Chiang Yee on Wartime Cooking

Another post somewhat related to my article in the current issue (No.8) of The Cleaver Quarterly on London’s Chinese restaurant scene in the 1930s and 1940s. Very interesting to me was M.P. Lee’s 1943 book, Chinese Cookery: A Hundred Practical Recipes. Useful ways to cook Chinese food during the Blitz and having to survive on the ration!

MP Lee enlisted the great British-based Chinese artist and poet Chiang Yee, famous for the Silent Traveller series of books, to provide the illustrations (or “decorations” as they rather charmingly called them). Of course you should order or buy the magazine to read the entire article and see all the illustrations, but here are a sample…