One of the themes in the older cookbooks is how a Chinese meal should play out, with multiple dishes, contrasting textures and flavors and a natural progression that will keep the diner at the table for hours!  Well, that’s not going to happen in my house and I suspect it is pretty unrealistic for the average home cook.  Cooking for myself, I have learned to appreciate the simplicity of a one-dish meal… something fun to cook, delicious to eat, beautiful on the plate and satisfying without being overwhelming calorie-wise.  The Chinese recipes I have cooked checked all those boxes.  And one of the joys of cooking for yourself is that you are cooking JUST for yourself and you’re the only person you have to make happy.  And any time you please yourself you have shared something with a person you love, don’t you agree?  And, just maybe, you are practicing and perfecting a dish you will serve to someone else you love someday.  

When you read a good cookbook, you learn something about the author.  You feel that cook’s warmth and personality (or lack thereof).  I can’t read a cookbook without thinking about the cook who wrote the recipe and I have found that these Chinese-American cookbook authors exude generosity as well as precision.  Jim Lee wrote in his cookbook that, “When I was a boy in China – and for generations before my time – our beef came from tough old water buffaloes.”  Wow, that’s something to think about!  Dr. Lee Su Jan’s bio says that he was the director of the YWCA in Peking and rebuilt Futan University after it was destroyed by the Japanese.  And yet Dr. Jan took the time to memorialize his food memories because that was an important part of his amazing life. These venerable cookbook authors shared more than just their recipes in these vintage books; they wrote down their own culinary memoirs and left us a piece of history.  And studying with these old professors will teach you more than just how to make a pretty Chinese dish.