CHOP FRY WATCH LEARN
Available now from your preferred bookseller
A spirited new history of Chinese food told through an account of the remarkable life of Fu Pei-mei, the woman who brought Chinese cooking to the world.
In 1949, a young Chinese housewife arrived in Taiwan and transformed herself from a novice to a natural in the kitchen. She launched a career as a cookbook author and television cooking instructor that would last four decades. Years later, in America, flipping through her mother’s copies of Fu Pei-mei’s Chinese cookbooks, historian Michelle T. King discovered more than the recipes to meals of her childhood. She found, in Fu’s story and in her food, a vivid portal to another time, when a generation of middle-class, female home cooks navigated the tremendous postwar transformations taking place across the world.
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In Chop Fry Watch Learn, King weaves together stories from her own family and contemporary oral history to present a remarkable argument for how understanding the story of Fu’s life enables us to see Chinese food as both an inheritance of tradition and a truly modern creation, influenced by the historical phenomena of the postwar era. These include a dramatic increase in the number of women working outside the home, a new proliferation of mass media, the arrival of innovative kitchen tools, and the shifting diplomatic fortunes of China and Taiwan. King reveals how and why, for audiences in Taiwan and around the world, Fu became the ultimate culinary touchstone: the figure against whom all other cooking authorities were measured.
And Fu’s legacy continues. Her cookbooks have become beloved emblems of cultural memory, passed from parent to child, wherever diasporic Chinese have landed. Informed by the voices of fans across generations, King illuminates the story of Chinese food from the inside: at home, around the family dinner table. The result is a revelatory work, a rich banquet of past and present tastes that will resonate deeply for all of us looking for our histories in the kitchen.
PRAISE FOR Chop Fry Watch Learn
"A fascinating, in-depth look at the history and impact of the woman who taught countless mothers and grandmothers how to master Chinese home cooking."
― Kaitlin, Sarah, Bill, and Judy Leung, New York Times best-selling authors of The Woks of Life
"spectacularly good."
― Krishnendu Ray, professor of food studies at NYU and author of The Ethnic Restaurateur
"This is an eye-opening biography that’s well researched from a great storyteller."
― Grace Young, author of Stir-Frying to the Sky’s Edge
"Chop Fry Watch Learn stands as evidence that cooking transcends sustenance when propelled by visionaries like Fu."
― Lucas Sin, chef
"An excellent and long overdue celebration of Fu’s long-lasting influence in kitchens around the world."
― Clarissa Wei, author of Made in Taiwan
"Michelle King makes culinary icon Fu Pei-mei come alive in this long overdue biography."
― Carolyn Phillips, author of At the Chinese Table and All Under Heaven
