With a comprehensive glossary of ingredients and detailed listing of equipment and techniques, Every Grain of Rice is a perfect introduction to the art of Chinese cooking and a moving celebration of food and family.
Amazon.com Review
There's something of a warning for all readers in this book: blend too well with the American melting pot and you may lose the way things tasted when you were a child. Such was almost the case with Ellen Blonder and Annabel Low, who grew up together in Chinese families in California. "For all the time we spent helping in the kitchen while we were growing up," Blonder writes, "we missed the next step of mastering the recipes on our own; we lost our connection to the old ways of cooking. We can teach our daughters how to deal with corporations, but we couldn't pass down the simplest technique for dealing with taro root." While compiling a collection of favorite family recipes meant as a wedding gift, Blonder and Low realized there was a deep hole in their heritage: when push came to shove, they really didn't know how their parents had prepared a lot of their favorite foods. Fortunately for their families and any other families that open and use this book, their rediscovery developed into a gem of a book. Blonder's illustrations alone are worth the price of the book. The reminiscences open up a chapter of American immigrant history too often hidden, and the recipes and careful instructions for assembling the dishes bring the special foods of a particular village in China to anyone's table. There may well be better Chinese cookbooks on the market, but Every Grain of Rice is special for the implied invitation to sit down and eat with the two authors, their families, and all their ancestors stretching back in time to the place where the recipes were originally developed. Invitations like that don't show up every day. The experience may turn readers back to their own favorite foods, and their own heritage, and encourage them to save what they can while the information is still available. That, in and of itself, is a very special sauce to add to any dish. --Schuyler Ingle
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Have bought copies for everyone I know who would like to cook Chinese, 2007-06-09
This is a beautiful and touching cookbook. The authors realized in midlife that their Aunties, Parents, and Grandparents were passing on and that they, the next generation, were ill-equipped to pass on the traditions and share the skills of making the food they remembered from when they were growing up. So they set about remedying the situation by cooking with their relatives until they could recreate the recipes and understand the philosophy behind much of the food that has meaning to them.
I am not Chinese, but I grew up in a Chinese area of San Francisco and so have many of the same fondnesses for Chinese cooking, and this book is the first one I have found (and I have MANY Chinese cookbooks!) that has a Tomato Beef Chow Main recipe (and an excellent one, I might add - exactly what I remember from the local restaurants I ate at as a kid).
If you have ever tried to make wontons and failed, try this book. If you enjoy cookbooks which combine short, personal stories with the recipes to give the recipes a context and a meaning, then buy this book.
The illustrations add so much to the amazing recipes, too. This makes an excellent gift for anyone missing Chinese home cooking, or for anyone who has a weakness for dim sum.
The authors also have a book on cooking dim sum which is excellent as well. I prefer this one mostly because I prefer cooking meals to dim sum type foods and because I have such fond memories of so many of these foods, but I found both books easy to follow and both have produced truly excellent results on the first tries.
HIGHLY Recommended.
Just like the food my Grandpa used to cook, 2004-09-22
The best Chinese cookobook bar none. Easy to follow recipes. Taste like the stuff my grandfather used to cook.
This book rocks!, 2004-04-30
Great little stories but the REAL gems are the recipes. Not only do they work, they also deliver in the flavor department!I've been looking for a good char sui pork recipe since I was a teen. I've tried a bunch and I've been burned by them all, except the recipe in this book. Fabulous (and it freezes well too!) Great book.
Getting in touch with my roots, 2002-07-12
After having moved away from home for a number of years, I started to realize and appreciate the important role of food to Chinese culture, family and traditions. Much to my chagrin, I had learned very little about the Chinese family kitchen while growing up. While I was nourished by the comfort foods my mother and aunts had made for us, I had very little knowledge of the mechanics of producing these offerings of love.
Blonder and Low have done an impressive job of bringing back to the memories of my childhood, where food plays such a central role in Chinese family life. I have tried many of the recipes in this book and most of them have turned out just the way I recall my mother making them.
And most of all, the stories and anecdotes demonstrate how Every Grain of Rice inextricably links culture and food to Chinese traditions. The authors recall momentous occasions such as Chinese New Year and donning their "best" clothes; the excitement of receiving little red "luy see".
This book is all about comfort foods. It's about home cooking in the Chinese family. You will rarely find these dishes in a restaurant. My cousin was looking through this book and disdainfully noted how the recipes were so "chop suey". I don't know if his description is correct, but you will rarely find these dishes in a restaurant. Perhaps he was comparing it to the sometimes over-complicated and sophisticated, "gourment-style" Chinese cookbooks. It is certainly not that. It is purely about childhood memories of growing up Chinese in North America.
 Impress Your Friends, 2001-10-05
As the Caucasian parent of children adopted from Asia, I'm always interested in cookbooks that offer a healthy dose of cultural ed along with the recipes. This one does both things beautifully -- I have enjoyed the stories and the pictures very much. I have also made dozens of the included recipes, always with excellent results. (Living in an urban center with easy access to Chinese ingredients helps, but the difficulty level of many of these dishes is not as high as with some other Asian cookbooks I own, and should not be too scary even for beginning cooks.) The ultimate endorsement has to come from Chinese-American friends at the weekend school I attend with one of my kids. After having some of them over for a Lunar New Year party and serving the soy sauce chicken, steamed whole fish, and several other dishes from the book, I have gained a small reputation at the school as "that white woman who can cook Chinese food." The following year I made the steamed New Year's Cake (nian gao, in Mandarin) and took it to weekend school. Two of the faculty actually asked me for the recipe. I vow that one day soon I'm going to get the bamboo leaves out of my freezer, gird my loins, and cook up a batch of those time-consuming Jeng. Authors Ellen and Annabel have convinced me that the results might just be worth the effort.
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.5951
EAN: 9780609601020
ISBN: 0609601024
Label: Clarkson Potter
Manufacturer: Clarkson Potter
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 208
Publication Date: 1998-05-26
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Release Date: 1998-05-26
Studio: Clarkson Potter |
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