Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)My parents are Cantonese and I grew up eating home-style food. When I left home for college in the 1980's, I lugged Miller's book with me, hoping to satisfy my ethnic belly. My dad, a professional cook who owned a restaurant, doubted the efficacy of the recipes and he was right -- they were a disappointment! It wasn't that I lacked cooking skills (I spent most of my weekends helping Dad in his kitchen, so I was competent in that way). He thought Miller's understanding of basic cooking principles was less than complete. Take her recipe for Steamed Eggs. Whenever my parents made this dish, the resulting custard was beautifully silky. But when I followed Miller's recipe to the letter, I wound up with a rubbery mat of inedible green protein. Eggs should never be overcooked, and that's what Miller's 'steam for 20-30 minutes' instructions did to them.
I won't go into the gory details about the other recipes I tried. (There was always some crucial bit of knowledge missing that made a mess of a dish.) I suspect Miller didn't actually put the vast majority of her recipes to the test. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that in her zeal to amass 1000 recipes for her opus, she relied too heavily on her sources and then opted not to make the time-consuming effort of actually testing ALL the recipes herself.
At the time I bought this book, it never occurred to me to question the author's accuracy or skill. The sheer mass of the book seemed to be so thorough, so complete. Well, size isn't everything! I have a puny Cantonese cookbook featuring less than 75 recipes, but every single one of them turned out dishes as tasty as anything my folks fed me. (Sadly, this book is out of print.)
Chinese cookbooks have come a long way since Miller got published, so shop around. For homestyle Cantonese cooking, I like and respect Grace Young's "The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen". Her directions and tips produce good food. She also included some folk remedy recipes I've rarely seen in print. (For those of us who remember how our moms used to drink quarts of a special tonic after giving birth to one of our sibs, well, guess what? here's your chance to find out exactly what grandma put into that evil-tasting soup!)
Eileen Yin-Fei Lo also wrote some decent books. I particularly liked "From the Earth: Chinese Vegetarian Cooking". (Her method for cooking Stir-Fry Lettuce was dead on.) As for her most recent work "The Chinese Kitchen" ... well, it IS a beautiful book ... some of her recipes are suitable for every day cooking (I thought her seafood dishes were quick and easy), but a good many of the other recipes were not dishes I'd want to tackle after a long day at work, so I can't recommend these to a beginner. If, however, you are an experienced cook who likes a weekend cooking challenge, then go for it!
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