The Food Of Taiwan: Recipes from the Beautiful Island

My wife came across this cookbook at the library while doing research on Taiwan for our son's kindergarten school project. Since my wife is originally from Taiwan, we were really excited to see this cookbook, so we read the reviews & ended up ordering it. We have since tried the following recipes:Fried ShallotsSweet-and-Sour Tomato-Based SaucePan-Fried Leek Buns with Dried ShrimpOyster Omelet (O Ah Jian)Sauteed Water Spinach with Fermented TofuNoodles with Minced Pork & Fermented Bean Sauce (Zha Jiang Mian)Sweet Potato CongeePork Meat Sauce over Rice (Lu Rou Fan)Basil ClamsPineapple Tarts (Feng Li Su)Although most of the recipes turned out decently, as other reviewers have pointed out, we found that we had to tweak several of the recipes - either the proportions were off or the recipe called for too much of one ingredient or that some important info was omitted. For example - in the Pork Meat Sauce over Rice recipe, it called for 1 cup of light soy sauce & 1/2 cup dark soy sauce. By following the recipe exactly, we were left with a soupy pork meat sauce that was dark & very salty. If we have to make it again, we would reduce the light soy sauce to 3/4 cup & omit the dark soy sauce. For the Oyster Pancake recipe, four oysters was not enough per pancake. Also, the pancake became too top-heavy with all those additional vegetables & was impossible to flip over without breaking it. The Pineapple Tart recipe was the worst - it called for a lot of butter (more so than in any other pineapple tart recipe that we've seen). The author also neglected to mention that pineapple tart needed to be made using molds - this is very important, as the mold is what shapes the pineapple tart (like how one cannot bake a pie without using a pie baking dish). If no mold is used, the tart would spread since it is very high in butter content. The one recipe that turned out decently without any tweaking was the Basil Clams.The plus? We enjoyed the format of this book, as author Cathy Erway wrote it more like a history book/tour book combined with a cookbook. My wife enjoyed reminiscing about the Taiwan from her childhood. She even learned some Taiwan history along the way - things that either she had forgotten or didn't learn about. The photos by Pete Lee were breathtaking - they really captured the essence & uniqueness of Taiwan, from the beautiful landscape to the mouth-watering food to the people of Taiwan.The minus? We would say a lot of the recipes need more testing and cross-referencing. Cooking is an art & it is often passed down from one generation to another, especially in a country like Taiwan, where ancestors came from various regions of China, & there are Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese, & aboriginal influences. So it is understandable that these recipes from Cathy's family may be different from other Taiwanese families' recipes. However, the basic recipes should still be similar to & not differ too much from other Taiwanese families' recipes.The take-away message is that we enjoyed this cookbook, but for many of the recipes, before cooking, we would recommend having a back-up recipe on hand, just for comparison & to make sure that the recipe in this book isn't too different from other similar ones.

Rest assured, dear reader, this is an excellent cookbook for folks who want to learn some basic, delicious recipes for popular Taiwanese dishes. Are the dishes authentic, tasty? Yes and yes! Oh c'mon, Auntie Meihua may have cooked her beef noodles differently, but that doesn't mean that Cathy Erway's recipes may lack authenticity. In fact, there is no such thing as a "standard" way to cook any Taiwanese dish. Each family, each restaurant, will have its own specialty, its own way of preparing things. So when you follow Erway's recipes, you are exploring her family's interpretation of these Taiwanese classics. For this reason, I am grateful for this book. I approach each recipe that Cathy shares gratefully and with humility. For the record, I am not Taiwanese. I am just a White American guy who lived and worked in Taiwan for 15 years, so I have eaten my share of Taiwanese cuisine. Fortunately, the directions of this book are clearly, simply presented. Even if you have limited experience cooking Asian cuisine, you should be able to handle all if the dishes in this volume. Thank you, Cathy, for writing this book. It brings back a lot of warm memories for me.

This wonderful cookbook fills a big gap - books in English about Taiwanese cooking are few and far between. There are many great cookbooks about Chinese cuisine, but none that focus on Taiwanese cuisine exclusively. I wanted to recreate recipes my Taiwanese mother makes as well as food I've tried in Taiwan, but being unable to read Chinese, I was at a loss. I was left hoping that someone would do for Taiwanese food what Fuschia Dunlop has done for Sichuanese cooking.I love Cathy Erway's blog (Not Eating Out in NY) so imagine how excited I was to find that she is Taiwanese-American, like me, and writing a Taiwanese cookbook to boot. Nearly every recipe you could think of is here - three cups chicken, oyster omelet, stir-fried rice noodles, pork with preserved vegetable, and the list goes on. When my mother came recently for a visit, we enjoyed paging through the book together, and she even used some of the recipes to jog her memory on dishes she hadn't made in a while. The Cold Noodles with Sesame Sauce has entered my regular cooking rotation. When eggplant was in season, I made the Braised Eggplant multiple times a week. Not only does the author give us recipes for Taiwan's "greatest hits" (even street food which almost no one makes at home), she gives a well-written introduction to Taiwan's cuisine and sections throughout the book highlight interesting aspects of food culture on the island. If you are Taiwanese-American, or just a lover of Taiwanese food, this book is a must.

This recipe book is an excellent starting point for making taiwanese dishes. Word of caution though: the pork sauce over rice recipe is too salty, and if you are making it for the first time I definitely recommend that you use chopped pork belly instead of ground pork (both options are suggested in the book) and maybe add some chopped nappa cabbage to give it a more rounded flavor. The pork and shallots pan fried dumplings turned out exactly like the ones I used to get in Taipei near university (NTU). I have already recommended this book to my friends. It is worth buying not only for the recipes but also the pictures and the "stories".

Excellent cookbook. Enjoyed many of the foods familiar to me having been born in Taiwan and growing up in Canada with a Mom homesick for Chinese food and cooking many of these in my childhood. I hope Cathy develops more recipes based on some of the foods she wrote about, such as the train Bentos with vegetable steamed rice and pork cutlet in the photos. I have purchased a copy for each of my siblings!

Good quality book with interesting recipes.Even if I won't be reproducing them exactly it is a good cooking inspiration.Reading a cook book with well written recipes and good photos is quite relaxing too.

les recettes sont bien expliquées et utilisent plus d'ingérdients et mieux définis que d'autres sur livres de recettes du pays de Taiwan.

Great recipes. Wonderful introduction. We love it!!!