The Key to Chinese Cooking

This classic tome on Chinese cooking was published in the 1977 and written by a Irene Kuo, who immigrated to the United States after fleeing Mao Zedong's Chinese Revolution. Kuo became the owner of two popular Chinese restaurants in Manhattan and would often appear in news media and on television dressed in glamorous cheongsams and stiletto heels. While her cookbooks can often get lost in the pile of tomes on Chinese cuisine, it's important to remember that her contemporaries are still considered among the ranks of the most famous "celebrity chefs" that were edited by the esteemed Judith Jones at Knopf. Her contemporaries were no less than Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, Claudia Roden, and Madhur Jaffrey and her detailed and lovely cookbook on the cuisine of her native home was just popular - Kuo later became the face of Chinese cooking in America.