The recipies in this cookbook tend to be slightly more fancy (and thus more time consuming)than absolutely neccesary, which can be good or bad, depending on your mood and patience. So I recommend having another, slightly simpler book for comparison, such as "Chinese Cooking" by the Wei Chuan company.

14 of 14 found the following review helpful:

A REAL Chinese cookbook in English!  Dec 10, 2002
By nemrac
I was delighted to find this book at my local library. I grew up in Hong Kong, the food paradise, eating real Chinese food. Most Chinese cookbooks in English disappoint me with Americanized recipies (some of the entries I don't even recognized as Chinese food!). This cookbook though, contains most all Chinese food that I enjoy eating at home. I tried making a couple items, and I can testify the authenticity of the recipes. Some of the recipes are complicated, but I can find plenty recipes that are affordable and manageable. I think it's a must-have if you like cooking your own Chinese food in America.

10 of 10 found the following review helpful:

Best Chinese cookbook around  Nov 22, 1997
By jwang@ifspm.unizh.ch
As a Chinese who has eaten his way through incredible home-style and restaurant cooking on three continents, this is by far the best cookbook I've encountered on Chinese cuisine. The recipes are authentic and cover many of the most famous dishes (regional specialities included) familiar to real Chinese food connosieurs. The small, yet important detail of including the name of dishes in Chinese is something most Chinese cookbooks on the US market would do well in adopting. Be aware that the recipes and preparation aren't simple, a loyal reflection of the effort that goes into preparing fine Chinese dishes. Persistence will be rewarded with fine results.

11 of 12 found the following review helpful:

Comprehensive  Feb 08, 2000
By dallas
This book introduced me to Chinese cooking, and although I now own a number of excellent Chinese cookbooks by such notables as Nina Simonds, Ken Hom, and Susanna Foo, I return to this book again and again. It covers a wide variety of dishes, from simple to complex. In addition to lots of great photos, there is good information on ingredients with which beginning cooks or cooks new to Chinese cooking may not be familiar. This book is a bargain and I keep mine within easy reach in my kitchen. I've made the simple fried rice time and again; although Susanna Foo's fried rice is delicious, it is much more labor-intensive than the fried rice recipe in Yan-Kit's book. Hint: try them both!

7 of 7 found the following review helpful:

Terrific classic recipes, less-than-terrific layout  Oct 07, 2008
By Richard Lee Wallace
As far as the text is concerned, this is a five-star cookbook if ever there was one. For the familiar Chinese classics, it remains probably the best English-language source available, with creditable versions of every dish it includes, and some recipes (the sweet-and-sour pork, for instance) that are unmatched elsewhere. Yet, in contrast to earlier editions, this 2006 British republication now has problems in typeface and layout.

Unlike the 1998 American "DK Living" edition, where ingredients and recipes are printed in an easy-to-read bold typeface, the type used in the 2006 hardcover is small and thin; especially in the list of ingredients, the squeezed-together type is very hard to make out, and the fractional amounts can only be read (by me, at least) with a magnifying glass. Moreover, before I gave up, I found at least one instance where the centimeters-to-inches conversion was way off ("¼ inch" as the thickness of the pork cubes in that sweet-and-sour recipe).

Then there are the illustrations, usually the glory of a DK cookbook. In the "DK Living" edition, there are pictures of every dish, and they are breathtakingly styled and photographed; they are a lesson in how to make Chinese food look delicious and elegant without the vegetable cutouts or background chinoiserie of lesser publications. In the 2006 version, only some of the dishes are pictured; most of its best photos (the "ingredients" section at the beginning of the book) are those that appeared in the "DK Living" edition, and only the photo of Szechwan duck with lotus rolls is an improvement on the older picture. For the rest, the shallow-focus, hyper-colorful photos may be the current cookbook standard, but they don't measure up to the more austere beauty of the "DK Living" illustrations; they can misrepresent the recipe as given (for instance, the dark soy in the sweet-and-sour fish produces something much browner than the bright red sauce shown); and the sloppily shredded scallions atop the pang pang chicken look downright amateurish. Finally, the ingredient photos (and recipes) in the "DK Living" edition are accompanied by the names in Chinese, a useful addition for Chinese readers or when shopping.

Everyone interested in Chinese cooking should own this book; but the "DK Living" edition, a sturdy, well bound paperback, is the one to get.

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