does anyone have any recommendations for chinese cookbooks, particularly featuring recipes for fancy, weekend project-type soups?
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I seen this cookbook on Amazon.
I can’t vouch for it.
Basically when it comes to soup you have to look at the Cantonese. They have a soup culture. They drink soup everyday. They love soup. Every Cantonese household has soup. I think it’s also well known amongst other Chinese that Cantos know soup!
You can find plenty of recipes online btw. I am not sure what you mean by fancy. Abalone? Expensive AF dried orange peels?
Common ingredients would be bones, carrots, daikon, mountain yam, mustard greens, watercress, dried shiitakes, red dates, goji berries, ginger/garlic, dried scallop, dried orange peels.
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i guess what im looking for is like the Cantonese version of the french laundry cookbook? or something similar from famous old chinese chefs?
but this book looks very promising, thanks for the link!
I like Fuchsia Dunlop’s cookbooks but mostly I copy my mother-in-law. Also I like Chinese cooking demystified on YouTube but I’ve never made a soup from FD or YouTube.
there are some exceptions, but in chinese cuisine, soups typically cleanse the palate much like a sorbet; they’re typically drunk from one’s rice bowl and are usually relatively simple. fuchsia dunlop’s Every Grain of Rice has a selection of simple soups from different regions across china.
phoenix claws and jade trees categorizes dishes by cooking techniques but chapter 5 addresses stocks of various complexities and chapter 13 has a list of soup recipes.
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I love “Phoenix Claws and Jade Trees”! I also recommend “All Under Heaven” wherein “Yi Residence Noodles” which is a
despite it’s name. The book also contains a recipe for “Crossing-the-Bridge Rice Noodles”, also a soup, but I think the recipe in “Cooking South of the Clouds” is better. “Crossing-the-Bridge Rice Noodles” probably fits your desire more than anything, and “Cooking South of the Clouds” is a beautiful cookbook. It put Yunnan on my bucket list.
I am often awestruck at how Chinese names can be so descriptive, poetic and often comical; “Pock-Marked Mother Chen’s Tofu”, or “Ignored By the Dog’s Filled Buns” for example. Makes our English labels seem prosaic; meatloaf, roast beef, applesauce…
Have you looked at Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown cookbook?
I can’t vouch for the book, but I’ve read Keller’s book before and Mister Jiu’s cookbook sounds just as daunting as Keller’s book according to this review:
“Home cooks will have to rise to the challenge, as the long and complex recipes may be demanding to recreate at home… ambitious chef, who wanted the book to reflect his restaurant…Jew did not dumb down his recipes, many of which take multiple days, multiple components, and special equipment. .”
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