Saratoga News

Photograph by Stephen Brashear

Sandra Chun of Saratoga (left) and Ruth Fong of Los Gatos are promoting 'Chinese Cooking: Our Legacy.'

Chinese-American cookbook gets an update

By Michelle Jenkins

Almost 30 years ago a small group of Chinese-American women from throughout Santa Clara County found themselves with 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 get involved in the community.

A few years later, one way they found to accomplish both goals was through publishing a cookbook composed of family favorites and traditional dishes. Their creation, Chinese Cooking: Our Way, sold more than 20,000 copies and raised more than $50,000 for dozens of local and national charities. This summer, CAWC completed an updated, retitled collection they hope will be even more popular than the original.

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

Saratoga resident and CAWC member Sandra Chun bought a copy of the original cookbook when she moved to the Santa Clara Valley area. "I thought it was a great cookbook, but more than that it was actually interesting to me just to read it," Chun said.

Chun, who taught cooking for two years at what is now Moreland Area Community Center, joined CAWC a little over a year ago--too late to contribute one of her own recipes to the new book. Still wanting to get involved, Chun offered to became their distribution coordinator and now processes and organizes mail orders. "We get orders from all over the country: Connecticut, Florida, Texas; even Canada," she said.

Like the original, the new edition of Chinese Cooking 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 addition both text and images were laid out on computer.

Another element that has changed over the years is the availability of many of the ingredients. Even such exotics as birds' nests for soup come preprocessed and packaged, and items such as shiitake mushrooms are found at most supermarkets.

All the important ingredients that went into the original can still be found in what Los Gatos resident Ruth 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 because we wanted everything to be just right," explained Fong, who contributed five recipes.

As its predecessor did, this cookbook will also 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.

CAWC members donate their time to support organizations such as these, both indirectly through the cookbook and directly as volunteers. It was this belief in community involvement that drew Chun to the CAWC.

"I just thought it was time to start doing things for the community again," she said.

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