In 1971, the New York Times called the Taiwanese-Chinese chef, Fu Pei-Mei, the “the Julia Child of Chinese cooking.”

But, as Michelle T. King notes in her book Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-Mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food (Norton, 2024), the inverse–that Julia Child was the Fu Pei-Mei of French cuisine–might be more appropriate. Fu spent decades on Taiwanese television, wrote three seminal cookbooks on Chinese cuisine, ran a famous cooking academy and even provided important culinary advice to those making packaged food and airline meals.

And this all starts from humble beginnings, when she was an amateur–and not very good–home cook arriving in Taiwan from mainland China.

In this interview, Michelle and I talk about Fu Pei-Mei, her humble beginnings and rise to the heights of Chinese cooking, and what Fu’s work tells us about Chinese cuisine.

Michelle T. King is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she specializes in modern Chinese gender and food history. She can be followed on Instagram at @michtking.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Chop Fry Watch Learn. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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