How a new wave of Chinese diaspora cookbook authors are exploring identity through recipes

From soy sauce brownies to Italian udon, a new wave of cookbooks offer tastes of the Asian diaspora while asking what it means to be Chinese

Reading Time:5 minutes

Cacio e pepe udon is a dish Chinese-Australian cookbook author Hetty Lui McKinnon grew up on. She is one of many diaspora food writers who express themselves in dishes fusing Eastern and Western flavours and techniques. Photo: Hetty Lui McKinnon

Published: 4:15pm, 3 Aug 2024Updated: 4:28pm, 3 Aug 2024

Two different recipes for a dish published a century apart illustrate the importance of cookbooks in documenting the evolution of Chinese diaspora cooking.

In his new cookbook Kung Food, Chinese-American chef Jon Kung highlights war su gai, or almond boneless chicken, a popular dish in Michigan, the US state where he grew up.

In 1917, one of the first English-language Chinese cookbooks, The Chinese Cook Book, by Shiu Wong Chan, was published in New York.

On page 35, there is a recipe for hung yuen guy ding – almond boneless chicken. But the dish bears little resemblance to the crispy battered chicken on shredded lettuce Kung writes about, known today as “ABC”.

Chinese-American chef Jon Kung, who has a recipe for almond boneless chicken in his cookbook Kung Food. Photo: Johnny Miller

Recently, there has been a wave of cookbooks – from Betty Liu’s My Shanghai to The Woks Of Life by the Leung family behind the blog of the same name – by a new generation of Chinese diasporic food writers.

Rather than merely telling the reader how to cook dishes, these writers focus on their identity.