Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food
Division of Research Programs
W.W. Norton & Company
W.W. Norton & Company
Michelle T. King's Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-Mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food tells a fresh history of Chinese food through the story of television chef and cookbook author Fu Pei-Mei
At the same time that Julia Child was teaching American audiences about French food, Fu Pei-Mei was instructing the world on how to make dishes from the varied repertoire of Chinese cuisine. King’s biography follows Fu Pei-Mei from her childhood in China and flight to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War to her efforts to learn to cook as a young housewife and rise to culinary celebrity with a public career that spanned 40 years.
King combines Pei-Mei's story with vignettes and oral histories from her own family to trace how Pei-Mei's influential cookbooks not only impacted cooking, but also serve as symbols of cultural preservation.
Learn more about the NEH Public Scholars book Chop Fry Watch Learn from NPR and The New York Times. And read an excerpt from the book in the Spring 2024 edition of NEH’s HUMANITIES Magazine.