Chinese delights
I’m a sweet and sour chicken balls and crispy shredded beef kinda girl. There must be prawn crackers, seaweed, and chow mein, and yes, my local Chinese takeaway does know me by name.
But that might be about to change, thanks to a new opus of Chinese cooking from husband and wife duo, Diora Fong, 65 and Kei Lum Chan, 75.
The pair have written China: The Cookbook, a collection of 650 recipes (whittled down from 1,200) from across every province in China - after all, “if you have ‘China’ on the cover, you have to feature all of the regions,” says Kei Lum matterof-factly. The book is the work of a lifetime spent exploring, tasting and collecting ideas, and took two years to pull together in a bound form (the Chans are very proud that they were “never late on the deadlines”). They’re in the midst of a mad dash round the globe (London via San Francisco, then on to Australia) when we meet, but aren’t showing the jet lag; the Chans are experts when it comes to travelling, mining each destination they visit for foodie revelations. “When we go somewhere new, the first thing we do is to always go to the market to see what there is and what we can buy, then we go to a bookshop and do some research - and then we go eat,” says Kei Lum happily.
This is a man who, in his eighth decade, gets up at 4am every day to start work on developing new recipes.
“I’ve had to redefine the word ‘retired’,” he adds wryly.
His and Diora’s work ethic is beyond impressive, but I quickly learn it’s a misconception that Chinese cooking is nightmarishly difficult, exacerbated by complicated ingredients lists and topped up with monosodium glutamate.
We meet at Asian and oriental cookery school, School of Wok in central London’s Covent Garden, with host, head chef and founder, the perennially chipper Jeremy Pang, and it’s the prep that’s the work says Pang.
He explains how the first 45 minutes of most School of Wok cookery classes are spent chopping and dicing ingredients.
The actual cooking in Chinese cookery is often a flash moment that just brings everything together.
● China The Cookbook by Kei Lum Chan and Diora Fong Chan is published in hardback by Phaidon Press, priced £29.95. Available now