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Culinary History, Food and Drink, Summer 2026

The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book: Community Building in Beirut

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By Jennifer Brannock

On September 21, 1950, E. Gertrude Joly gave a talk about the women of Lebanon at the Royal Central Asian Society, a British society founded in 1901 focusing on the history and culture of Asia. In her speech, she described the diverse roles of women in the country, from educated Lebanese women advocating for equal rights (Lebanese women did get the right to vote in 1951) to village women who cared for their households while working in the homes of British families in Beirut. Even though Joly differentiates between the women of Lebanon, partially because of the audience at her talk, she celebrates the foodways of the women and culture, but with a caveat. “Arab cookery is very good, but you have to get used to it gradually – it is hard on Anglo-Saxon digestions until they have got used to it.”

Cover of the cookbook The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book (1940s). Image courtesy of Special Collections at the University of Southern Mississippi.

In the 1940s, Joly and a group associated with the Young Women’s Christian Association (Y.W.C.A.) in Beirut, Lebanon, compiled the cookbook The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book to highlight local and Western recipes. In the book, Joly refers to the dishes as Syrian, which may be a holdover from the time before Lebanese independence. It may also acknowledge the culinary overlap between Syrian and Lebanese cuisines. The cookbook was created to serve three purposes:

  1. “To supply the newcomer (generally a bride coming out to live in a country whose vegetables and dishes are unknown to her but popular with her husband) a book to guide her steps in the first anxious days of striving to “feed the brute.” 
  2. “To supply to those who live in the Near East something definite in ideas for the arranging of new and varied menus suitable to the country.” 
  3. “To supply to the Y.W.C.A a book, the sale of which may bring in an income to help in the furnishing of their annual summer camp in Lebanon.” 

The book had a broad potential audience, and to further the goal of making this book accessible to locals and expats, each recipe is printed in English and Arabic. In the preface, following the goals and purposes of the cookbook, Joly writes how disappointed she is in the book. “I regret that my original intention of committing to paper a representative set of Syrian dishes has been far from realized. The response to my appeal for such dishes was not as hearty nor as spontaneous as I could have wished…” 

With the combination of Lebanese, English, and some American recipes, Joly wanted to create a community of people, food, and culture through The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book, and in her own words, she believes she failed. 

Recipe for Tamale Pie from The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book (1940s). Image courtesy of Special Collections at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Why weren’t there more local dishes submitted? There could be numerous guesses as to why. Maybe the call for submissions was not as broad as needed. Most of the women who submitted recipes were probably expats married to professors or businessmen in Beirut. These women were not from Lebanon and probably employed local women to prepare meals in their homes. Another reason may be that the local women did not want to submit their recipes to a cookbook that could potentially put them out of a job. The Lebanese cooks in expat households relied on their recipes and cooking skills to maintain employment and publicizing their recipes makes their main commodities available to anyone who had the book. 

One wonders if the community that Joly hoped to bring together couldn’t be formed because the community didn’t exist in day-to-day lives. Joly infers in her talk to the Royal Central Asian Society that there were the wealthy expats like her, the educated Lebanese women who were pushing for equal rights, and the village women who helped in the expat homes. Maybe the emphasis wasn’t on creating a human community, but more of a diversity in recipes?

Recipe for Majadarah from The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book (1940s). Image courtesy of Special Collections at the University of Southern Mississippi.

The Lebanese recipes included in the cookbook are few, but include dishes that are well known today. Simple dishes like Houmous Tahini, Mjadarah (a rice, lentil, and onion dish), and Kibbeh highlight the food of the local culture. More unique recipes like The Dervish’s Rosary (great name!) and Mouloukeya found their way into the book as well. 

Recipe for The Dervish’s Rosary from The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book (1940s). Image courtesy of Special Collections at the University of Southern Mississippi.

From a Veal à la Marengo (a French classic) to the American Southwest’s tamale pie to a section on scones, the bulk of The Y.W.C.A Cookery Book focuses on European classics and wartime versions of English recipes. The European and American recipes incorporate some local ingredients, but most require tapioca pudding, Robinson’s Patent Barley, and other ingredients that were only found at specialty stores in Beirut. If anything, many of the recipes submitted don’t encourage community and seemingly emphasize the differences between the cultures. 

An advertisement from Anis Nasif, the proprietor of a grocery at the American University in Beirut, stating that he carries American groceries that can be used to prepare recipes in The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book (1940s). Image courtesy of Special Collections at the University of Southern Mississippi.

It’s unknown how many copies of the cookbook were sold. What we know is that in 1950, E. Gertrude Joly published The English-Arabic Cookery Book. It’s evident from the preface that this cookbook is a copy of The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book without attribution to the people who submitted recipes or contribution to the money donated to support the Y.W.C.A. Perhaps Joly believed that having edited the first edition, and likely contributed many of its recipes, she was entitled to revise the formatting and modify some of the recipes for a new edition under her name. She continued with her initial mission of providing a book of recipes for the young bride new to Lebanon, but her initial goal of creating a community cookbook had been left behind.

References 

Joly, Mrs. Gertrude. “The Women of Lebanon.” Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society. 38 (1951): 177-184.

Jennifer Brannock is Professor and Curator of Rare Books and Mississippiana at the University of Southern Mississippi. She has a BA in Art History and an MSLS from the University of Kentucky. In 2011, Jennifer started collecting Mississippi community cookbooks for Special Collections. Over 150 of these cookbooks are digitized and available in USM’s Digital Collections. Since starting the collection, she has hosted events highlighting the collection and given talks to local women’s groups, as well as conference presentations in Mississippi, the United States, and in Kazakhstan about the importance of cookbooks in local history and genealogy research. 

In 2020, Jennifer received the American Library Association/Reference and User Services’ Genealogy/History Achievement Award, recognizing her work with the cookbook collection among other achievements. She is active in the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (Vice-chair/Secretary for the Local History and Genealogy Section) and the Society of Mississippi Archivists (President).

 

Culinary History, Global Exchange, Summer 2026

Translating a Santorini specialty: Santorini Tomato Fritters (GREEK: Ντοματοκεφτέδες)

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By Thei Zervaki

Related article: 7 Greek cheeses you should know

For this project, I selected the recipe for Santorini Tomato Fritters from the Greek cookbook «Του ανέμου και της αρμύρας» which literally means “Of the Wind and of the Salt.” However, I would translate the title Made with Wind and Salt. Its subtitle reads Products and Cooking Techniques of Cyclades Islands, which reflects the book’s focus on local ingredients and traditional culinary techniques.

The Book

Published in 2015, «Του ανέμου και της αρμύρας» was co-authored by three established Greek food and wine writers, Nana Darioti, Thalia Tsichlakis, and Andreas N. Androulidakis, and was supported by several organizations, including the Chamber of Commerce of the Cyclades and the European Regional Development Fund. Each chapter is dedicated to a different island, combining geographical and culinary background with one to three recipes. It is illustrated with photographs of both landscapes and finished dishes and contains fifty recipes.

Part recipe collection and part culinary geography and history, this book explores the food heritage of the Cyclades, one of Greece’s best-known island groups. While the islands are famous for their whitewashed houses overlooking the blue Aegean Sea, they are defined by a distinctive agricultural environment. The Cyclades experience long hours of sunshine, receive little annual rainfall, and are exposed to the strong seasonal meltemi winds. 

One of the islands that makes up the Cyclades is Santorini. Specifically, Santorini is known for its volcanic and rocky soil. Rather than producing abundant crops, the island yields ingredients with concentrated flavors, including Santorini’s famous small tomatoes, capers, white eggplants, and fava. Local recipes are therefore closely tied to the geography and climate that shaped them.

On Translation

From a translation perspective, cookbooks, like any other type of specialized text or book, have their own conventions. A recipe typically combines headnotes with precise ingredient lists, measurements and instructions. Translations require accuracy both in language and in culinary technique. 

Many recipes in this book present an additional challenge because they rely on ingredients that are regional and often unavailable outside Greece. Therefore, I chose Santorini tomato fritters because they are among the easiest and most accessible recipes for an international audience. Although the authentic recipe uses Santorini’s small, flavored tomatoes, they can be substituted with cherry tomatoes in many countries. The result will not be identical, but the substitution allows readers to prepare a version that remains faithful to the spirit and color of the original recipe (and of the island). Small tomatoes’ availability also varies depending on the target country and its local produce.

Tomato Fritters 

Head Note:

These meatless fritters are commonly used in Cyclades islands. They are made with seasonal ingredients and herbs, and often use leftovers from the previous day, mainly legumes. In Santorini specifically, the small sun-dried tomatoes are flavored with mint or oregano and occasionally are added to salted cod. 

Ingredients

  • 500 grams Santorini tomatoes (suggested portion in cups: 3 ½ cups)
  • 1 zucchini
  • 1-2 onions, thinly chopped
  • ½ US cup mint, thinly chopped
  • 400 grams all-purpose flour (suggested portion in cups: 3 1/3 cups)
  • Salt and pepper
  • Olive oil or seed oil for frying

Instructions

Cut the tomatoes into small cubes and let them drain in a colander for 15 minutes. Grate the zucchini and squeeze out the excess liquid. Place the tomatoes and zucchini in a large bowl with the finely chopped onions, mint, flour, salt, and pepper, and mix well. If the mixture is too dry, add a little water. Let the mixture sit in the refrigerator for a few hours to allow the ingredients to bind together. Spoon the batter into a frying pan in hot oil and fry over medium heat until golden brown. Do not fry them over high heat, so they don’t burn on the outside and remain raw on the inside. Do not add too many fritters into the hot oil at once, as this will lower the oil’s temperature and they’ll end up looking like they’ve been boiled. Flip them over to fry on the other side. Transfer them to a platter lined with paper towels to drain off the excess oil.

Serve them hot. 

Tomatokeftedes are fried tomato balls served as an appetizer on the Greek island of Santorini. Credit: DEPOSITPHOTOS

Ingredient Substitution

The key ingredient is the Protected Designation of Origincherry tomato variety from the Greek island of Santorini.  These small tomatoes are deep red, ribbed fruits and have historically been grown without irrigation, relying on the island’s humidity and volcanic soil. This results in firm flesh and a sweet, strongly acidic flavor with high lycopene levels. As these Santorini tomatoes are not available in the US, I suggest cherry tomatoes as the closest substitute. 

From Aruna at ml.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12038931

Converting Measurements

Europeans typically use the metric system in recipes. You will find grams (gr) and kilograms (kg or kilos) for dry ingredients, and milliliters (ml) and liters (l) for liquids. Smaller ingredient quantities are indicated in tablespoons or teaspoons. 

Cups in European cuisine, however, are not the same as in the US. 

  • 1 US cup = 240 ml
  • 1 EU cup = 250 ml

When measuring dry goods, the conversion is more complicated and depends on the actual ingredients. Flour weights differently than tomatoes, so the metric system is more accurate. 

In this recipe, you will notice that no quantity is given for salt and pepper. I left it as it appears in its original text.

For the frying oil, no quantity is indicated. I assume that home cooks can decide how much oil they want to use.

Recipe Structure

The first, and perhaps most interesting, element of this recipe (and all the recipes in this book) is that there is no mention of kitchenware size. The recipe does not specify what size frying pan or serving platter should be. Elsewhere in the book,  recipes that indicate the use of baking pans, yet no pan sizes are mentioned there either.

This absence is an invitation for readers and home cooks to decide for themselves what kitchenware they will use. The typical American practice of specifying the exact size of every bowl, baking pan, and even spatula or whisk can feel overly instructional when most home cooks are experienced and operate intuitively.  Ultimately, nothing significant will occur if they choose a large pot instead of a medium size? 

The same applies to the recipe’s language. The instructions are written as one continuous paragraph, without numbered steps or spacing. The author uses the first-person plural (“we”) in Greek rather than the imperative (“do,” bake,”” cook”), which is more common in American recipes. Therefore, recipes feel friendlier, more inclusive, and more collaborative, inviting the reader to cook alongside the author rather than simply following orders from an expert.

I translated the recipe following the American structure, as it is the standard. For the ingredients, I kept the metric measurements and suggested their US equivalents. As this example illustrates, recipes are both texts of instructions and cultural documents. Translating them requires balancing linguistic accuracy with culinary expectations, while taking into consideration the historical and geographical context in which they were created. In doing so, translation helps regional food traditions reach new readers and home cooks globally without losing the identity that makes them unique. 

Thei Zervaki is a trained linguist, translator, and interpreter working with three languages. She has a genuine love for words, dictionaries, and food writing. In her free time, you can find her reading vintage cookbooks, strolling through markets around the world, or enjoying a glass of chilled rosé.

Find her work here: https://thehungrybookshelf.substack.com/, https://theizervaki.contently.com/, https://wedesserts.com/

 

Culinary History, Food and Drink, Posts, Summer 2026

What were we eating? Salmon, seafood, and the diet of fishing and canning communities in British Columbia’s Salmonopolis

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By Tatyana Beck, with content adapted from Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present, a Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society publication

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the fishing and salmon canning industries on the West Coast of British Columbia (BC) were powered by a diverse workforce of Indigenous communities, European settlers, and international labourers primarily hailing from Japan and China. This multicultural working community was in turn powered by salmon.

The communities that fished the Fraser River and laboured for the expanding number of canneries along the BC coast were operating in the province at a time when Pacific salmon was particularly abundant, fresh, and accessible. The canneries along the Coast, which opened as early as the 1870s, were built at the mouth of the Fraser River, where they had access  to a seemingly endless supply of fat, fully-grown salmon as the fish made their way from the ocean towards their freshwater spawning grounds each summer and autumn.

Chum salmon awaiting processing, Leonard Frank Photography. Credit: Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society Collection, G1996.006.002/8

Known colloquially as “Salmonopolis”, the village of Steveston, BC was a major player within the history of these industries. By 1890, Steveston was home to a total of 15 operating canneries,the largest of which was the Gulf of Georgia Cannery. For the communities living and working in Steveston, fish and seafood weren’t just a job – they were inseparable from the sights, smells, and taste of everyday life.

In Steveston, like the rest of the Coast, the first cannery workers came from the local Indigenous communities. Indigenous groups were the first fishers of the Fraser River, as well as the original knowledge-keepers who taught European settlers how to find and fish Pacific salmon. Traditional Indigenous fishing focused on collecting enough fish to feed community members during the spring and summer, and to be smoked, dried, or candied for winter preservation or seasonal trade. 

Fishers taking a lunch break on the dock. Credit: Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society Collection, G2003.033.004.

The arrival of European businessmen to Steveston, alongside the newly-invented process of commercial canning, brought rapid change. The industry grew, and cannery work attracted labourers from around the world. Along the West Coast, the Japanese community had a significant presence and brought tremendous fishing expertise with them. Chinese labourers, some already in BC to build the Canadian Pacific Railway, supplied seasonal labour in a variety of manual positions. Together with a range of European immigrant communities and early Indigenous workers, these communities formed the workforce that helped the business of salmon canning and exporting flourish. The Fraser River’s abundant marine populations became an economic tool, exported by sea to buyers primarily in England.

But wait: if the hundreds of thousands of cans of salmon that the canneries produced were being sent across the world to England, then how was salmon the food that powered the Cannery’s workforce? What, exactly, were they eating?

Cannery can loft stacked with thousands of cans waiting to be filled with salmon. Credit: Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society Collection, G2002.003.001.

In 20th century Steveston the reality was this: when the river has a seemingly never-ending supply, even the canneries might turn away your catch. Even after selling what the canneries rejected, leaving gifts for your friends and neighbours, and stocking your pantry with self-canned product for the winters, there would still be more fish waiting for you to use. If you were a fisher, docked for the night and in need of dinner, what would’ve been simpler than taking a fish right out of your boat to whip something up for you and your crew? With such abundance, Steveston residents would make use of whatever leftover fish they had on hand, adapting traditional recipes to fit with the resources the River had given them.

There was one notable exception: Indigenous communities, who had been the earliest workers at many West Coast canneries, were soon heavily policed and restricted from partaking in traditional fishing practices or accessing salmon for their communities in favour of those very same canneries.

At the canneries, seasonal workers typically lived in bunkhouses segregated by race and gender, or in communal housing with a contracted cook supplying meals. Supplies often included the national foods of the workers, such as salted eggs, bean cakes, and bamboo shoots for Chinese bunkhouses. This community would certainly have made use of fresh or canned local fish in addition to the pork and chicken they were supplied. 

Commercial fisherman Butch Sakiyama remembers bringing the fish he’d caught that the canneries had rejected to the bunkhouses to be turned into meals for himself and the other fishers : “[…] the ladies would cut it up, salt it or cook it, and the next day, next thing you know they got teriyaki salmon. And the ladies would go up there and grow their own veggies, […] and have meals ready for us”.

With diverse communities working and living in such close proximity, there were opportunities not only to adapt one’s own cultural recipes, but to learn and share recipes with one another. Commercial fisher and Coast Salish/Sahtu-Dené cultural worker Rosemary Georgeson recounts how she and her father shared jibu, a seafood hot pot, with Japanese-Canadian fishers they encountered one night after she gave them some of the fillets from her family’s boat. “[…] they bring me and dad over and they start making this sauce on the grill, adding in slivered onions and carrots, and then the slivered fish. We ate together and they spent about two hours talking with my dad.”

Cover, Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present

The Gorgeson’s story is just one of the many tales included in the Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site’s Fish Tales feature exhibit (2023-2025), which explored coastal BC residents’ deep ties to fish and seafood as a dietary staple, source of community connection, and a way of life. The legacy project created from this exhibit, the newly-published Cannery community recipe book Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present collects the “fish tales” shared by Steveston’s present community members, fishing communities, and museum audiences and connects them to the past experiences, interviews, recipes, and eating traditions of Steveston’s past.

Credit: pp. 44-45; Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present, Copyright 2025, Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society.

This article is only a taste of what can be found in the Society’s new publication. Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present is now available at the Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site in Steveston, BC, or through our online gift shop at https://thecannerystore.square.site/s/shop. 

References: 

Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present. Vancouver, BC: Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society, 2026.

The Monster Cannery: The History of the Gulf of Georgia Cannery. Vancouver, BC: Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society, 2011.

Tatyana Beck is a heritage and cultural resource management professional and current Curatorial Program Manager at the Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site. With over five years of experience in museum programming and interpretive writing and many more in cultural and event work, Tatyana finds joy in using storytelling to create connection and bring new and hidden perspectives to audiences of all ages. Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present is her first official publication.

The Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society honours the importance of Canada’s West Coast fishing history by sharing stories of the fishing industry and fishing communities through exhibitions, collections, programs, and events. In addition to operating the Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site, the Society works to achieve its mission through other activities such as creating annual feature exhibitions related to fishing history and producing community events. www.gulfofgeorgiacannery.org 

 

Culinary History, Summer 2026

Gelatin for Pig Rinds: Joyce Chen’s Translations of Chinese Home Cooking

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By Jolin Chan

Joyce Chen’s path to becoming a chef, restaurateur, and author began in an unassuming setting: her children’s school bake sale. In 1957, bearing two dozen homemade egg rolls and a few dozen cookies, Chen dropped off her contributions to the Buckingham School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the introduction to her 1962 cookbook, Joyce Chen Cook Book, she remembers asking her daughter Helen:

Did you see my egg rolls there? She replied, No, I only saw your cookies there, not your egg rolls. I thought they did not like them so they had not put them up for sale. But on the same evening when I was shopping I met one of the mothers who was in charge of the food table. She asked me, Mrs. Chen, do you think you could make some more egg rolls, your egg rolls sold out in five minutes. What a surprise to me. They did like them. I made dozens more the same night for that school.1

Chen was born in Beijing in 1917 to a wealthy family that employed a cook and multiple servants, though she remembers learning from them and her mother as they cooked. In 1949, she, her husband Thomas Chen, and her two young children fled China as the Communist Party took over, catching the second-to-last boat before the ports of Shanghai closed. They settled in Cambridge, worlds away from the life she once knew and where the search for Northern Chinese and Shanghainese foods felt impossible. Not only was Chinese food as you would find it in China rare in 1950s America, American Chinese food—a cuisine developed by Chinese immigrants who had to work with different ingredients and tastes during the Gold Rush—had long been rendered as cheap, unrefined, and even suspect.2 Asian Americans, and by extension, their food, occupied a tenuous position in the U.S. as a foreign “other.”

Rather than yield to her new circumstances, she began hosting dinners for Chinese students from Harvard, M.I.T., and Boston University. Realizing people were interested in Chinese cuisine, she taught cooking classes at adult education centers and, in 1958, opened the first of her four restaurants, the Joyce Chen Restaurant. (Her restaurants were frequented by college students, as well as figures like Julia Child, James Beard, Danny Kaye, and Henry Kissinger.)

It is one thing to introduce a new cuisine by cooking for someone, letting them smell the stir-fried garlic and ginger, taste the wok hei (“breath of the wok”), or feel the velveted meat, made tender with baking soda and a cornstarch coating. It is another thing, however, to introduce a novel cuisine through a list of ingredients, instructions, and if you’re lucky, illustrations. How does a recipe writer translate these experiences and the cultural contexts within which a cuisine has developed and evolved?

Chen’s cookbook answers this question, simultaneously advocating that the complexities of Chinese cuisine have a place at the table.3 With recipes that “still kept the authentic flavor,” her cookbook addressed common complaints: “It was too hard to get the ingredients. The recipes were too complicated to follow …. Many dishes simply did not come out right.”4 Some of her translations are quite literal, such as the handwritten Chinese characters accompanying detailed explanations for ingredients and techniques (Figures 2–4). 

If translation is also a process of interpretation, Chen demonstrates the necessity of translations that extend beyond language, particularly in a diasporic context. Take, for example, how canned bean sprouts cannot replace fresh ones, but home cooks could use shredded lettuce in place of sprouts (Figure 2). Cooking fried rice, then, might require translating one vegetable (bean sprouts) to another (shredded lettuce). She suggests other culinary conversions: a metal can for a bamboo steamer, Smithfield ham for Chinese ham, and—for a Jellied Lamb Loaf—gelatin for pig rinds for a collagenous texture. She invites the readers to engage in their own acts of translation, asking them to transfer the meaning, use, and properties of one tool, ingredient, or flavor to another.

Chen transforms the unfamiliar into something digestible. This includes not only ingredients and techniques but also customs and practices. Sections are dedicated to the particularities of serving tea, the elements of a well-made dish (color, aroma, flavor, and nutrition), and the structure of a Chinese meal. While anthropologist Mary Douglas theorized the minimum structure of an English meal to be a formula of A + 2B (a main course plus two smaller courses), Chen decoded the Chinese meal, which does not have courses but rather “several dishes together.”5 Furthermore, her unique table of contents is a grid of dots that indexes recipes into categories like “Main dish,” “2nd Main dish,” and “Hors d’oeuvres” (Figures 5 and 6).

The beef and pork sections in the table of contents. Joyce Chen Cook Book.

Chen has been called “the Chinese Julia Child.” They had some similarities: both called Cambridge their home and wrote cookbooks on daunting cuisines. They were even friends and shared the same studio for their respective shows. However, to know Chen only as Child’s Chinese counterpart erases the particular translations and renditions she strategically made. This is not to discount Child, a translator of French cuisine in her own right, but instead to present the context within which Chen worked to bridge her two homes. Her cookbook was written with her “blood, sweat, and love”: “love in remembering the old days in China where I was born, grew up and lived for more than thirty years” and “love to my new country for the freedom, wonderful friendships and good opportunities.”6 Honoring her first home and claiming a space in “my new country,” she reveals how recipe-writing can produce a sense of belonging for individuals and cuisines.

Her biggest impact was not necessarily identifying clever substitutes for winter melon (old cucumbers) or Shaoxing wine (a pale dry sherry). It was her translation of knowledge that introduced and championed a new form of Chinese cooking, one that required some adaptations but nevertheless unapologetically established itself as Mandarin, Shanghai, or Cantonese cookery. Recipes and cookbooks often present an argument, and hers was a trailblazing declaration to celebrate a long-disdained cuisine. For Joyce Chen, this was a cuisine that belongs in a dinner party, on a bookshelf, and on a TV screen in American homes.

  1. Joyce Chen, Joyce Chen Cook Book (J.B. Lippincott Company, 1962), 2.  ↩︎
  2. Madeline Y. Hsu, “From Chop Suey to Mandarin Cuisine: Fine Dining and the Refashioning of Chinese Ethnicity during the Cold War Era,” in Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture, ed. Madeline Y. Hsu and Sucheng Chan (Temple University Press, 2008), 189. ↩︎
  3. While I focus on Chen’s cookbook in this article, her 1966 television show, which was produced and broadcasted by WGBH, offers other examples of Chen’s culinary translations. You can find her episodes on the American Archive of Public Broadcasting here: https://americanarchive.org/catalog?q=joyce+chen. ↩︎
  4. Chen, Joyce Chen Cook Book (J.B. Lippincott Company, 1962), 2. ↩︎
  5. Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” Daedalus 101, no. 1 (1972); Chen, 207. ↩︎
  6. Chen, 223. ↩︎

References

Chen, Joyce. Joyce Chen Cook Book. New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1962.

Douglas, Mary, “Deciphering a Meal,” Daedalus 101, no. 1 (1972): 61–81. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20024058. 

Hsu, Madeline Y. “From Chop Suey to Mandarin Cuisine: Fine Dining and the Refashioning of Chinese Ethnicity during the Cold War Era.” In Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture, edited by Madeline Y. Hsu and Sucheng Chan. Temple University Press, 2008. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/183/edited_volume/book/45919.

Jolin Chan is a recipe developer, content creator, and recent History & Literature and Social Anthropology graduate from Harvard College. Her undergraduate research focused on food studies and Asian American studies. After graduating, she continues to work within the world of food, collaborating with brands and businesses to develop recipes and social media content. You can find her cooking, baking, reading, and writing on @jolinfromscratch.

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