Skip Seamless and Make Your Chinese Food Favorites with ‘China Town Kitchen’
By Joanna Prisco
Yahoo Food’s Cookbook of the Week is China Town Kitchen: From Noodles to Nuoc Cham, Delicious Dishes from Southeast Asian Ingredients by Lizzie Mabbott, author of the popular Southeast Asian cooking blog Hollow Legs and who spent her childhood living in Hong Kong up until the age of 13.
“Although Hong Kong was a bustling place, it was safe on the streets and from a young age I was given absolute freedom of it,” writes Mabbot of wandering the renowned, food-obsessed metropolis.
“Outdoors in the stifling heat just off the busy roads, men and young students alike would sit on plastic chairs slurping up noodles, steam rising to their faces,” she continues. “Vendors sold fishballs on sticks, the charcoal enticing you in, finishing them with a lick of curry sauce and a shake of chili powder while you impatiently waited for them to get cool enough to eat.”
Then, after setting the scene and tempting readers’ appetites, Mabbot left.
Her family moved to England and it was several years before she would come across any of the ingredients that had flavored her memories.
It was only upon relocating to London as an adult that Mabbot launched her blog “Hollow Legs” in 2008 as a platform for rediscovering the foods that she remembered from her youth, exploring dishes she had never tasted and experimenting with new creations of her own.
That online journey inspired China Town Kitchen, and resulted in a broad collection of recipes, ranging from Homemade Sriracha to Cola Chicken Wings to Mu Shu Pork.
“This book is a guide to the Asian supermarket and the treasures you can find within,” Mabbot describes. “My hope is that by sharing the main attributes of common ingredients via the recipes here, the intimidation will lessen and you will gain confidence in Asian food, as I did.”
But, just as Hong Kong famously reinvents its harbor’s skyline every few years, tearing down what is old and replacing it with something newer, shinier and more towering, Mabbott also is unafraid of bucking conventions in her search for culinary greatness. (See: Udon Carbonara!)
“This isn’t supposed to be an educational tome, tangled in the authenticity of cuisines,” she notes. “There are some classic recipes remade to my take in here, but you’ll also find that I’ve downright rejected authenticity in a couple of recipes to make way for what tastes good—that’s what it’s about, isn’t it?”
Visit Yahoo Food throughout the week for recipes from China Town Kitchen.
Check out other cookbooks from Yahoo Food’s Cookbook of the Week:
Modern Jewish Cooking by Leah Koenig
Oh Gussie! By Kimberly Schlapman
A Girl and Her Greens by April Bloomfield
