Chinese food is supposed to look good, taste good, and do you good. Now Taiwan's celebrity cooks are highlighting presentation on both the screen and the printed page.
Whether they like Chinese cuisine or loathe it, most Westerners have a pretty fair idea of what it involves--or at least, think they do. They imagine an arcane art dominated by implements and methods that have remained more or less unchanged for centuries, with the ubiquitous wok playing the leading role in a kitchen where exotic spices and hard-to-find seasonings are used to concoct a rich variety of dishes. And of course, depending on the individual's degree of exposure to Chinese movies, the whole production is presided over either by a benign grandmotherly figure or a malevolent male chef whose chief delight is to torture his underlings.
Well, the time has come to kiss those preconceptions goodbye. Taipei's culinary world is changing fast, and nowhere is that more true than in the realm of cookbooks and television programs about all things tasty and nutritious.
Taiwan is scarcely unusual when it comes to the explosion in cookbookery. Nobody entering any of the big bookstores in major cities on the island can fail to be dazzled by the variety of books about food on display. From introductions for beginners to specialized know-how about the preparation of cocktails and desserts, readers at any level can always find a cookbook to suit individual tastes and skills.
Traditionally, the major force in the Chinese cookbook market used to be collections of recipes by eminent writers and gourmets such as Fu Pei-mei (傅培梅), Liang Chiung-pai (梁瓊白), and Hwang Shu-huei (黃淑惠). Typically, their locally published recipe books would be replete with pages of pictures of mouthwatering dishes printed on heavy, high-quality paper complete with step by step instructions. Such large-format books tended to be weighty in more ways than one--they adopted a serious approach to their subject and at between NT$290 and $550 (US$10.50-$20.00) cost rather more than the average Chinese-language paperback.
But the appearance of such cookbooks is undergoing a radical transformation, along with the image of those who write them. A Chinese kitchen used to be the exclusive preserve of the hostess, and so except for a few male professional chefs the cookbook market was long dominated by women. Recently, however, two male amateurs have triumphantly broken down the walls of the citadel. Not only that--they appear on television, where they have become popular personalities.
Take the surprisingly youthful Chen Hung (陳鴻), for example, whom many women believe is as good to look at as the dishes he so lovingly prepares. Chen, in his early thirties, was born in Hsinchu county and brought up in a big family. After graduating from college, he took a variety of jobs with a recording company, two broadcasting companies, and the China Times newspaper. Now he hosts his own cooking show on TVBS, one of Taiwan's most popular cable TV companies.
Chen's father and grandfather both loved cooking, so it is hardly surprising that he developed an interest in it at an early age. Through often helping out in the kitchen, he also learned about traditional Taiwanese home-style cooking from his mother, grandmother, and aunts. This year saw the publication of Chen's first cookbook, Chen Hung Does the Cooking. Apart from the Taiwanese and Japanese-style recipes he learned from his family, such as bitter melon salad, five-spice meat fingers in thick soup, mashed taro with fried green onion, and chicken cooked in wine, Chen's cookbook also includes a few exotic recipes of his own. For example, one calls for the addition of milk and coconut powder to sweet potato rice, and another involves sprinkling fried fresh rose petals on steamed pomfret.
When asked where he learned these new variations on old tricks, Chen replies that he would occasionally eat out in restaurants recommended by gourmet friends and, on returning home, experiment with likely ingredients in the hope of coming up with dishes tasting like the ones he had just sampled. Most of his recipes are successful examples of such experimentation.
Actually, Chen's recipes form only a small part of the overall package. They mostly involve a series of easy steps in which he is not afraid to make full use of the full panoply of modern gadgets available to today's cook, including Western-style electric ranges, the microwave oven, and food processors. But to understand the real joy of what he does you have to read the whole cookbook, which, with its exquisite photos of each beautifully garnished dish occupying one whole page, is a tribute to the designer's art. By carefully choosing harmonizing plates and cutlery, and paying close attention to floral table decorations, Chen seems to have perfected the art of packaging an entire culinary culture. He frankly admits that he has deliberately set out to present an "attitude to eating."
Chen's book, with its emphasis on flowers as both ingredients and adornments, gives substance to the fantasies of a young male romanticist. Preceding each recipe are a few lines of poetry or prose connected in some way with the often quixotic names he gives his dishes, while at the end he frequently adds notes about the nutritional and healing effects of the food according to the principles of Chinese medicine.
This romanticism spills over into his personal philosophy of food. Chen feels that we should treasure each moment of a meal taken with families or friends. He believes that any meal has the potential to create beautiful memories of love or friendship in the making, and that such memories deserve to be cherished, noting that our feelings about food are composed of many factors apart from the straightforward one of taste, and when he thinks back to the meals his grandmother cooked at home, they seem to him to symbolize the love she felt for her grandchild.
But for all his charm and good looks, Chen does not hold the field alone. Another man who recently published a book about cooking but hardly fits into the preconceived notion of a master chef is Lee Khan (李崗), who seems today's equivalent of a Renaissance man. He has worked as a crewman on a deep-sea trawler, peddler, gift-shop owner, and self-employed businessman, and now he writes screenplays and hosts a TV show about fashion. Describing himself as a "rolling stone," Lee says he has so far made his way through life by a process of trial and error, but for the time being, he views writing and cooking as the two wellsprings of his happiness.
Lee admits to having had absolutely no idea what cooking was about before he went to the United States to visit his brother, the famous international film director Ang Lee (李安) of The Wedding Banquet and Sense and Sensibility fame. Lee recalls how on his first night in America his brother cooked dinner. "I had mixed feelings when I came to taste the food, because he'd never done that when he was in Taiwan," Lee says. But the food was wonderful--so wonderful, in fact, that Lee was moved to offer to do the washing up. The whole experience helped him realize that there was no fixed rule that only women should cook and do the dishes--family duties should be shared.
Of his cookbook entitled It Feels Good to Cook, Lee says, "Rather than just selling recipes, I'm marketing the concept of a man cooking for his family. Besides, I want to share with my readers the joy cooking gives me." He explains his personal philosophy of cooking in this way: "Though my happiness is rooted in my family, I still need my own time and space. When I'm alone in the study or kitchen, I enjoy having command of my territory. Writing and cooking are both creative activities, but they are totally different in nature. For example, reactions to my writing come long after I've finished, but my family's feedback on my cooking is immediate."
Like Chen Hung's work, Lee's cookbook is much more than a bare collection of recipes. Actually, there are only sixteen recipes, all meriting the description of good plain home cooking, and Lee says his main purpose is simply to help readers overcome psychological obstacles to operating in the kitchen. But since the dishes necessitate use of a wide range of cooking methods and include nearly all the most commonly encountered ingredients, Lee claims that anyone who studies his instructions can get a proper grounding in the wonders of Chinese cooking.
Lee's book is actually more of a collection of essays than a source of recipes. In his writings he deals with the contrast between the cultures of East and West, and the changing relationship between the sexes. Lee argues that, given the obvious biological differences, men and women will only achieve true equality after they have won the right to do the same things. Men should be free to do what are usually thought of as women's jobs, just as women are now sharing financial responsibilities within the family. In short, he is an advocate of equal rights, and he is quick to pay tribute to his wife's contribution to his own career.
"If she didn't go to the office to work, I would never be able to do my 'dream job' of writing screenplays," he admits. (Lee has twice won the annual prize offered by the Government Information Office for Best Movie Screenplay.) His wife brings home the bacon, in other words--but it is Lee who cooks it. "My skills improved a lot after I took cooking classes," says Lee, who at one time even considered opening a restaurant. "For me, the joy of cooking comes mainly from just doing it, and the knowledge that my family is going to enjoy the food. You can't buy the satisfaction that comes from cooking for your family. Men and women are increasingly sharing family chores." If his book's popularity is any indication, his ideas may be catching on fast.
So does this mean that men are relentlessly taking over the Taiwan culinary scene? By no means. In a way, every cookbook published on the island is a kind of tribute to the woman who set the benchmarks: Fu Pei-mei. For the past thirty-five years, Fu, one of Taiwan's most popular and prolific food writers and broadcasters, has been presenting her popular TV show, Fu Pei-mei's Time. The program has broadcast more than 4,000 recipes and claims to be the world's longest-running cooking program.
The initial success of Fu's show quickly led to publication of her first cookbook, published simply as The TV Recipes. Since then she has published about thirty more, translated from Chinese into Japanese and English, and now even has her own publishing company. A glance at the titles shows the breadth of her expertise: introductions to regional dishes of mainland China, home-style Chinese cooking, Chinese snacks and desserts, lunch box recipes, vegetarian recipes, "mini" cookbooks, and recipe cards.
Fu has created many original recipes, but she also devotes a considerable amount of attention to traditional aspects of Chinese cooking. In ancient times, when means of transportation on the mainland were few and far between, each region made the best use it could of indigenous products. Consequently, several main types of Chinese cuisine evolved and they are customarily grouped under five main headings: Peking, Hunan, Shanghai, Szechuan, and Cantonese. Fu's first series of cookbooks was an attempt to cover the principal recipes of those regional cuisines.
Merely browsing through one of Fu's cookbooks gives great pleasure. Interspersed with beautifully composed photographs of delicious meals are comprehensive lists of necessary ingredients and clear, concise instructions on how to prepare them. The author frequently offers helpful suggestions about how to select fresh ingredients or find adequate substitutes: for example, using modern oven wrap as an alternative to lotus leaves in a centuries-old dish.
Fu's numerous books all have one thing in common--they are extremely user-friendly. Each contains a section with illustrations of the ingredients covered in the book, along with basic cooking implements. An added bonus is that each of her publications is now printed in a bilingual Chinese-English edition. But there is one curious area of omission. Fu has never used a microwave oven to cook her famous dishes. While regarding today's microwaves as useful when it comes to reheating food, Fu says they cannot hope to copy the numerous cooking methods used in preparing Chinese cuisine, nor can they reproduce the unmistakable aromas of green onion and garlic sizzling in the wok.
To Hsiao Yi-chuan (蕭義娟), on the other hand, microwave ovens do not present a problem. Since the late 1980s, Hsiao has published nine microwave cookbooks, hosted a cooking show for TVBS, and taught microwave cooking in shows for two local radio broadcasting companies. Born in 1954 in Hsinchu, south of Taipei, Hsiao started writing microwave recipes for the magazine Family Monthly in 1989. Later, she began to write regularly for the Taiwan edition of Marie Claire as well.
There was nothing particularly promising about Hsiao's first contact with the world of the microwave: one of her friends got a job selling them and she wanted to help him out. As a first step, she taught herself microwave cooking techniques. After numerous experiments and failures she eventually accumulated enough experience to begin teaching microwave cooking classes in several locations across the island.
At first, it was an uphill grind. Most housewives viewed microwave ovens with some suspicion, thinking them newfangled and of dubious safety. Few saw any way in which they could be used to cook traditional Chinese cuisine. In order to surmount these preconceptions, all of Hsiao's cookbooks begin with short articles on such topics as how to choose a microwave oven, what utensils can be used in them, safety factors, the general principles of microwave cooking, and techniques that are peculiar to the genre.
An important difference between her books and those of Fu Pei-mei is that because not all recipes are suitable for microwave cooking, it is impossible for microwave recipes to follow the most popular main schools of Chinese cuisine. Nevertheless, Hsiao's microwave cookbooks, printed in standard format with pages of glossy photographs, are as delightful as they are practical.
"There's nothing you can't cook in a microwave oven," Hsiao maintains, "as long as you use the right utensils." For pan-frying, baking, and deep-frying, she recommends a browning skillet. "The metal is specially designed to maintain the heat and shorten cooking times," she says.
Surprisingly, Hsiao has even found a way of bringing out the aroma of garlic and scallion in the microwave. "I put oil and chopped garlic, ginger, or scallion in a Corningware porcelain cup," she explains, "and cook it on high heat without a cover for three minutes. To avoid spillages, make sure the cup is dry and clean."
She also likes to use a microwave for steaming. "Except for breads, and snacks made with flour, you don't need to stand the food on a rack over boiling water," she says. "The only thing to remember is always to keep the food covered or wrapped in plastic film. Or you can put the food in a heat-resistant bag."
But how does the microwave fit in with Chinese traditions? For example, many Taiwan people believe that only a whole chicken should be offered when making sacrifices to Taoist deities and ancestors. Hsiao understands this, but even then she recommends using the microwave. "It's better than using boiling water," she points out, "because the chicken tends to lose all its flavor into the water. It only takes about twenty to thirty minutes to steam a whole chicken in the microwave, depending on the size of the bird. Just remember to wrap it in microwavable plastic wrap."
Hsiao accepts that microwave ovens are not suitable for every cooking process--cakes are better baked in a conventional oven, where it is easy to check progress, and many dishes are best deep-fried in a wok over an easily adjustable flame--but says she has no intention of giving up on microwave cooking. "You don't get grease and thick fumes with a microwave," she points out. "It's easier on the cook. I believe in a happy cook cooking delicious meals. For people like me who hate grease and having to clean the kitchen afterward, the microwave oven is an essential appliance."
On the topic of cleanliness, Hsiao has even devised her own solution to the often-raised problem of how to keep a microwave oven smelling sweet. "To prevent odor, stand a glass of cold water containing unused tea leaves or lemon slices in the oven, and cook over high heat for about five or ten minutes. Let the steam stay in the oven for a while before wiping the inside with a clean cloth. If you haven't cleaned your oven in a while, leave the door shut for several hours, so that any bad smells can be completely absorbed by the tea or lemon water."
Taiwan's purists, brought up on a diet of mother's home cooking and sacred recipes, must be shaking their heads in wonder. Microwave ovens steaming whole fowls in readiness for the gods; men cooking for their families and bragging about it; and Chen Hung beguiling would-be cooks with poetry.... Whatever next? One thing's for sure: the once-arcane world of the Chinese cookbook will never be quite the same again.