Chinese Food (Introductions to Chinese Culture)

Really good good to know the traditional Chinese food.

This is a curate's egg of a book.It's style varies over whimsical flight of fancy, xenophobic fiction, historical reportage with a supreme eclecticism.It reads like a collection of sound bites and rants that you might get when talking to an English speaking but ardently party line minor official who doesn't really know anything but has just looked the relevant information up on Chinese Wikipedia.There are lots of nice pictures in the book, mostly super-small in the margin.Another downside is that these pictures are chosen to represent the most iconic aspects of China, *not* to represent the foods that are mentioned in the texts. Lots of fantastic sounding dishes are mentioned but with no explanation of what they contain, how they are made or how they taste or look.Having now thoroughly ragged on this book, let's take a step back. What is there to compare it with? Nothing really. Just the far less detailed and far more eclectic (if better written) portions of blurb in Chinese cookbooks. As a result I could this a valuable addition to my library.There appear to be 30 of these volumes from the Cambridge University Press (presumably in collaboration with the PRC propaganda department) on elements of Chinese culture. A few of the others have also sparked my interest. I may order them :)