Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food

FAIN: FZ-272064-20

Michelle Tien King
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC 27599-1350)

Research and writing for a cultural and social history of postwar Taiwan, told through the life of the cookbook author and television personality Fu Pei-mei (1931-2004).

Chop Fry Watch Learn is a cultural and social history of postwar Taiwan, told through the life and career of Fu Pei-mei (1931-2004), cookbook author and television personality, often called the “Julia Child of Chinese Cooking.” Fu authored dozens of cookbooks and appeared as an instructor on television for four decades, beginning in 1962. Women in her generation, which included both housewives and career women, turned to Fu because she taught them how to cook an astounding range of unfamiliar Chinese regional dishes on their television sets, in ways their own mothers and grandmothers never could. As her fame grew, Fu and her cookbooks traveled beyond the borders of Taiwan, teaching the rest of the world how to cook Chinese food. Fu’s story offers a way to examine a much more personal and intimate set of concerns about food, family, gender roles, and cultural identity. This is not a story of timeless tradition, but of modern transformation—of self and family, of cuisine and society.

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Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food (Book)
Title: Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food
Author: Michelle T. King
Abstract: A new history of Chinese food told through an account of the remarkable life of Fu Pei-mei, the woman who brought Chinese cooking to the world. In 1949, a young Chinese housewife arrived in Taiwan and transformed herself from a novice to a natural in the kitchen. She launched a career as a cookbook author and television cooking instructor that would last four decades. Years later, in America, flipping through her mother’s copies of Fu Pei-mei’s Chinese cookbooks, historian Michelle T. King discovered more than the recipes to meals of her childhood. She found, in Fu’s story and in her food, a vivid portal to another time, when a generation of middle-class, female home cooks navigated the tremendous postwar transformations taking place across the world.
Year: 2024
Primary URL: https://boldforkbooks.com/products/an-evening-with-michelle-t-king-for-chop-fry-watch-learn
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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