The Chinese Chicken Cookbook: 100 Easy-To-Prepare, Authentic Recipes for the American Table

By Eileen Yin-Fei Lo

Book Overview

In China the chicken represents the phoenix, the mythological bird that rose from its ashes and that symbolizes rebirth and reaffirmation. Because of this deeply held belief, chicken is served at every New Year celebration, every wedding feast, and every birthday dinner. The chicken is honored for its eggs, its meat, and the flavor it provides for stocks and broths. Because of the reverence for this bird, the Chinese prepare chicken in myriad ways. Chicken is steamed, baked, boiled, stir-fried, deep-fried, pan-fried, and roasted. It is served hot, cold, or at room temperature. No part of the chicken is wasted from its bones to its skin to its feet, a Chinese delicacy. Now, renowned Chinese cooking expert Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, who has been called "the Marcella Hazan of Chinese cooking" by The New York Times, brings her love of Chinese cooking and traditional Chinese chicken recipes to American home cooks in The Chinese Chicken Cookbook. The Chinese Chicken Cookbook brings together more than one hundred of the best traditional and modern chicken recipes of China from simple stir-fries to more elaborate celebration dishes. In chapters that pair chicken with noodles and rice and in chapters on soup, preparing chicken in the wok, and cooking it whole, readers will find dozens of delicious, easy-to-prepare delicacies. Recipes such as Two-Sesame Chicken, Hot and Sour Soup, Ginger Noodles with Chicken, Chicken Water Dumplings, Chicken Stir-Fried with Broccoli, Mu Shu Chicken with Bok Bang, Mah-Jongg Chicken, and Asparagus Wrapped in Minced Chicken offer new and flavorful ways to prepare chicken whether you're making a quick weeknight meal or having dinner guests on a Saturday night. Although these recipes use ingredients that home chefs can find in the international section of a well-stocked supermarket or on the Internet, Lo includes the Chinese names for ingredients and recipes, rendered in beautiful Chinese calligraphic characters. Not only decorative, these characters can help you locate unfamiliar ingredients in a Chinese market. The Chinese Chicken Cookbook also has sections on how to select and clean a chicken, a detailed explanation of Chinese ingredients, suggested equipment (including how to properly season a wok), and how to cook a perfect pot of rice. With wonderful family stories from the author's childhood in China, The Chinese Chicken Cookbook is not just a cookbook for your cookbook library, it is a source of culinary inspiration.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743233417
• ISBN13: 9780743233415
• Release Date: February 2004
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.53 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.6" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Another excellent cookbook

Many of the recipes require a dutch oven and a boning knife (for meat from the chicken leg). There are over 100 recipes including stir fry dishes with melons. I am particularly happy to find recipes for steamed chicken buns including the bun dough recipe and street dumplings that "were created by refugees from Shanghai who fled their city in the 1950s revolution and came to Hong Kong. They would set up portable charcoal or coal stoves in the streets and make these dumplings for people to lunch on. Later, many of these entrepreneurs went on to open restaurants." I am collecting all of the author's titles as much for her old fashioned style as for her recipes. She makes me want to make my own pasta. In my opinion, acquiring all of the author's cookbooks first before buying the other English language Chinese cookbooks makes an important foundation to understanding what you eat in America and how the food is cooked at home. Then proceed to the other cookbooks and hopefully to eating the more elaborate levels of Chinese cooking. I didn't pick up the author's cookbooks until very recently and only after learning that the author is from Sun Tak. I wish I had bought her books long ago.