https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/12/books/review/chop-fry-watch-learn-michelle-t-king.html

She Taught Generations How to Wield a Wok and a Cleaver

As Michelle T. King demonstrates in this moving and ambitious biography, Fu Pei-mei was far more than "the Julia Child of Chinese cooking."




Although she only learned to cook as an adult, Fu Pei-mei became an authority on Chinese cuisine who wrote dozens of books.Cheng An-chi


Thessaly La Force is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to The New York Times Styles section.
May 12, 2024

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CHOP FRY WATCH LEARN: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food, by Michelle T. King

Chinese cooking prioritizes two essential qualities: huohuo ("fire-time") and daogong ("knife-skill"). The former is the precision with which a cook can control the heat of her stove, the latter the blade of her knife. Think of the perfectly sliced green scallions, thin and trembling like blades of grass, that accompany a Peking duck or the way beef sliced for a stir-fry instantly cooks on a heated wok, evenly seared on the outside, still juicy and tender within.

Both of these skills were broadcast live on Taiwan Television in 1962, when a housewife and cooking instructor named Fu Pei-mei was asked by the network to host a 20-minute cooking show. The set was makeshift, decorated by a cloth fish stapled to the wall. Fu had been asked to bring her own ingredients and equipment, which included her wok, cleaver and brazier.

Fu hastily sliced and chopped, narrating as she went, eventually producing tangcu songshu yu (sweet-and-sour "squirreled" fish), in which a whole fish is deboned, carved and then deep-fried so that it puffs up, resembling a bushy tail. Rushed and frazzled, Fu was surprised when she was asked to return the next week.
She would go on to spend the next four decades hosting cooking shows, becoming a household name in Taiwan and around the world, and teaching millions how to make the complicated and varied dishes of Chinese cooking. She published dozens of cookbooks, and even produced her own line of instant ramen. In 1971,The New York Times described Fu as "the Julia Child of Chinese cooking."



But as the historian Michelle T. King writes in her fascinating biography of Fu, "Chop Fry Watch Learn," Fu’s firstappearance aired a few months before Child’s. And if Child was exploring America’s preoccupation with France, Fu was mining China’s rich and vast cuisine, which is as wide-ranging and diverse as its geography.It would make more sense, King points out, "to call Child the ‘Fu Pei-mei of French Food.’"

In teaching people how to cook, both in Taiwan and abroad, Fu played a critical role in defining the Chinese food served at home. Though Fu was in many ways quite different from Child, they, along with other pioneering television cooks, were instrumental in not only defining cuisines, but also professionalizing a role for women in the traditionally male-dominated world of food.

Fu was born in Dalian, a major port city in northeastern China, but fled to Taiwan in 1949 as a wartime refugee, aged 18. Married by 20, Fu was, by her own admission, a terrible cook. She spent her dowry (gold and jewelry) hiring various Chinese chefs to instruct her, eventually studying cuisines from the provinces or regions of Sichuan, Jiangsu/Zhejiang, Beijing, Guangdong, Fujian and Hunan. War had divided China, and Taiwan had become a place of refuge for millions. Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party,fled with "not only the funds of China’s central bank and the most prized items of the imperial collection" but also "a coterie of China’s best chefs, who were national treasures in their own right," writes King.

For many, the voyage was a memorable rupture. As King writes, in the hold of the ship that brought Fu to Taiwan, "a passenger had brought along a gigantic wok and a crock filled with lu sauce, a mixture of soy sauce, sugar, garlic, ginger, and a unique blend of spices, used in all manner of braised dishes. The remains of each iteration of the sauce are used in the next batch, intensifying and deepening the flavor over many decades, much like a sourdough starter." Fu never forgot it.

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The newly arrived mainlanders saturated the island. With families permanently separated and traditional large Chinese households broken apart, housework and food preparation fell largely on housewives. Experienced hired help, who typically would have contributed to the cooking, was scarce. Fu’s arrival on television came as social norms were changing and many Chinese women were eager for instruction.

King writes about all this and more in her studious and wide-ranging text, using Fu as a jumping-off point to discuss the complicated history of Taiwan, feminism in Taiwanese society, the complexities of Chinese identity in the wake of the Chinese Civil War, Indigenous Taiwanese food and culture and much more. Interspersed between chapters are brief interviews with Taiwanese women, some of them relatives and friends of King’s, who learned to cook from Fu. As King explains, she wanted to offer "a history of Chinese food from the inside, centered on the place where most Chinese actually eat it: at home around the family dinner table, made with love (and various degrees of culinary skill) by mom."

My own mother can be counted among these women. She was born in Taiwan, and came to America as a young student. Her mother, my grandmother, gave her Fu’s cookbooks as a wedding gift. A few years ago, my mother gave me Fu’s cookbooks as a present. Time and distance have made Taiwan feel, at moments, quite far away. But as King says of her own family, we still "speak the language of food."

CHOP FRY WATCH LEARN: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food | By Michelle T. King | Norton | 304 pp. | $29.99
Michelle T. King
CHOP FRY WATCH LEARN



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