Dim Sum Cookbook

While the information in the book was what I wanted, it arrived falling apart therefore I am not sure it is really usable. I was not expecting a new book but certainly one that didn’t have the pages coming out of it

Why do I say "astonishingly good"? Because this slim volume with its terrible puns, pseudo-folksy text, and grainy black-and-white pictures, is the last place you would expect to find such really good, authentic, yet easy-to-make recipes for dim sum. As another reviewer--with whom I completely agree--points out, things like Swansdown cake flour (a substitute for rice flour in the "old days," but still useful if you can't get to an Asian market) seem bizarre, but actually produce a product that is 99% indistinguishable from the real thing. I used this book for years when it was the only one available; even now it's still in my Top Five (others are Eileen Yin-Fei Lo's "The Dim Sum Dumpling Book," Mai Leung's "Dim Sum and Other Chinese Street Foods"--also known in another edition as "The Chinese Peoples Cookbook"--and the three dim sum books published by Wei-Chuan Publishing). If you want to make dim sum at home, whether you're a beginner or an experienced cook, get a copy of this book!

This is the random house imprint of the 1977 "Dim Sum" by Rhoda Lee published by Taylor & Ng. If you have ever been to a Chinese tea house, you will know that Dim Sim is a culture upon itself. Part of this book is Rhoda Yee's childhood experiences with dim sum in her village in China, the move to Hong Kong, and finally to America; all well-written in distinctive conversational 1970s-style prose. The dim sum recipes are spectacular; and most come with a story or legend about how the dish came about. All the dishes are authentic (siu mai, har gow, fun gor, char siew pow), and most of the famous dishes have a BW photo to show the finished dish. The only minor criticism is some of the commercial ingredients used are archaic (swanson cake flour?), but you can make sensible substitutions. This is one of the 2 cookbooks considered as the bibles of dim sum, the other being Chinese Dim Sum by the Wei-Chuan Cooking school. This imprint is out of print, but because it was reasonably well distributed in its day, you can get a used copy at a reasonable price. Otherwise you can order new reprints from Taylor and Ng directly. I am puzzled by why Rhoda Yee and the published never came out with new editions of this wonderful gem of a cookbook.