Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by Stephen Brashear

Sandy Chun of Saratoga (left) and Ruth Fong of Los Gatos are promoting an updated version of 'Chinese Cooking: Our Way.'

Chinese cookbook keeps culture alive

By Michelle Jenkins

Almost 30 years ago, a small group of Chinese-American women from throughout Santa Clara County had a few free hours on Sunday evenings while their children attended Chinese school.

They decided to take advantage of this time and formed the Chinese American Women's Club as a way to preserve their heritage for future generations and to get involved in the community.

One way they found to accomplish both goals was through publishing a cookbook a few years later comprised of family favorites and traditional dishes. Their creation, Chinese Cooking: Our Way, sold more than 20,000 copies and raised more than $50,00 for dozens of local and national organizations. This summer, CAWC completed an updated collection the group hopes will be just as popular as the original, if not more.

Chinese Cooking: Our Legacy contains about 375 recipes--some old favorites from the original and some new additions. Recipes have tempting titles like "Grandma Fung's Soy Sauce Chicken," "Sea Cucumber and Black Mushroom" (which can take several days to prepare) and "Four Treasures Chicken." Recipes come directly from the kitchens of local Chinese-American women.

"One thing I really like about the cookbook is that it contains recipes that you're not going to find in a restaurant," said Los Gatos resident and CAWC member Ruth Fong, who contributed five of her favorites. Her contributions include a traditional vegetarian Chinese New Year dish called "Buddha's Delight" as well as a recipe for fried chicken.

"At first I didn't think it would fit [with the other recipes]. But then I realized that it was handed down to me from my grandmother, and that made it special," Fong recalled.

Like the original, the new edition of the CAWC cookbook is meant to be a link to the past. But it also highlights some of the changes that have taken place over the last 30 years. Recipes are no longer attributed to "Mrs. Philip Gee" but to "Mary Gee." And while all of the original 300 recipes were typed by hand on clunky typewriters, in this edition both text and images were laid out on computer.

Another changing element over the years is the availability of many of the ingredients. Even such exotics as bird's nests for "Bird's Nest Soup" come preprocessed and packaged ("no more plucking out the feathers by hand," Fong commented), and items such as shitake mushrooms are found at any supermarket.

All the important ingredients that went into the original can still be found in what Fong calls "our cookbook for the 20th century." Both books are labors of love that took a great deal of time and effort on the part of everyone involved. "We took two years to put this together," Fong explained, "because we wanted everything to be just right."

Like its predecessor, this cookbook is designed to have an impact on people's lives beyond the culinary knowledge it contains. Proceeds from the $25 book support organizations such as Self-Help for the Elderly, San Jose Beautiful Earth Day, the San Jose Historical Museum, and Agnews Developmental Center.

And perhaps, just as daughters of the original authors now contribute their own recipes, the next generation of Chinese-American cooks will make their contribution with a collection for the 21st century.

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