Carolyn Phillips

This is the book that first gave us such terms “stir fry” and “pot sticker,” as well as the concept of umami (which she referred to here correctly as hsien). What this means is that even if her book had little else to offer, we would still have been in her debt. But How to Cook is, in fact, a marvelous introduction to Chinese gastronomy at a time when bean sprouts came in cans and chop suey was all the rage.

I adore this book. Born in Hawaii, Mrs. Sia wove her husband’s Beijing-style foods and local Chinese-American dishes with her beloved Cantonese specialties that include ingredients like pickled mustard, caul fat, dried oysters, gizzards, and blood. Her fierce dedication to getting things right infuses every page, and the gorgeous line drawings certainly don’t hurt.

This great introduction to regional Chinese cuisines includes recipes from the author’s native Shanghai. She taught us how to cook a proper meal using ingredients from either American or Chinese grocery stores, leaving us with few excuses for being too lazy to get out our woks. This book ended up being so good that it merited a foreword by Craig Claiborne. She followed it up with Madame Chu’s Chinese Cooking School (1975) as she guided serious cooks on a deeper tour of China’s regional cuisines.

This restaurateur was one of the first to introduce many northern Chinese dishes to her Western audience. She hosted her own PBS cooking show on the same set as Julia Child, and her recipes for relatively unknown dishes (at least at that time) make this book a real standout. It’s short but excellent.

As the proprietor of New York’s famed restaurants Lichee Tree and Gingko Tree, it should come as no surprise that her magnum opus, The Key to Chinese Cooking (1977), was shepherded by renowned editor Judith Jones into an encyclopedic look at China’s culinary legacy. Fifty years later, this book still is such a standard English-language bible on classic Chinese cooking that it remains one of my favorites.

A teacher and author of seven great cookbooks, hers was (I’m pretty sure) the first title to take a deep dive into China’s way with wheat. She should also be lauded for Florence Lin’s Chinese Vegetarian Cookbook (1983), which it was decades ahead of her time. An incredibly warm and funny woman, she ended up being a friend and mentor. Like most of the authors on this list, she was also a feminist with a keen intellect who took great pride in her homeland.

The author of a shelf full of cookbooks in her native Chinese—and in a perfect world they would all be translated into English—we are lucky in that she did manage to publish at least one in the U.S. with the help of her husband, Tien Chi Chen, and Prof. Rose Tseng. Like the other women on this list, she pulled no punches and never talked down to her audience, but rather showcased the brilliance of China’s cuisines in a way that even a beginner would find easy to master.

She was a cooking star in Taiwan in the years before Julia Child transformed cooking in American. The prolific author of over 30 Chinese titles, she is perhaps most famous for this three-volume series, which was published in both Chinese and English between 1969 and 1979. She was my first real guide to cooking the way my Chinese friends did in Taipei, a beautiful place I was lucky enough to live and work in for eight years. Her easy recipes soon had me whipping up dry-fried green beans and mapo tofu like a pro.

A cooking teacher and the author of eleven titles on classic Cantonese-style cooking, her last book is considered by many to be her finest, as it is a distillation of a lifetime of love for her native Guangdong’s stellar dishes. Unlike all of the other books on this list, this one is packed with color photographs, making it as nice to flip through as it is to cook from.

The sole non-Chinese author here, she was probably most responsible for introducing traditional Chinese cooking methods and dishes to mainstream Americans. True, some of her recipes—and especially the sweets—are not even vaguely Chinese, but they were what she served to the enthusiastic customers at her popular restaurant, San Francisco’s China Moon. She made cooking Chinese seem easy and accessible, and she is one of those great authors who gave me the confidence I needed to forge ahead with my own forays into the infinite delights of China’s cuisines.