My Shanghai: Recipes and Stories from a City on the Water

This immersive guide to the home cooking of Shanghai rewards cooks who like to read. Betty Liu, the daughter of immigrants from the city and the author of the award-winning blog bettysliu.com, vividly conjures the city and its culinary traditions while providing 100 recipes and beautiful photography that is her own work.

Arranged seasonally, her recipes are detailed, sometimes supported by step-by-step photographs, and almost always let you in on an aspect of the way Shanghai cooks think about ingredients or a dish. Perhaps it’s the reliance on certain flavor combinations (ginger, scallion, and garlic, for instance). Or attention to the colors that will appear on the table when a meal is served. It might be the use of a double-frying technique, or the choice of poetic names for a dish over those that are literally descriptive.

The food itself makes frequent use of fish and seafood as well as seasonal vegetables, but pork is also abundant, and it’s easy to find chicken and even duck recipes. Recipes names, and much other terminology, appear not only in English, but transliterated and in Chinese characters.

Impressive.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.