Chinese Cookbook Recommendations

[Banco]

I love Fuchsia Dunlop's Land of Plenty, which I think does for Chinese cooking what Julia Child did for French Cooking in Mastering the Art. However, it focusses only on Szechuan cuisine, and my wife and kids do not always like to bring a fire extinguisher to the table when they eat. I see that Dunlop now has a book out on Hunan cuisine (Revolutionary Chinese Cooking). has anyone used this? Any other suggestions for similarly authoritative cookbooks for Chinese cuisine?

[synaesthesia]

Pei Mei is very much the Julia Child of China/Taiwan. Walk into any Chinese home and you will see a copy of one of the three in the series. Seems like Amazon doesn't sell them... but they have them here

[Sthitch]

Chinese food is one of the few things I use cookbooks for, however, I am getting better at improvising. The first one that I always reach for to get ideas is Pearl Kong Chen's Everything You Want to Know About Chinese Cooking. If you can find it I would definitely pick it up.

[ol_ironstomach]

Pei Mei is very much the Julia Child of China/Taiwan.

...

they have them here

Just curious...has anyone tried buying Pei Mei's books from Chinasprout? They appear to be based in NYC at least, but I'm also curious which edition they're selling.

[thistle]

I like Martin Yan's Chinatown Cooking, The Breath of a Wok-Grace Young, China Moon Cookbook-Barbara Tropp, & Fragrant Harbor Taste-Ken Hom. I also have the other Fuchsia Dunlop book, but I don't believe I've cooked anything from it yet.

[comestibles]

Just curious...has anyone tried buying Pei Mei's books from Chinasprout? They appear to be based in NYC at least, but I'm also curious which edition they're selling.

I bought a copy of Volume I many years ago but not from Chinasprout. I purchased it locally. The cover picture is different from the one shown in the link and my copy has 400 pages vs the 362 pages stated in the link. I didn't know that there were different editions.

[ol_ironstomach]

Just curious...has anyone tried buying Pei Mei's books from Chinasprout? They appear to be based in NYC at least, but I'm also curious which edition they're selling.

To answer my own question (having just unpacked the carton), Chinasprout has some difficulty getting restocked regularly, but managed to fill my order for all three volumes after a few weeks' delay. This is the new edition from 2005, edited by two of Pei Mei's adult children and a former protege, and fully rephotographed. Compared to a 1970s edition, the page count is slightly lower, and the recipe counts are close but not identical. The original alternated signatures between photographic plates and text pages on two grades of paper; the new edition takes advantage of modern typography and is illustrated throughout.

More to the point, it seems to have been out of stock there since at least October (and pretty much every other time that I've looked), but they currently have inventory.

ETA: this is a pretty major revision, with the procedures updated for modern kitchens. Some of the historical methods have been edited out, simplifying the text. The Cantonese roasted pork recipe, for instance, no longer assumes that you have a charcoal oven. (For the record, the earlier edition addressed the issue by including a footnote adapting the recipe to appliance-type ovens.) The English translations now use commonly recognizable names for ingredients, with names re-Romanized in Pinyin where applicable.