Review: Chinese Cuisine Szechwan Style | Sybaritica

1993:  Wei-Chuan Publishing.   ISBN-13: 978-0941676311

The Wei-Chuan Cooking School in Taiwan has its own associated publishing house that has produced a large number of cookbooks. Most deal with Chinese cookery, but there are also volumes covering several other nations such as Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Thailand and even Mexico. I like almost all of the two-dozen or so Wei-Chuan books I have purchased so far and this current volume on Sichuan cookery is one of my favorites. The format and style of all of the volumes is fairly similar and many of my comments about this one apply to the others…

Content and Organization

Click to enlarge image

The 155 recipes in this book are divided amongst 8 sections based on food-type. Each recipe is accompanied by at least one illustration and a fair number also include a few step-by-step photographs. At the beginning, there is also a ten-page introduction that illustrates some techniques for the preparation of certain foods along with some useful recipes for basic things such as Chili Oil and Pepper-Salt. There is not much in the way of a written introduction to Sichuan Cuisine save for a few paragraphs in the foreword.

Critique

The layout of this book, and most others in the Wei-Chuan series, leaves a little to be desired. Many recipes occupy a whole page and are not badly laid out, but others come compressed two to a page and the effect is often cluttered. The photographs of the finished dishes are generally very good but the step-by-step pictures that accompany some recipes are too small and poorly taken to be of much use.

On the plus side, the range of recipes provided is very good. There are some of the usual dishes one would expect in a Sichuan cookery book, such as Kung Pao Chicken, and Hot and Sour soup, but there are a lot of less common preparations as well. There are also some very interesting and unusual dishes featuring ingredients not often found in a western kitchen, most notably, Pig Intestines and Sea Cucumber, to name a couple.

What I particularly like about the Wei-Chuan series is that most of the books are printed in Chinese as well as English. I am trying to improve my vocabulary of Chinese characters and having the recipes in both languages is a great resource. The English recipes are a little terse and not always easy to follow, but the translations are occasionally rather amusing and it is also interesting when one comes across meanings for the Chinese names of dishes that are not reflected in the English.

Overall

Not all Wei-Chuan publications are created equal and the ones dealing with various aspects of Chinese cookery tend to be better than those focusing on other cuisines. In the main, these books, and this one in particular, offer the sort of look at Chinese food that goes beyond publications produced in the west that specifically target an exclusively western readership.

Available Here…

…