"Lin-Liu is a charming guide to modern China and its kaleidoscopic cuisine."--People
"Serve the People is light fare, a delicately crafted steamed dumpling of a book. It's peppered with delicious descriptions, authentic recipes, humorous anecdotes and all the goodness of a young woman who finds her way in life, and even falls in love."--International Herald Tribune
"A mouthwatering tale of the thriving culinary scene in today's China--top rated by Zagat."--Nina and Tim Zagat, co-Founders and co-Chairs of Zagat Survey

Autorentext

Jen Lin-Liu was raised in southern California, graduated from Columbia University, and came to China in 2000 on a Fulbright fellowship. A food critic for Time Out Beijing and the coauthor of Frommer's Beijing, she has also written for Newsweek, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Saveur, and Food & Wine. She is the founder of Black Sesame Cooking School in Beijing.

Klappentext

A memorable and mouthwatering cook's tour of today's China

As a freelance journalist and food writer living in Beijing, Jen Lin-Liu already had a ringside seat for China's exploding food scene. When she decided to enroll in a local cooking school?held in an unheated classroom with nary a measuring cup in sight?she jumped into the ring herself. Progressing from cooking student to noodle-stall and dumpling-house apprentice to intern at a chic Shanghai restaurant, she finds poor young men and women streaming in from the provinces in search of a ?rice bowl? (living wage); a burgeoning urban middle class hungry for luxury after decades of turmoil and privation; and the mentors who take her in hand in the kitchen and beyond. Together they present an unforgettable slice of contemporary China in the full swing of social and economic transformation.

Zusammenfassung

A memorable and mouthwatering cook’s tour of today’s China

 As a freelance journalist and food writer living in Beijing, Jen Lin-Liu already had a ringside seat for China’s exploding food scene. When she decided to enroll in a local cooking school—held in an unheated classroom with nary a measuring cup in sight—she jumped into the ring herself. Progressing from cooking student to noodle-stall and dumpling-house apprentice to intern at a chic Shanghai restaurant, she finds poor young men and women streaming in from the provinces in search of a “rice bowl” (living wage); a burgeoning urban middle class hungry for luxury after decades of turmoil and privation; and the mentors who take her in hand in the kitchen and beyond. Together they present an unforgettable slice of contemporary China in the full swing of social and economic transformation.

Leseprobe
In cooking class, I learned a startling array of facts: Eating fish head will repair your brain cells. Spicy food is good for your complexion. Monosodium glutamate is best thrown in a dish just before it comes off the wok. Americans are fat because they eat bread, while Chinese are slim because they eat rice. If you work as a cook in America for three years, you can come back to China and buy a house.
     I bicycled down a narrow alley, past a public toilet and through a gate with a scowling security guard to get to the cooking school. I enrolled in October 2005, in my fifth year of living in China. Lectures were held in a classroom rented from a high school, and the unheated room felt colder by the minute. Everyone else was used to the lack of heat and insulation in public schools and dressed accordingly, in down jackets. I shivered in my thin coat.
     My classmates slumped in their seats, seeming bored and detached, holding their pens limply. They were all men, ranging in age from twenty to fifty. Most hadn’t completed high school. Teacher Zhang didn’t mind that they answered their cell phones in class. Once I heard a student clipping his fingernails, the snip of the scissors punctuating the cadences of the lecture. Teacher Zhang often narrowed his eyes at me while he spoke, however. He didn’t like that I was different from the others.
I interrupted him with questions. I didn’t bother to raise my hand because that custom didn’t exist in this classroom—students weren’t supposed to have questions. So I just spoke up, as loudly as I could. "Could you write that character more clearly?" I often asked.
     Teacher Zhang grunted and wiped the chalkboard with the back of his hand, then rewrote the character in the Chinese equivalent of block letters, the chalk screeching against the surface.
     Sometimes I was so busy copying down what Teacher Zhang said that I didn’t stop to question it. Later, reviewing my notes, I discovered a strange mix of pop psychology and old Chinese clichés.
     "Your taste buds are influenced by several different factors," Teacher Zhang declared, and enumerated them. Age, sex, occupation, and mental state, I dutifully wrote. Women liked lighter foods and men preferred spicy foods, he explained. Women–light, men–spicy, I scribbled in English.
     "If you’re a farmer working in the fields and doing a lot of heavy lifting, your taste buds will be different from someone who works in an office," he added. Uh-huh, I thought as I transcribed the information into my notebook. Looking back on my notes later, I wished I had asked him to elaborate further.
     But when I asked questions, Teacher Zhang shot me annoyed glances, and the other students shifted uncomfortably in their seats. I learned to behave like the rest: listen, bow, and copy.

When we weren’t in the classroom taking notes on the world according to Teacher Zhang, we were in the kitchen. The kitchen was created out of another classroom by installing a burner, gas tank, countertop, sink, and refrigerator. With those simple fixtures, it became a larger version of the typical home kitchen in China. Though spacious, it wasn’t the kind of room where you let your eyes wander, lest they settle on a patch of scum on the tile wall that had probably not been scrubbed for a good five years. I figured the time we would spend in the kitchen learning real things would make up for the time wasted on the lectures. I had never been in a professional Chinese kitchen, which was notoriously off-limits to diners. I now found myself in a room full of cutting boards, woks, cleavers, and bottles of chili oil and oyster sauce. But I quickly found out that even in this kitchen, certain things were not permitted to students. Like cooking.
     Instead of cooking, we sat on a set of bleachers across the room, observing Chef Gao’s every move. Chef Gao was an old-school chef who worked at a Soviet-style, government-run hotel that had seen its glory days pass with the end of the state-planned economy. Gao was a relic of the old system, and he continued the time-honored Chinese traditions of using MSG and copious amounts of soybean oil. Despite the MSG and the oil—or maybe because of them—his cooking was delicious.
We watched as Chef Gao fanned out his skinny arms and elbows like a grasshopper as he cooked. We listened to him chirp the recipes in a folksy Beijing accent as he wrote them on the chalkboard, dividing the ingredients into three categories: main ingredients, supplementary ingredients, and seasonings. Occasionally, he noted quantities next to the main ingredients, but usually he threw things in by intuition. The kitchen didn’t contain a single measuring cup or spoon anyway.
     We scrutinized his equipment, which was limited to a wok, a cutting board, and a cleaver with an eight-inch-long and four-inch-tall blade. Once in a while he’d pull …