Vegetables - Cooking, Chinese Cooking, Vegetarian Cooking

From the Earth: Chinese Vegetarian Cooking

Name: From the Earth: Chinese Vegetarian Cooking
Author: Eileen Yin-Fei Lo
ISBN: 9780026329859

by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo

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Overview

Eileen Yin-Fei Lo is one of the best-known authorities on Chinese food. Now she brings Chinese vegetarian cooking to America. From the Earth presents more than 200 delicious recipes, ranging from traditional Buddhist-style preparations to the author's own personal creations. In the true Chinese tradition each recipe is meant to "fool the eye and please the palate." Born and raised in Canton, China, where vegetables abound in two crops per year, Eileen Yin-Fei Lo first learned about Chinese vegetarian cooking at her grandmother's side. Her elders taught her to respect the foods of the earth. Although not strict Buddhists, her family refrained from eating meat on numerous sacred days and birthdays throughout the year. An introduction to Chinese cooking begins From the Earth, with a glossary of ingredients, their possible substitutions, and their detailed preparations. Eileen discusses utensils, including tips on how to buy a cleaver and wok, and covers cooking techniques as well, from steaming to the essential stir-fry. After a handful of introductory recipes, including the author's own flavorful creations like Hot Oil and Sweet Scallion Sauce, there are chapters on vegetables, rice, soups, and noodles. For devoted vegetarians, there's a chapter on daufu, or bean curd, with recipes like "Chicken" with Sesame Peanut Sauce and Spiced "Duck" Salad. For less strict vegetarians, there's a seafood chapter, including Sole with Black Beans and Scallops with Mango, to name only a couple.

One of the best known experts on Chinese food draws on her reminiscences of the foods of her childhood to create 200 exciting vegetarian recipes--many of which make use of commonly available ingredients--and describes the techniques used to prepare them. 40 line drawings.

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Editorials

Library Journal

Yin-Fei Lo, an authority on Chinese cooking and author of several other cookbooks, presents dozens of delicious and unusual Chinese vegetarian dishes. Some are recipes from her childhood and family, others are the "real" versions of dishes served in Chinese American recipes, and still others are her versions of classic dishes or her own innovations, often using ingredients not traditionally available in China. The readable headnotes give a good sense of the symbolism inherent in all of Chinese cooking, and a special chapter is devoted to the vegetarian dishes created in Buddhist temple kitchens. Highly recommended.

Barbara Jacobs

The culinary tidbits that Lo includes in her salute to earth foods are almost as intriguing as her more than 200 mainly vegetable recipes. Vegetarian Buddhists may eat only three types of seafood--mussels, claims, and oysters. The turnip cakes enjoyed at the Lunar New Year are a symbol that good fortune is rising, and so on. She insists on and explains the gathering together of the right stuff and learning the right techniques; a carbon-steel wok and cleaver, for example, are the two critical pieces of equipment in Chinese cooking. The best part of the book are the dishes--some tied to tradition, others the product of Lo's imagination. The need for exotic ingredients, from buckthorn seeds to red dates, may be the only deterrent to reader-cooks.