Mary Sia's Chinese Cookbook

MARY SIA'S CHINESE COOKBOOK has been a classic of Chinese cookery since it was first published in 1956. Mary Sia was from Beijing and cooked home-style Cantonese food in Hawaii. Mary Sia taught Chinese cooking for so many years in the Richards' Street YWCA that it named its kitchen after her. Some of her recipes are definitely old school, with liberal use of pork caul fat, and recipe names are sometimes un-PC, like the coolie pancakes (aka green-onion pancakes). There are recipes to make your own shrimp chips, steamed buns, oxtail soup, and bitter melon stuffed with pork, as well as Chinese New Year favorites such as dumplings and gau. Jacqueline Newman, founder and editor of Flavor and Fortune (a magazine dedicated to Chinese cooking) who assembled the premier collection of English-language Chinese cookbooks, commented that MARY SIA'S CHINESE COOKBOOK remains one of the finest introductions to home-style Cantonese cooking all these years after Mary Sia first created the recipes. Dr. Newman says, "She was years ahead of her time, a better cook with a better set of taste buds than most folk I know, as well as a better writer." -from the Introduction There are well over 300 recipes, ranging from simple, everyday fare to more elaborate dishes for entertaining, as well as essays by Sia.