Chinese cooking has always been closely linked to the vegetarian way of eating Vegetables in China, because of its climate, are easily grown, and therefore plentiful Culturally, Taoism and Buddhism have further added a tradition of cooking without meat to the Chinese way of life.

Happily, the Chinese have made a virtue of cooking with vegetables. With ingenuity and thousands of years of refining their cooking style, they have transformed grains, beans, and vegetables into a cuisine with almost infinite subtle variations of taste and color. Their primary cooking methods, stir-frying and steaming, are ideally suited to vegetables, for they allow them to retain their flavor, nutrients, texture, and color in the final dish. The Chinese employ this benefit further by taking extreme care with presentation, using the colors and textures of the ingredients to enhance the presentation of their dishes. A relatively simple recipe such as Snow Peas and Carrots with Ginger combines contrasting textures and colors with fragrant ginger in a light sweet-sour sauce to produce a dish that is as pleasing to the rye as it is to the palate. In addition, through deft use of sauces and spices, Chinese cooking can transform basic ingredients such as eggplant and cabbage into any number of dishes-spicy, mild, sweet and sour, pungent. The results, so different each time, reflect the multiplicity of influences that have made Chinese cooking so fascinating and endlessly enjoyable to cooks all over the world.

Chinese cooking has been called exotic, different, difficult. It is exotic and different to the uneducated Western palate, but exotic in the most pleasurable of ways. It ranks as one of the great cuisines of the world, so anyone who is even generally interested in food would be remiss in overlooking Chinese cooking. Mastering it need not be difficult and in fact, the basic techniques of Chinese cooking are relatively easy to learn. The most common method of cooking is stir-frying, and that holds few mysteries: it is simply quick cooking over very high heat.

This guide is for the beginner, although the more practiced Chinese cook will also find many recipes to enjoy. The range of recipes runs from very straightforward, such as Stir-fried Asparagus, to more complex dishes like Fourcolor Shui Mai, and wherever possible I’ve emphasized those recipes that are easy to prepare in the Western kitchen. If you haven’t cooked with a wok before, read through Chapter 1 for information on equipment and the techniques of stir-frying and steaming. This chapter also includes a glossary of the main ingredients I use in the recipes; a second glossary at the end of the book covers some of the less-essential vegetables, beans, spices, and oils. Wherever possible I have included suggestions for substitutions for ingredients that may be hard to find, and added a list of mail order sources of supply for equipment and ingredients. The menu guide at the back of the book will help you plan everything from an everyday meal to an array of party dishes.