When people think of a cookbook, they typically don’t expect much more than recipes and instructions for a delicious meal. This is not the case with The Cooking of China by Emily Hahn.
Published in 1968, this beautifully written cookbook is filled with detailed recipes as well as stories and histories that even many Chinese people nowadays would be surprised to learn of. This rich background of culture and history is the fruit of the author’s experience in China from 1935 to 1941, which is also the most tumultuous of her life.
Without doubt, Emily Hahn’s unique perspective is one of the most important factors that set this cookbook apart from others. With an elegant blend of personal experience, historical context, and artful presentation, she turns what could have been an ordinary cookbook into an artful piece of writing that achieved much more beyond being a successful cookbook.
Emily Hahn was a journalist, author, feminist, and adventurer. Among all the factors, her personal experience is probably the single most important factor that makes the book so unique.
Emily was born in 1905 in a German-Jewish family in St. Louis, Missouri. When she went to college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she was initially enrolled in a general arts program. But she soon switched her course of study to mining engineering after being prevented from enrolling into a chemistry class and told by a professor that “The female mind is incapable of grasping mechanics or higher mathematics” taught in engineering. In 1926, she became the first female student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to receive a degree in Mining Engineering.
In 1935, she was hired to be The New Yorker’s China correspondent and arrived at Shanghai, where she stayed until 1941. It was a period of the Communist revolution and the war against the Japanese, and she made the acquaintance of some most prominent figures in China such as the Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai and even wrote a biography for the influential Soong Sisters. She also became romantically involved with a Chinese poet, Shao Xunmei, and even became addicted to smoking opium because she thought it was “romantic.”
Emily's experience provides a personal touch to the article, which is vital to the book’s lively and dynamic feeling. Many chapters in the book start with a story of either herself or her friend in China, and sometimes one of her experiences would be covered in detail to provide a better understanding for the readers. For instance, in Chapter I: An Ancient and Honorable Art she described in detail a five-course dinner with more than 30 dishes she had at a Chinese court official’s place. In her description of the dinner, not only did she mention the details of each course and food, but she also noted the table manners at the dinner such as most guests “showed their good manners by token sampling of most of the platters—avoiding only those that had troubled their digestions in past.”
Throughout the book, there are many subtle but important details noted by the authors. One such example comes in Chapter II: “Cooking Chinese” in Your Own Kitchen, where she explained in detail how “the ease with which a flame can be adjusted makes gas generally more suitable for Chinese cooking than electricity” because coils of the electric ranges retain their heat longer than do gas burners (p. 42).
Making her personal experience an integral part of the book was an amazing choice to bridge the audience with the topic since the book is targeted mainly toward Western people at a time when many of them might not feel familiar or comfortable with Chinese food. By blending in a personal touch, she managed to close the distance and highlighting some of the most important aspects of Chinese cooking as well.
In addition to Emily’s personal experience, the cookbook also shines in the ample amount of cultural and historical context that is included.
In Chapter I, Emily provides a brief explanation of the history and philosophy of Chinese food, stressing that the special feeling Chinese feel about food comes from their connection to the land, illustrated as “he knows that his life and the lives of his family depend on the soil, crops and weather” (p. 10). In a later chapter, she mentioned the Chinese people’s connection to not only food themselves, but also the instrument of enjoying the food—chopsticks: “Chinese will tell you that they can guess many things about a person from the way he handles his chopsticks. If he places them across his rice bowl between bouts of eating, it indicates that he is a boatman, for this is considered a good omen in navigation.”
In Chapter IV: A Reverence for Good Food, the author spent eight pages diving into the Chinese philosophies of food. She mentioned briefly about some myths and histories ranging from 2000 B.C to 11th century to 18th century, but the majority of the discussion is about chefs and cooks roughly at the same time of the writing, with the author acknowledging knowing many of them personally. These philosophies, including dedication to learning the art of making food, the dynamic balance when making the food, and the spirit to fight the harshest poverty and famine even helped me as a Chinese greatly in the understanding of Chinese food, and I believe no matter who is reading the book, she/he is most likely to gain a much more complete understanding of Chinese food and even the food itself. The author’s historical and cultural narrative made it clear that it’s never just about the food, but the people that write the poems of their lives in the form of food.
Emily’s personal experience and the abundance of historical and cultural contexts provide the book with great contents, but without the artful presentation, the book would never be as polished and pleasant to read as it is.
Unlike a normal cookbook, The Cooking of China is organized in chapters, with each chapter having a specific theme. All but the first chapter have an introductory text about the theme going to be introduced in the chapter, followed by several dishes that are related to the theme. Up to the discussion now it almost feels like we are talking about a historical document than a cookbook, but the recipe part of the book is just as elegant and artful.
Most entries of the recipes are in the form of a concise paragraph—typically no more than half of a page—that consists of two to three parts such as “Prepare Ahead”, “To Cook”, “Variations” and “Notes”. On the side of the book is the corresponding ingredient list of recipes with details about the amount for each of the ingredient. Although the recipes are concise in length, they are still filled with adequate details while managing to feel like natural language at the same time. An example comes from the “Jellied Fish” in the fourth chapter: “With a small, sharp knife, skin the fish by making a small slit at the base of the tail and peeling off the skin from tail to head. Carefully turn the fish over and skin the other side similarly.” Some, but not all of the dishes come with one or more pictures depicting either the look of the finished dish or the process of making them.
These photos look distinct in their style of old film photography, but they are nonetheless beautiful photographs and the aged looking actually adds a unique, oil-painting-like feeling to them in a positive way. The best of the photos, however, do not come with the recipes, but with the content in the first half of each chapter. Some remarkable ones are an overlook of a small Hong Kong shop selling dried food ingredients (p. 79), a picture of two rows of tea leaves and two rows of tea brewed from them to show the range of colors produced by different brewing processes (p. 139), a portrait of a four-year-old boy learning to use chopsticks under the amused smile of his mother (p. 45) and a photo of a nine-dish all-vegetable meal eaten by Buddhists in the garden of West Forest Monastery (p. 64).
These pictures, along with many traditional Chinese paintings presented in the book, making the book feels almost like a textbook for an elective course in Chinese culture. They support the textual representation from the author’s beautiful writing and together the texts and images create harmony for the book, making the book in its complete and polished form we now see.
The Cooking of China is an old book, but surprisingly is how natural and comfortable the flow of the book feels like. Among all other factors, Emily’s unique personal experience, the historical and cultural contexts she chose to include, and the deliberate presentation are definitely the most important ones. As the reader turns the pages, it feels as if the book has a soul, and that it’s trying to communicate with you rather than give you instructions on how to cook. The wide selection of topics in the book and the natural flow of the content makes it pleasant to read outside of looking for instructions of making a meal, and with the ingenious use of various forms of presentation, the book is elegant, polished, and is much more than merely a successfully cookbook.