Chinese Recipes for the Home Kitchen [antikvár]

INTRODUCTORY REMARKSForeign tourists after a round of dinners in Chinese restaurants and hotels may wonder what the average Chinese have for their meals at home. As they may well expect, these meals are much less elaborate and require little or no professional skill for their preparation.Here is a collection of recipes which the Chinese cook at home when they have a free day; they are for dishes more frequently served in Chinese homes than in the fashionable establishments.These recipes, taken out of a cookbook published by us in Chinese and from other sources, are marked for their tastiness as well as simplicity and easiness to prepare.While recommending this cookbook to foreign readers who may be interested to try Chinese cooking back home in their own kitchens, we would like to make the following remarks:(1) As was mentioned at the beginning, the Chinese family meal is far from being the 10 to 15-course affair which is so much talked about abroad. The average household in China, like its counterpart in the West, makes no more than a couple of dishes for its everyday meals. Even on festive occasions few families on the mainland make anything approaching the sumptuous feast for which Chinese hospitality is known.As a matter of fact, except for formal occasions, the staple food at a Chinese meal is rice or steamed bread or some other starch food, and the dishes are meant to help the rice, etc. "go down".So, when the readers cook a Chinese meal, they should use their own judgment, based on the quantity of each dish, the number of people sharing the dinner and the time involved in deciding how many dishes to prepare.