Book Review: The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones

"I love that you got it about the food," he said, "that you understood it, that maybe - I hope I'm not projecting - you might even be on your way to loving it." (ch. 14)

Title: The Last Chinese Chef: a Novel by Nicole Mones
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May 4, 2007
Genre: culinary history, fiction
Rating: 4.5/5

My comments: Maggie McElroy, a food writer in America, is on personal mission to Beijing, where her deceased husband Matt worked on and off as a lawyer. Someone has filed a suit against his estate and she must find out the truth. She is also sent by her editor to interview chef Sam Liang in Beijing for an article. Liang is translating a culinary book with his father from the old Mandarin - The Last Chinese Chef.

In Beijing, Maggie's personal problems are balanced by her new interest in the history of Chinese cuisine as she learns about food used as a way to develop community as well as a way to ease heart and mind. She learns about the combinations of texture and flavor to provide various meals categorized as extravagant, rustic, or elegant. She also discovers the difference between Chinese American food, meant to be familiar yet exotic, and true Chinese food, with each dish different and unique.

I found the book very informative and learnt to appreciate the time, skill, and thought that goes into classical Chinese cooking. The special dishes that were once created exclusively for the Imperial family are now enjoyed by all. I myself am a great fan of dim sum, the little dishes of amazing variety that once only the Imperial family were privileged to eat.

Book description: Nicole Mones takes readers inside the hidden world of elite cuisine in modern China through the story of an American food writer in Beijing. When recently widowed Maggie McElroy is called to China to settle a claim against her late husband’s estate, she is blindsided by the discovery that he may have led a double life. Since work is all that will keep her sane, her magazine editor assigns her to profile Sam, a half-Chinese American who is the last in a line of gifted chefs tracing back to the imperial palace. As she watches Sam gear up for China’s Olympic culinary competition by planning the banquet of a lifetime, she begins to see past the cuisine’s artistry to glimpse its coherent expression of Chinese civilization. It is here, amid lessons of tradition, obligation, and human connection that she finds the secret ingredient that may yet heal her heart. (Amazon)

About the author: Mones, award-winning author of Lost in Translation and A Cup of Light, and a contributor to Gourmet magazine, ran a textile business in China for 18 years at the end of the Cultural Revolution. She lives in Portland, Oregon. For more about her books, visit her at Nicole Mones.

© Harvee Lau 2011

Book Review: Kitchen Chinese: A Novel about Food, Family, and Finding Yourself by Ann Mah

Kitchen Chinese: A Novel About Food, Family, and Finding Yourself by Ann Mah (Feb. 1, 2010)

Summary: Isabelle Lee is forced to leave her job as an editorial assistant at a swank New York magazine and decides to try her luck in Beijing, where her older sister Claire is practicing law. The two sisters were never very close but Claire invites Isabelle to stay in her spacious modern apartment in Beijing, and helps her get a job as a food writer for an English language magazine, Beijing NOW.

Claire gives her advice on how to interview a famous Chinese film director:Isabelle feels like a fish out of water as she doesn't speak Mandarin well, has no friends in the city, and still feels intimidated by her older sister, the successful Ivy League graduate and lawyer who has fulfilled all their parents' expectations, except one, that is. The sisters feel the pressure of their parents, even in far away Beijing, to marry a Han Chinese and provide grandchildren as soon as possible.

You don't know how I appreciate this, " I say in a rush.
In the car, Claire issues advice while simultaneously checking her BlackBerry, scanning the newspaper, and smoothing on another coat of lipstick. "Just be casual," she says, her voice as instructive as Dear Abby. "Men don't like it when women are too aggressive. Especially Chinese guys."

How the sisters deal with their parents, how Isabelle handles Beijing, her job writing on regional Chinese food,  and the attentions of Jeff, a Chinese rock singer, as well as the interest of a mysterious young American neighbor, Charlie, are the meat of the novel.

Comments: I loved traveling with Isabelle to places in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang to try out different styles of Chinese food. Her descriptions of the different kinds of "hot" in spicy Sechuan food made me want to try mapo tofu, bean curd cooked in hot chili oil. (The recipe is included in the back of the book, along with a few other dishes.)Here Isabelle takes her American friend Julia to breakfast in Hong Kong:

The conversation falters as we nibble dainty dumplings filled with shrimp peeping pale and pink through their translucent wrappers. We dive into plates of soy-sauce-scented rice noodles, unwrap bamboo leaves to reveal triangles of sticky rice....
"The food here is amazing. So fresh!" says Julia, her voice soft with awe. This is the best dimsum I've ever had. Ooh!" she exclaims, flagging down a passing cart. "Chicken feet!"

 I enjoyed Ann Mah's writing and the way she combined setting and regional cuisine in her story of the two Chinese-American sisters. I could relate to demands or expectations of parents, and the sometimes testy relationship between a younger and older sibling - these seem to be universal.

About the author: Ann Mah was born in California and lived in Beijing for four years, working as a dining manager for an English-language magazine. She was awarded a James Beard Culinary Scholarship in 2005 and now lives in Paris.

Challenges: 100+ Reading Challenge, China Challenge, Support your Local Library Challenge
Cym Lowell: Book Review Party Wednesday

Sunday Salon, Nov. 1

Avocado milk shake and beef noodle soup in Toronto, Canada just before Oct. 31 ended. Spent the rest of the night planning to buy four tickets for the Canadian $50million lottery and planning how to split and spend our winnings, among seven of us. This conversation was fueled by glasses of Bailey's Irish Cream and sweet wine.

Before heading for Toronto on All Hallow's Eve, I had finished three book reviews for the week:

Persian Girls by Nahid Rachlin
A Sportscaster's Guide to Watching Football by Mark Oristano
Nanny Returns by Emma McLaughlin, a new sequel to the Nanny Diaries which will be out Dec. 15.

And also an interview with mystery writer, Susan Arnout Smith, who discussed why she writes mysteries/thrillers such as her latest, Out At Night.

Books have come in from Hachette and other sources, so my TBR pile has been mounting again after I thought I had really whittled it down some.

Am now reading a library book, Breathing Water, a thriller set in Bangkok, Thailand, which is quite good and will be keeping my attention on the long ride back to the States from Canada.

Now, off for dim sum breakfast at a Chinese restaurant. I love to start a new week this way.
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Fortune Cookie Chronicles, book review

New York Times metro reporter researches and writes about Chinese food in her memoir, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, 2009.

An interesting question in her book:

"It gnawed at me. Could fortune cookies have been introduced to the United States by the Japanese?"

Many people wanted to know the answer to this one: (from Everyday Mysteries

"Two men in the early 1900s in California claimed the credit - a Japanese man who served tea and fortune cookies in 1914 in San Francisco, and a Chinese man of the Hong Kong Noodle Company in Los Angeles who stuffed Biblical messages in cookies. A judge ruled that Japanese-American Makoto Hagiwara of San Francisco was the real inventor of the fortune cookie!"

Jennifer 8 Lee tackles other questions about Chinese food as well in her memoir -the origin of chop suey, American stir-fry, and the phenomenon of multiple lottery winners on March 30, 2005 who bet on the same numbers provided by their fortune cookies!

The book details Chinese restaurants in the U.S. and around the world in places such as Australia, Brazil, Toyko, and Dubai, United Arab Emirates. There are explanatory notes on each chapter at the end of the book, and an impressive bibliography.

The author certainly did her homework for this one! However, I was prepared for a memoir rather than a book of such detailed restaurant and food research. The information wasn't new or unusual enough and much of it seemed to me to be already common knowledge. Correct me if I'm wrong!

(Jennifer 8 Lee thanked me on Twitter for reading her book. She has a blog for more Chinese food information at The Fortune Cookie Chronicles)

Book provided by the publisher, for my objective review.

Conversation and Food in Canada

How we came to be where we are, health care in Canada and the U.S.


Food favorites


- Jamaican jerk chicken and pork
- mango slices with red pepper flakes
- green tea ice cream
- squid in curry sauce
- vegetarian sushi
- curried goat and roti

Chinese Food in Toronto

Once more to Scarborough, Ontario, home to a whopping number of restaurants with interesting fare. Yesterday, we tried a new restaurant close to where we were staying and were served a Hong Kong style meal.

We started with the house tea, a blend of Ceylon and other Chinese teas that together have a unique flavor. We had Cantonese dishes of tofu and beef over rice, beef and fugah (a bitter green vegetable), and Malaysian-style noodles with pork cooked in salty black bean sauce.

The Hong Kong surprise came with the after dinner choice of beverage- Horlicks, Hong Kong style tea served with milk, and Ovaltine.

Horlicks, Ovaltine, and milk with tea are definitely left over habits from British Hong Kong. These have traveled to Canada with the new immigrants.

Today, we are having fresh lychee (which I eschew as lychee is really the fruit of a nut I'm allergic to), sweet mangoes, pawpaw, roasted pork with crispy skin, and barbecued pork. This is lunch.

Our dinner tonight will be Trinidadian-East Indian-Jamaican. We are having curried goat and curried chicken, with roti.

Last but not least, this is really a family reunion, an informal one. But in any event, we enjoy conversing at the table.

Tomorrow? Dim sum, of course, with Peking duck, our final meal before we leave Canada, the land of immigrant flavors.