Cooking of the East

The cooks of Shanghai will tell you, without the least trace of modesty, that to eat the best Cantonese food you should travel to Shanghai. Predictably, they say the same thing about Peking and Szechuan cooking. With good reason. The cooking in Shanghai is certainly the most cosmopolitan in China, as befits the country’s most cosmopolitan city, and its cooks as a group are most accomplished and versatile. I suspect more than a few of them come originally from my hometown of Sun Tak, of which it is said in China, “If you were born in Sun Tak, then you were born to cook.” Whatever the reasons, the food they produce tends to be a distillation of all that is best of China’s cooking as a whole.