Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food

本書透過傅培梅精采的一生，為中華料理史譜出新頁。

1949年，年輕的家庭主婦傅培梅初抵台灣，從新手蛻變為天生庖廚，寫食譜和在電視上教烹飪成為她職涯的起點，四十年始終如一。本書作者金恬 (Michelle T. King) 在翻閱其母所藏的傅培梅食譜中發現，這些她童年的食譜不只是桌上料理。從傅培梅的生平和介紹的家常菜中，金恬發現了一個通往另一個時代的入口，呈現當時中產階級的家庭「煮」婦，如何在戰後的世界巨變中尋找方向。

在《切、炒、觀、學》中，金恬以個人的家族史與當代的口述歷史為經緯，交織出非凡的論點：從傅培梅的生平故事，我們會將中華料理視為傳統的傳承，同時也是受戰後歷史現象所影響的現代創作。這些包括了職業婦女的激增，新媒體的蓬勃發展，各式新穎烹飪用具的問世，以及轉變的中台外交運勢。對台灣與世界的閱聽大眾來說，傅培梅儼然已成終極的廚藝試金石，是所有其他烹飪權威所仰賴的標竿。

傅培梅的遺緒尚在持續中，她的食譜已經成為親傳子這個文化記憶的珍愛象徵，是離散華人的落腳之所。從不同世代的傅迷口中獲取資訊，金恬從有餐桌的家開始闡述中華料理的故事，寫出這本發人深省的作品，它是飽含過去與現在美味的饗宴，並在透過廚房尋找我們歷史的讀者中引發迴響。

A spirited new history of Chinese food told through an account of the remarkable life of Fu Pei-mei, the woman who brought Chinese cooking to the world.

In 1949, a young Chinese housewife arrived in Taiwan and transformed herself from a novice to a natural in the kitchen. She launched a career as a cookbook author and television cooking instructor that would last four decades. Years later, in America, flipping through her mother’s copies of Fu Pei-mei’s Chinese cookbooks, historian Michelle T. King discovered more than the recipes to meals of her childhood. She found, in Fu’s story and in her food, a vivid portal to another time, when a generation of middle-class, female home cooks navigated the tremendous postwar transformations taking place across the world.

In Chop Fry Watch Learn, King weaves together stories from her own family and contemporary oral history to present a remarkable argument for how understanding the story of Fu’s life enables us to see Chinese food as both an inheritance of tradition and a truly modern creation, influenced by the historical phenomena of the postwar era. These include a dramatic increase in the number of women working outside the home, a new proliferation of mass media, the arrival of innovative kitchen tools, and the shifting diplomatic fortunes of China and Taiwan. King reveals how and why, for audiences in Taiwan and around the world, Fu became the ultimate culinary touchstone: the figure against whom all other cooking authorities were measured.

And Fu’s legacy continues. Her cookbooks have become beloved emblems of cultural memory, passed from parent to child, wherever diasporic Chinese have landed. Informed by the voices of fans across generations, King illuminates the story of Chinese food from the inside: at home, around the family dinner table. The result is a revelatory work, a rich banquet of past and present tastes that will resonate deeply for all of us looking for our histories in the kitchen.