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Most cookbooks, at heart, are designed for home cooking. The chasm, though, between a cookbook from a restaurant chef that has been adapted for home use and a book that exploits the spirit, resourcefulness and simplicity with which one feeds oneself and others in a home kitchen is vast.
“Every Grain of Rice,” from the British food writer Fuchsia Dunlop, sits implacably on the side of true home cooking. In Dunlop’s other books, her memoir, “Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper,” notwithstanding, she aims to reverse-engineer complex dishes from regional Chinese cuisines like Shanghainese, Sichuan and Hunanese. “Every Grain of Rice” is a gorgeous outlier. No fancy restaurant techniques that require an army of cooks to execute. No assemblage of seven time-consuming components in these dishes. Instead, the book’s recipes replicate how some Chinese people cook at home, in various parts of the enormous, diverse country.
Stocking for the future
The home cooking that requires the least effort is home cooking that foregrounds a strong pantry. In the case of the Chinese home cooking Dunlop celebrates, that means a pantry full of store-bought, shelf-stable items like soy sauce, Sichuan bean paste, Chinese black vinegar and toasted sesame oil.
She never assumes the reader knows these ingredients well — or at all — so the glossary in “Every Grain of Rice” is both wide and deep. Each subsection is accompanied by a full-page photo of the section’s ingredients, along with hanzi and roman names. The subsections include, for example, “preserved vegetables,” “fermented products sauces and pastes,” “rice and flour” (noodles and the like) and even “leafy greens,” ensuring you will always know your purple amaranth from your water spinach.
Note: There is zero shame in lugging the book to your local Chinese supermarket, asking a worker for an assist, then pointing at either the hanzi characters or the photos of the items you seek. Because Laoganma black bean sauce is very much not the same as sweet fermented sauce, just as Chinese pickled mustard greens (suan cai) are not a twin of snow vegetable (xue cai). This is shopping as enabling.
Recipes that work — and work, and work
Of all the cookbooks I own, there are a mere few I have cooked from. Then there is the smaller pool from which I have cooked more than one recipe, more than once. Finally there are the handful of books that I have cooked many recipes from. Typically when I cook a book’s recipe, I will note the date above the recipe and give the recipe a rating from 1 to 10, with 10 being stellar. My copy of “Every Grain of Rice” is riddled with these annotations. And the majority of the book’s recipes have a 9 or 10 next to them. Such is the delicious reliability of this cookbook.
The “Cold Dishes” chapter is an affable revelation. Radishes are smacked, then salted for half an hour. After they are drained of any liquid they have extruded, the spunky red orblets are dressed with chile oil, soy sauce and toasted sesame oil. A bag of frozen shelled edamame becomes a lively salad with the addition of tangy, crunchy Sichuan-preserved vegetable (zha cai) and sesame oil. So much flavor; so little effort.
Some of the stir-fries necessitate a mere four ingredients, as with the pressed tofu with planks of green bell peppers. Others — like gong pao chicken, aka kung pao chicken — have a robust list of ingredients. Yet every recipe feels equally manageable because each is simply a variation on a ripping-fire, wok-centric assembly line.
A parade of noodle dishes; greens and mushrooms; tofu from breakfast to late-night snack; spicy wontons that warm and startle. Every recipe in “Every Grain of Rice” is a Golden Retriever: comforting, frisky and, once you become acquainted, loyal like none other.