HOMESTYLE DISHES FROM SHANGHAI
Fresh ingredients are the secret to Liu's delicious family recipes
Pigs' trotters make fantastic stock. But that's not the only reason Betty Liu used the cut every week in the fall of 2017.
Trotters, as it turned out, are also ideal for honing suturing techniques. After practising on the two pigs' feet she bought weekly for a dollar apiece, she would make trotter soybean soup.
The recipe, which is among the family favourites in her debut cookbook My Shanghai (Harper Design, 2021), represents a rare merging of her medical and culinary careers.
Liu started writing about food on her blog, bettysliu.com, in 2015. She had left Oregon to attend university in St. Louis and found herself longing for her parents' seasonal, homestyle Shanghainese cooking.
She called and texted for instruction on how to make various dishes. On visits home, she took videos of her mom wrapping dumplings or zongzi (glutinous rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves) for reference.
Her family's cooking, which is rooted in Jiangnan cuisine (the region includes Shanghai and the neighbouring coastal provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang), found a devoted audience.
The success of her blog led to a book deal for My Shanghai, which she wrote during medical school and the first two years of her general surgery residency.
Writing, recipe testing and photographing a book while training to become a surgeon might sound like an overwhelming amount of work, but for
Liu — who turns to cooking as a stress reliever — the timing worked out perfectly.
“With medical school, your time is a little bit more flexible. It's classes versus having an actual 60 to 80 hours a week job,” she says. “It was a lot of time management, but it was great. And I had the flexibility to go to China before the pandemic.”
Seasonality is central to My Shanghai and Liu planned her research trips for all four seasons. She paid special attention to the shifting daily offerings at local fresh markets, visited farmers, foragers and producers, and set out to transport readers through her evocative photography and stories.
Tracing the progression of the year, she writes about visiting a hairy-crab farm in Yang Cheng Lake during the fall harvest, rejoicing in Shanghai's plentiful winter fruits and vegetables, and foraging bamboo in the spring.
Taking a seasonal approach to the book was her goal from the beginning. “Before I even came up with the exact recipe list, I knew that I wanted to organize it by season. When I told my mom and dad about it, they were like, `Well, of course. Why wouldn't you do it by season?' because it's so integral to how we eat at home,” says Liu. “And yet, it's something that hasn't really been talked about and it's something that isn't really associated with Chinese food.”