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Legendary cookbook editor Judith Jones deserves much of the credit for Irene Kuo's "The Key to Chinese Cooking."
What was Jones' best cookbook -- that is, hers by proxy -- over a long and brilliant career of nursing various authors' cookbooks through editorial gestation and into production?
You'll observe that I said "best," not "best-known."
No, my choice is not "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." Or Marcella Hazan's "The Classic Italian Cookbook." Or even any of Madhur Jaffrey's wonderful books. For Jones' finest editorial contribution to the ranks of modern cookbooks, I unhesitatingly nominate "The Key to Chinese Cooking" by Irene Kuo.
Of course, we all have our different ideas of "best." But I'd like to think that my opinion is based on something more than prejudice or whim. To make the principles of the Chinese culinary art comprehensible to ordinary American cooks is really, objectively many times more difficult than anything to do with France, Italy or probably even India. Maybe one of Jones' other projects tackled something equally daunting, but certainly not more daunting. In my estimation, Kuo's "Key" -- published in 1977, now sadly out of print -- stands out as the achievement of achievements among all the Knopf cookbooks produced on Jones' watch.
Of course, huge amounts of credit must go to Kuo herself, a former Manhattan restaurateur from whom Jones (with the aid of the highly regarded freelance editor and copy editor Suzy Arensberg) elicited vivid writing, broad but also minutely detailed knowledge of a cuisine, formidable technical insight and a large, eclectic, illuminating selection of recipes. But as one with firsthand experience of the Jones care-and-feeding-of-authors style, I venture to say that none of these virtues would have fully blossomed without Jones' very personal blend of friendly persuasion and iron will.
 In a way, however, that's just the beginning. With cooking, great teaching via printed book also requires other crucial elements that usually get less recognition. It's these that I think set "Key" above Jones' other accomplishments at Knopf, remarkable though they may be.
First and foremost, a design team (undoubtedly working under Jones' direction) deployed Kuo's recipes on the page in a format that visibly emphasizes the intrinsic logic of ingredients and preparation steps. It's a telling contrast to the intimidating sprawl that handicaps many otherwise valiant English-language efforts to do justice to Chinese cooking. A small but elegant visual cue, resembling an elongated square bracket with slightly enlarged Chinese-looking tips like the flick of the brush that ends some calligraphic strokes, is used to set off clusters of ingredients that will be combined in marinades, cooking sauces, or final seasonings. This simple device does wonders to keep a user's brain focused on some sort of underlying order -- and that's half the battle in helping novice Chinese cooks find their bearings.
The cause of spatial coherence is also furthered by the actual recipe directions and the effortless-looking way that they materialize on the page. Every cookbook has to strike a balance between telling cooks absolutely everything in massive (not to say forbidding) detail and getting the point across succinctly. "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" not only carried the first approach to great lengths but employed an unusually space-consuming format. Just a glance through a few recipes shows considerable page acreage devoted to equipment-and-ingredients lists and minutely broken down instructional steps, usually separated from each other by ruled lines and several spaces, as well as painstaking deployment of italic and boldface type in several point sizes to differentiate various recipe-elements.
By contrast, the Chinese book shows Jones and the design team at quite another level of experience and judgment. The recipe-directions are not only more concise but presented in a typographically simpler format that makes a beginner feel things can't be all that difficult. The material is certainly as demanding as that in "Mastering," but somehow it looks more user-friendly.
The typeface, the graceful, unobtrusive Palatino, creates a sense of lucidity. But in a real stroke of genius, Jones and colleagues chose to add recipe titles in a well-matched Chinese typeface -- equally attractive to the eye -- that's also used to give the Chinese names of ingredients in the shopping-information section. When "Key" first crossed my path, I didn't know that I would eventually teach myself to read at least some food-related Chinese words. But this book was one of the inspirations that set me trying to learn. Somehow the strange, elegantly printed characters looked as if they ought to make sense to me. And today they do -- though even now I'm still struggling to read more than a word or two of the beautiful, stylistically varied calligraphic "seals" designed as chapter headings by C.C. Kuo, the author's husband.
The final masterstroke here was the selection of illustrator: Carolyn Moy, of whom I've never been able to learn anything other than her name on the title page. Unknown quantity though she may be, the magic of the book owes a great deal to Jones' instinct in choosing her. The understated spot art that appears throughout (a scallion here, a few shrimp there) is delicately evocative of Chinese pen and ink drawings without being hokey. More crucial, the instructional pictures have clarity and force. These images are an object lesson in how much we've lost by today's obsessive emphasis on color photography. They zero in on essential details with serene economy; those showing hands and implements at work convey a kind of kinetic energy that photographs can never duplicate.
For me, the book resulting from the fusion of all the above elements is one that Jones was born to do: a unified aesthetic statement in almost miraculous harmony with its subject matter. I won't even try to discuss the excellence and range of Kuo's recipes, which enabled me to make quantum leaps in "cooking Chinese." Rather, I want to point out that the pleasure of learning what Kuo had to teach was inseparable from the pleasure of handling and poring over the volume brought to fruition by Jones.
I know now that I was almost unconsciously absorbing the rightness of its lovely pages at the same moment I was getting the feel of a cleaver, recognizing the smell of a properly heated wok, acquiring the rapid-fire cooking rhythms that in future would always be associated in my memory with an unlocking of doors through the Kuo-Moy-Jones "Key to Chinese Cooking." Thank you, Judith.
Zester Daily contributor Anne Mendelson is a freelance writer and culinary historian who has written for various newspapers and magazines. She is the author of "Stand Facing the Stove" (a biography of the authors of "The Joy of Cooking," Holt, 1996) and "Milk" (Knopf, 2008). The past recipient of honors including a fellowship at the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library and the Oxford Symposium's Sophie Coe Prize in Food History, she is currently working on a book about Chinese food in America with the assistance of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Photos, from top:
Judith Jones Credit: Christopher Hirsheimer
"The Key to Chinese Cooking." Courtesy of Knopf
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Irene Kuo, along with Grace Chu and Florence Lin, are the unsung heroines of English-language Chinese cookbooks, and “Key” can definitely be considered one of the best that Knopf ever published, which is really saying something.
These three writers are especially important because – unlike the majority of other Chinese cookbooks published in English-speaking countries – rather than concentrating mainly on Cantonese cookery, they provided a much broader understanding of the immense food culture that is China’s.
It is hard to believe that it was almost four decades ago when Lin first talked with unbridled pleasure about Fujian’s yanpi (meat wrapper) wontons and Suzhou’s glazed duck. At about the same time, Chu showed me how to make Beijing’s cassia pork and Ningbo’s sole with sea moss, and Kuo excited my very American palate with Sichuan’s chili-pepper chicken and Nanjing’s salt-cured duck.
Even for someone who has been tantalized by the flavors of China for longer than I care to remember, these were some of the only places I could turn to in search of recipes for the foods I had come to adore from years of living in Taipei. The only real pity here is that almost all of their books were published back in the 70’s and are now out of print.
In spite of their considerable contributions, China’s eight great cuisines are yet to be fully explored here in the West. However, way back when, at a time when Chinese food was still very much unknown, Judith Jones took a remarkable gamble on Irene Kuo and was rewarded with this amazing book. "The Key to Chinese Cooking" gave my fellow devotees and me some tantalizing glimpses at one of the greatest food traditions in the world, and in the process cracked the door open just wide enough for us to be in its thrall ever since.-- Carolyn Phillips