Yan-kit So’s Classic Chinese Cookbook is a perfect gateway to the country’s cooking. Here, food writer Fuchsia Dunlop recalls her friendship with its author. Plus five brilliant recipes
The first Chinese recipes I ever attempted were from Yan-Kit’s Classic Chinese Cookbook. It was the early 90s, and I’d been a keen cook since childhood, but Chinese cuisine was mysterious to me. Yan-kit So’s book was the perfect place to start, with its clear instructions and mouthwatering photographs of every dish. I started to cook, following the recipes blindly at first, but with increasing confidence. One evening, I made a few dishes for friends, including the braised fish Hunan-Szechwan style, with its heavenly sauce of ginger, garlic and pickled chilli. I’ve never forgotten the rapturous silence around the table.
Later, as a junior restaurant reviewer for Time Out, I met Yan-kit, the magazine’s ad-hoc Chinese culinary consultant, and we became friends. She was great fun, interested in everything and wildly sociable. Physically tiny, she was always immaculately dressed, often in radiant colours. She was an exquisite cook and threw legendary dinner parties, where guests might include musicians, journalists and famous novelists. She and I dined out at restaurants across London, from holes in the wall in Chinatown to the Oriental at the Dorchester Hotel. If I was lucky, she would invite me back to her house afterwards for a glass of wine and some homemade lotus root crisps.
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