Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food

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(as of Mar 20, 2025 01:57:45 UTC – Details)

One of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2024 • One of NPR’s Books We Loved in 2024 • A Saveur Best Narrative Food Book of 2024 •. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A spirited new history of Chinese food told through an account of the remarkable life of Fu Pei-mei, the woman who brought Chinese cooking to the world.

In 1949, a young Chinese housewife arrived in Taiwan and transformed herself from a novice to a natural in the kitchen. She launched a career as a cookbook author and television cooking instructor that would last four decades. Years later, in America, flipping through her mother’s copies of Fu Pei-mei’s Chinese cookbooks, historian Michelle T. King discovered more than the recipes to meals of her childhood. She found, in Fu’s story and in her food, a vivid portal to another time, when a generation of middle-class, female home cooks navigated the tremendous postwar transformations taking place across the world.

In Chop Fry Watch Learn, King weaves together stories from her own family and contemporary oral history to present a remarkable argument for how understanding the story of Fu’s life enables us to see Chinese food as both an inheritance of tradition and a truly modern creation, influenced by the historical phenomena of the postwar era. These include a dramatic increase in the number of women working outside the home, a new proliferation of mass media, the arrival of innovative kitchen tools, and the shifting diplomatic fortunes of China and Taiwan. King reveals how and why, for audiences in Taiwan and around the world, Fu became the ultimate culinary touchstone: the figure against whom all other cooking authorities were measured.

And Fu’s legacy continues. Her cookbooks have become beloved emblems of cultural memory, passed from parent to child, wherever diasporic Chinese have landed. Informed by the voices of fans across generations, King illuminates the story of Chinese food from the inside: at home, around the family dinner table. The result is a revelatory work, a rich banquet of past and present tastes that will resonate deeply for all of us looking for our histories in the kitchen.

22 illustrations

From the Publisher

What was your inspiration for writing Chop Fry Watch Learn?

I grew up with Fu Pei-mei’s cookbooks on my mom’s cookbook shelf during my childhood in Michigan in the 1970s and 80s. I always thought of her as “that cookbook lady”—at the time I had no idea that she was a huge celebrity in Taiwan, having taught cooking shows on television for forty years. It really wasn’t until after I had my own children that I found myself flipping through Fu’s cookbooks once again, looking for easy Chinese recipes to make for them. Now I noticed things in the cookbook that I had never paid attention to as a child—photos of Fu shaking hands with VIPs, teaching foreigners, traveling the world, and heaps of newspapers clippings about her. That’s when I got excited and thought—hmm, maybe there’s more to discover about Fu Pei-mei.

The topic seems pretty different from your first book. How have your research interests in Chinese women evolved?

I was trained at Berkeley as a Chinese gender historian and my first book was about female infanticide in nineteenth-century China—an important topic, but quite depressing and very different from food! All of the sources I coud find for that book were written by men. I really wanted my next book to feature and celebrate women’s voices and historical experiences. That’s why Fu Pei-mei’s decades-long career as a cooking instructor really appealed to me—women’s voices are front and center throughout the whole story. Not only that, the arc of Fu Pei-mei’s career maps directly onto larger social transformations for Chinese women in that postwar generation. At the start of Fu’s career, she was teaching eager housewives how to cook new dishes for their families, but by the end, she had to shutter her school because women had entered the work force in such great numbers, they had no interest or time to cook at home anymore.

Where does the title of your book, Chop Fry Watch Learn, come from? Is it some kind of traditional Chinese saying?

No, but I wanted you to think so! The Chinese language is filled with idioms that are exactly four characters long. Sometimes these sayings refer to ancient Confucian texts, such as the phrase “Eat Drink Man Woman”—food, drink, and sex, the most basic of human desires. I made up my own four-character idiom to capture Fu Pei-mei’s entire career. Chop/Fry (切qie/ 炒chao) refer to the two pillars of Chinese cooking, knifing skills and the control of heat-time. Watch/Learn (觀guan/ 學 xue) refer to viewers watching her on television and learning how to cook from her. You read the title and feel like you’re reading an ancient saying that you’d find in a fortune cookie, but really it’s a made-up idiom that’s completely new. It’s the same with Chinese cuisine—everyone always talks about the ancient roots of Chinese cuisine, but really so much of what we understand today as Chinese cuisine has been shaped by modern phenomena, such as television, electric rice cookers, and trans-Pacific jetliners.

What’s your favorite Chinese dish?

Hah! That’s like asking who your favorite child is! Once you start to learn about Chinese cuisine, you quickly realize there is an infinite number of local specialty dishes, styles, tastes, and flavors. It’s impossible to have tried every Chinese dish out there, and there are so many wonderful dishes. However, I will say that the dishes that linger most in my memory are my father’s scallion pancakes and my mother’s hot and sour soup. My dad was from northern China and made all the flour-based dishes in our house—scallion pancakes, steamed buns, dumplings, mushu pancakes—but it was his scallion pancakes that we clamored for the most. My mom always made hot and sour soup for my birthday at my request, filled with brined shrimp, tofu, shredded pork, lily buds, wooden ear fungus. I loved it. I can’t help but order these items in Chinese restaurants. Of course, it’s never the same. If you want to find those childhood tastes, you have to learn to cook these things for yourself.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company (May 7, 2024)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1324021284
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1324021285
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.3 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.3 x 1.2 x 9.4 inches