Chinese Street Food
Small Bites, Classic Recipes, and Harrowing Tales Across the Middle Kingdom
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
"Chinese Street Food is brimming with history, food lore, and recipes that take you on a culinary journey outside of the restaurant and into the streets of regional China. Authentic flavors and techniques explode onto the page in a way that first make you salivate, then motivate to roll up your sleeves and get cooking." —Chef Lee Anne Wong
One element of Chinese cookery that remains rare throughout the Western world is the most popular style of cuisine across China: street food! Every day, nearly one-fifth of humanity sustains itself on conveniently placed bites and cheap alfresco meals. In China, one’s home is often small, kitchens are cramped, and time is short. So, a walkable nosh on the way to the office, a quick, cheap lunch, or an evening spent hopping from snack stand to snack stand with friends is an everyday occurrence.
Howie Southworth and Greg Matza, best friends and bestselling food authors, have been eating their way through China for over two decades. Soon after their yearly culinary journeys began, they were struck with a delicious addiction: street food! Within this entertainingly narrated cookbook, our dynamic eating duo not only fondly recalls highlights of their fascination with China’s incredible food culture, but they artfully weave in folklore, origin stories, and witty chats with the cooks, vendors, and fellow gastronomes they’ve met along the way.
Photographed entirely in China, this book beautifully presents small plates from the balmy rice paddies of Yunnan and spicy streets of Sichuan to the frozen tundra of Harbin and the imperial majesty of Beijing. This tale of two foodies is destined to change the way readers view going out for Chinese.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In their third collaboration (after Kiss My Casserole!), Matza and Southworth present a fun collection of more than 100 recipes of Chinese street food. Street cuisine is "quickly changing yet deeply rooted in tradition," the authors write, and this is made evident across 10 chapters that combine breezy bits of travel writing and food history with a vast variety of xiao chi, or "small eats." The first chapter, "What's in a Name," includes dishes with curious names, such as "Bedspread Noodles" (named for wide noodles) and steamed "Barbarian Head Buns,"(large fluffy white buns) found in Beijing. A mostly savory collection of breakfast options include steamed eggplant buns from Xi'an and pan-fried pork pockets, which date back to the Tang Dynasty. There is an intriguing exploration of the city of Xi'an with its culinary remnants of the Silk Road trade routes. And in a chapter titled, "You'll Love This, We Promise," the authors showcase oddities like stinky tofu and a green fish ball soup popular in southwestern Yunnan. These quick bites do not necessarily equate to fast preparation, but a lamb shoulder and five patient hours cooking in a Dutch oven results in a hearty meal of lamb and bread soup. Augmented with 100 on-location photos, this lively cookbook brings a distant land into deliciously sharp focus.
