Introduction

It is almost an impossibility to write on Chinese cookery in the terms of European cookery. Chinese cookery, with its intricacies, its subtleties and niceties, is a sealed book to us, and our methods seem clumsy and primitive as compared with their elaborate kitchen work. Just as years of patient toil are spent on the making of a small square of some beautiful piece of embroidery, so hours of equally patient labour are devoted to the making of a subtle dish, where flavours are as carefully and artistically blended as the silken threads of needlework. It seems, indeed, almost sacrilegious to vulgarize Chinese cookery by adapting it to European taste. Chinese cookery is, in fact, “untranslatable.” It is remote from both our understanding and from our palates.