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An A-Z of Chinese Food
'I started stitching together my story through a different, universal language: food.'
An A-Z of Chinese Food (Recipes Not Included) is not a recipe book, but a deliberate 'anti-glossary' - a delectable edible anthology that serves up Chinese flavour beyond just its taste.
Jenny Lau always found herself sitting between cultures, connected to both east and west. Hungry to understand herself, she threw herself into researching the Chinese food of her heritage. The result is An A-Z of Chinese Food - a surprising, unputdownable and deliciously enriching anthology that uses food to explore who we are and how we relate to the world.
From A is for Authentic, breaking down our assumptions of who 'owns' what cuisine, to R is for Rice Cooker, a humorous entry from the point of view a hard-working kitchen appliance that has seen a family through its ups and downs, An A-Z of Chinese Food will change the way you think about, see, and eat, food.
'An A-Z of Chinese Food is a landmark in British food writing, somewhere between a book, a magazine, and a treatise, but completely its own thing. Jenny has the rare ability to dissect unwieldy matters of identity, race and culture with the lightness of touch that all serious topics need, combatting preconceived notions about Chinese cuisine with immaculate research and subversive humour. This book is a tonic to the mainstream of food writing' Jonathan Nunn
'A leading light in the British Chinese community' Fuchsia Dunlop
'A balm for the soul... Jenny Lau is a compelling and evocative storyteller, an important voice that shines bright in the world of modern food writing' Hetty Lui McKinnon, author of To Asia, With Love
'There is so much to admire about Jenny's writing... Brilliant' Anna Jones, author of One: Pot, Pan, Planet
'She is a writer of force and warmth. Everything she writes is a must-read!' Dr Mukta Das, food anthropologist
'Essential reading for any serious culture enthusiast' Daniel York Loh, Associate Artistic Director at Kakilang Arts
An A-Z of Chinese Food (Recipes Not Included) is not a recipe book, but a deliberate 'anti-glossary' - a delectable edible anthology that serves up Chinese flavour beyond just its taste.
Jenny Lau always found herself sitting between cultures, connected to both east and west. Hungry to understand herself, she threw herself into researching the Chinese food of her heritage. The result is An A-Z of Chinese Food - a surprising, unputdownable and deliciously enriching anthology that uses food to explore who we are and how we relate to the world.
From A is for Authentic, breaking down our assumptions of who 'owns' what cuisine, to R is for Rice Cooker, a humorous entry from the point of view a hard-working kitchen appliance that has seen a family through its ups and downs, An A-Z of Chinese Food will change the way you think about, see, and eat, food.
'An A-Z of Chinese Food is a landmark in British food writing, somewhere between a book, a magazine, and a treatise, but completely its own thing. Jenny has the rare ability to dissect unwieldy matters of identity, race and culture with the lightness of touch that all serious topics need, combatting preconceived notions about Chinese cuisine with immaculate research and subversive humour. This book is a tonic to the mainstream of food writing' Jonathan Nunn
'A leading light in the British Chinese community' Fuchsia Dunlop
'A balm for the soul... Jenny Lau is a compelling and evocative storyteller, an important voice that shines bright in the world of modern food writing' Hetty Lui McKinnon, author of To Asia, With Love
'There is so much to admire about Jenny's writing... Brilliant' Anna Jones, author of One: Pot, Pan, Planet
'She is a writer of force and warmth. Everything she writes is a must-read!' Dr Mukta Das, food anthropologist
'Essential reading for any serious culture enthusiast' Daniel York Loh, Associate Artistic Director at Kakilang Arts
373 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 23, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 21, 2025
A warm hug of a read.
I can't say much about Jenny Lau, apart from she's a down-to-earth, witty person at the heart of the community. I've been to events she's hosted at the London ESEA community centre and she's well-respected, much loved and her dishes very much enjoyed by everyone.
I came about this library copy and will now definitely get my own. It invites a lot of re-reading, in an A-Z format which means you can go alphabetically (which I did) or dip into highlights. Either way of reading works though because throughout her book Lau ties together a lot of strands of thought. It's about food, obviously, but goes into how that connects with meditations on upbringing, migrant/diaspora experience, being multi-lingual/multicultural, I would say being a product and trying to find agency in the globalised, capitalist world we live in.
Lau speaks a lot from her personal experiences growing up in Hong Kong then moving to the UK when she was twelve. As a result, she's experienced both wanting to be connected to her culture and community through food, while also resisting being minimised to cliches and common tropes about this.
She's very adept at pulling together her personal experiences and observations to expound or complicate theoretical ideas of what's happening at-large on a structural level. I've enjoyed her dissecting food Instagram influencers using Baudrillard; and her applying Sontag's thoughts to appeal against explaining, but understanding how things came to be.
It was her last chapter which pulled me together with her. When she talks about particularly Chinese diaspora's need to feel like they belong and be perceived as belonging. She's talked this whole book about cultural practices, rituals and etiquette in my words as an embodied cultural knowledge, but in the last chapter really emphasises why it's so important. Because we all want to belong to the community, and while it's a shame that these practices can be used to 'shame' that we don't know or 'we're not Chinese enough', I think Lau is really challenging us to do better. Actually more than that, it's an invitation to bring us together in the face of these barriers that come from both inside and outside the community, a point made very beautifully with the last passage with instructions on preparing a zongzi community gathering.
I felt so much love reading this book. Thank you, Lau, for being able to complicate, probe and deconstruct things. It makes for a satisfactory read, but deeper than that it intentionally leaves a lot of things open-ended to the reader. You get to have an opinion, you get to define yourself and how you belong to the community. And that's a very endearing message to leave on, I reiterate what I said at the start, such a warm hug of a book!
Please keep existing Jenny Lau, Love from the community Xx
I can't say much about Jenny Lau, apart from she's a down-to-earth, witty person at the heart of the community. I've been to events she's hosted at the London ESEA community centre and she's well-respected, much loved and her dishes very much enjoyed by everyone.
I came about this library copy and will now definitely get my own. It invites a lot of re-reading, in an A-Z format which means you can go alphabetically (which I did) or dip into highlights. Either way of reading works though because throughout her book Lau ties together a lot of strands of thought. It's about food, obviously, but goes into how that connects with meditations on upbringing, migrant/diaspora experience, being multi-lingual/multicultural, I would say being a product and trying to find agency in the globalised, capitalist world we live in.
Lau speaks a lot from her personal experiences growing up in Hong Kong then moving to the UK when she was twelve. As a result, she's experienced both wanting to be connected to her culture and community through food, while also resisting being minimised to cliches and common tropes about this.
She's very adept at pulling together her personal experiences and observations to expound or complicate theoretical ideas of what's happening at-large on a structural level. I've enjoyed her dissecting food Instagram influencers using Baudrillard; and her applying Sontag's thoughts to appeal against explaining, but understanding how things came to be.
It was her last chapter which pulled me together with her. When she talks about particularly Chinese diaspora's need to feel like they belong and be perceived as belonging. She's talked this whole book about cultural practices, rituals and etiquette in my words as an embodied cultural knowledge, but in the last chapter really emphasises why it's so important. Because we all want to belong to the community, and while it's a shame that these practices can be used to 'shame' that we don't know or 'we're not Chinese enough', I think Lau is really challenging us to do better. Actually more than that, it's an invitation to bring us together in the face of these barriers that come from both inside and outside the community, a point made very beautifully with the last passage with instructions on preparing a zongzi community gathering.
I felt so much love reading this book. Thank you, Lau, for being able to complicate, probe and deconstruct things. It makes for a satisfactory read, but deeper than that it intentionally leaves a lot of things open-ended to the reader. You get to have an opinion, you get to define yourself and how you belong to the community. And that's a very endearing message to leave on, I reiterate what I said at the start, such a warm hug of a book!
Please keep existing Jenny Lau, Love from the community Xx
January 24, 2025
Food and culture serve as a compelling lens through which Chinese identity is explored. In this innovative work, the experiences of the Chinese diaspora are examined in a personal and nuanced manner, transcending traditional culinary writing.
In exploring Chinese food culture in a multifaceted manner, she offers readers both scholarly and personal perspectives. Food clichés are deconstructed, the nuances of Chinese cuisine are addressed, and issues of appropriation and racism are dissected.
Rather than simply presenting recipes, the author uses food as a powerful medium to explore broader questions of identity, cultural belonging, and the complex experiences of diaspora communities.
Food writers, cultural scholars, and those interested in personal narratives that challenge conventional views will find this book inspiring. There is more to this book than just food - it is about identity, community, and the stories we tell through our food. It is a book that transcends national boundaries.
In exploring Chinese food culture in a multifaceted manner, she offers readers both scholarly and personal perspectives. Food clichés are deconstructed, the nuances of Chinese cuisine are addressed, and issues of appropriation and racism are dissected.
Rather than simply presenting recipes, the author uses food as a powerful medium to explore broader questions of identity, cultural belonging, and the complex experiences of diaspora communities.
Food writers, cultural scholars, and those interested in personal narratives that challenge conventional views will find this book inspiring. There is more to this book than just food - it is about identity, community, and the stories we tell through our food. It is a book that transcends national boundaries.
September 9, 2025
I have An A-Z of Chinese Food to thank for some very immersive Saturday mornings. Rather than yielding to the pull of Instagram for disappointing dopamine hit after hit, I have been cleansed after a morning bathed in razor-sharp social criticism.
My past professor Tarak Barkawi has described our global surroundings as a thick international space that has evolved through layer upon layer of historic mutual encounter and co-constitution. Jenny extracts a cross section through the topography of that organic space, from the tallest skyscraper to the deepest root, sees it all and plays around in it. Her cover is a photo of it. The young Hong Kong people yearning for McDonalds fast food that embodies their egalitarian, self-expressive American dream? Seen. The Global North infiltrators who’ve sussed McDonalds out and are now yearning for a sense of worldliness and originality? Seen. The ayi who may yearn for one perfect son at Harvard or may be a secret rebel but who has a soft spot for modernist fonts and knows 诶 better than A? Seen. Many more besides (including a smartphone-wielding Golden Mountain labourer and a people-watching, anthropomorphic lazy Susan) – also seen. Jenny brings out the beauty of Chinese cultural motifs prone to stereotyping, such as what European chefs have dubbed nose-to-tail eating (a largely redundant term for historic common sense), or the evolution of the Chinese character for ‘knife’, showing us the good, bad and ugly derivatives they have spawned, without a tinge of Orientalism.
Jenny’s own background across Hong Kong and the UK is an ideal lens for her work. Hong Kong has been described by Ho Fung Hung as a ‘city on the edge’, a co-constituted autonomous city-region at the border of sovereign states that allows a porous interface with the global economy. Hong Kong is the city of Swire, Jardines and Kadoorie, in short – a modern day Venice. Hong Kong’s setting brings into relief this co-constitution that other white people like me have often seemed to escape but is merely in shadow. Telling moments of shadow are my own mother’s upbringing in a serene bubble of 1980s Canada where teenagers' own teachers mark their exams while the teenagers happily pitch in in the annual tobacco harvest, shielded under a protectionist framework, for the highest wages available in town; or my own time as a ‘gap year’ teacher in Gansu, China, where the cost of living is low, the pace slow and the food cheap, healthy and uncomplicatedly Chinese. As the light has shifted, in the former, the teenagers have now mysteriously been replaced by migrant workers, and in the latter, all the migrant workers had self-selected out of my encounters, having disappeared to major cities to serve global value chains. Examine these, and the thick, post-colonial world shows its true colours.
My university friend Sean has described this book as a warm hug. It is indeed a tonic, as author Jenny Lau says, for any child of immigrants, particularly those from the ESEA diaspora. But it is also a challenge - let’s face it, implicitly, above all for the white majority. After you’ve drunk the tonic, what do you do, what level of agency do you aim for, (how) do you encourage/model/宣传/普及/[your entry here] a more self-aware, open-minded society? A continuum in approach might be bookended on the socialist end by Pol Pot who reset time to year zero and destroyed family, vowing to outdo Mao, and on the conservative end by the boarding school teacher oblivious to the cost of living, moaning about the pylons destroying the view enjoyed by a long line of ‘Great Men’ who singlehandledly shaped history from his Tudor manor over his morning plantation coffee beans. But rather than either of these extreme caricatures, the headache for Jenny and me is mainly triggered by performative Hackney hipsters and priced-out Hackney refugees who aim for a trendy online footprint while neglecting to be culturally informed. Jenny captured the mindset in Pippa, an innocent requestor for free labour who surfaced in one of Jenny’s previous articles in her perpetual struggle for fair pay. Pippa probably said she had no budget for ‘diversity’ events after paying a white speaker £1k for their recurring teach-in session last month.
The crux, then, becomes: how much should we expect of these performative hipsters, or indeed anyone of any background who doesn’t want to fall into the performative hipster trap? We can’t expect everyone to go full shokunin. This Japanese term refers to a person disproportionately enthusiastic about a given topic, and is ripe for all manner of Orientalist mistranslation, but has been rendered very simply by Ruby Tandoh in a great article for recent essay compilation London Feeds Itself as - nerd. I am a baby one of these, and my more experienced counterparts have been known to bring a dozen Qing-dynasty clay teapots to a tea festival in the park, or to dress up in full garb to serve ceremonial matcha a la Japanese school of their lineage. Others, like Fuchsia Dunlop, swear that the Dragon Well Manor restaurant in Hangzhou is the holy grail for food from China's Yangzi Delta, a haven shielded from a Chinese food scene becoming infected by mass production. These shokunin practices may be memorable, but sadly they are not scaleable, since if everyone was a shokunin, there would be not only no good £5 matcha left (the current situation), but no drop of matcha left at all. Indeed, shokunin can alienate the British-born ESEA community in their singlemindedness.
On the other extreme, however, I loathe to admit that there is not a loss in the approach taken by these performative hipsters who do not think a bit more about the context they are sitting in. One prime example would be a contact of mine who, with manifestly minimal drive to understand the cultural background, will soon take up a much coveted diplomatic post in Southeast Asia. Others are friends who love Greenwich but, puzzlingly, dismiss Deptford 10-minutes west, the other side of the colonial coin. Some are customers who walk into the latest Hunan restaurant offering hard-to-find dishes and techniques, and obliviously order exclusively, only, the 80s classics straight out of the takeaway kid nostalgia list. The most insidious are perhaps the bosses who hand an away day meal budget running into the hundreds of pounds to a mediocre restaurant that hits the palatable-exotic mix just right (see, for example, the newsletter from Mangal II, a Hackney restaurant). Sharing knowledge and enthusiasm in a nuanced way is clearly helpful to avoid these types of traps. As for what else to do, nobody seems to know.
Read this book. It is one of the most valuable pieces of work to come out of the ESEA movement and the next stage of ESEA food culture in London, something that is thrilling to be a part of and that makes living in London a joy amidst all the material constraints. If this movement has any leaders, one would be Jenny. This cultural exploration of a book bends disciplines, opens up vivid dilemmas and makes my mind wander. Yours will too.
My past professor Tarak Barkawi has described our global surroundings as a thick international space that has evolved through layer upon layer of historic mutual encounter and co-constitution. Jenny extracts a cross section through the topography of that organic space, from the tallest skyscraper to the deepest root, sees it all and plays around in it. Her cover is a photo of it. The young Hong Kong people yearning for McDonalds fast food that embodies their egalitarian, self-expressive American dream? Seen. The Global North infiltrators who’ve sussed McDonalds out and are now yearning for a sense of worldliness and originality? Seen. The ayi who may yearn for one perfect son at Harvard or may be a secret rebel but who has a soft spot for modernist fonts and knows 诶 better than A? Seen. Many more besides (including a smartphone-wielding Golden Mountain labourer and a people-watching, anthropomorphic lazy Susan) – also seen. Jenny brings out the beauty of Chinese cultural motifs prone to stereotyping, such as what European chefs have dubbed nose-to-tail eating (a largely redundant term for historic common sense), or the evolution of the Chinese character for ‘knife’, showing us the good, bad and ugly derivatives they have spawned, without a tinge of Orientalism.
Jenny’s own background across Hong Kong and the UK is an ideal lens for her work. Hong Kong has been described by Ho Fung Hung as a ‘city on the edge’, a co-constituted autonomous city-region at the border of sovereign states that allows a porous interface with the global economy. Hong Kong is the city of Swire, Jardines and Kadoorie, in short – a modern day Venice. Hong Kong’s setting brings into relief this co-constitution that other white people like me have often seemed to escape but is merely in shadow. Telling moments of shadow are my own mother’s upbringing in a serene bubble of 1980s Canada where teenagers' own teachers mark their exams while the teenagers happily pitch in in the annual tobacco harvest, shielded under a protectionist framework, for the highest wages available in town; or my own time as a ‘gap year’ teacher in Gansu, China, where the cost of living is low, the pace slow and the food cheap, healthy and uncomplicatedly Chinese. As the light has shifted, in the former, the teenagers have now mysteriously been replaced by migrant workers, and in the latter, all the migrant workers had self-selected out of my encounters, having disappeared to major cities to serve global value chains. Examine these, and the thick, post-colonial world shows its true colours.
My university friend Sean has described this book as a warm hug. It is indeed a tonic, as author Jenny Lau says, for any child of immigrants, particularly those from the ESEA diaspora. But it is also a challenge - let’s face it, implicitly, above all for the white majority. After you’ve drunk the tonic, what do you do, what level of agency do you aim for, (how) do you encourage/model/宣传/普及/[your entry here] a more self-aware, open-minded society? A continuum in approach might be bookended on the socialist end by Pol Pot who reset time to year zero and destroyed family, vowing to outdo Mao, and on the conservative end by the boarding school teacher oblivious to the cost of living, moaning about the pylons destroying the view enjoyed by a long line of ‘Great Men’ who singlehandledly shaped history from his Tudor manor over his morning plantation coffee beans. But rather than either of these extreme caricatures, the headache for Jenny and me is mainly triggered by performative Hackney hipsters and priced-out Hackney refugees who aim for a trendy online footprint while neglecting to be culturally informed. Jenny captured the mindset in Pippa, an innocent requestor for free labour who surfaced in one of Jenny’s previous articles in her perpetual struggle for fair pay. Pippa probably said she had no budget for ‘diversity’ events after paying a white speaker £1k for their recurring teach-in session last month.
The crux, then, becomes: how much should we expect of these performative hipsters, or indeed anyone of any background who doesn’t want to fall into the performative hipster trap? We can’t expect everyone to go full shokunin. This Japanese term refers to a person disproportionately enthusiastic about a given topic, and is ripe for all manner of Orientalist mistranslation, but has been rendered very simply by Ruby Tandoh in a great article for recent essay compilation London Feeds Itself as - nerd. I am a baby one of these, and my more experienced counterparts have been known to bring a dozen Qing-dynasty clay teapots to a tea festival in the park, or to dress up in full garb to serve ceremonial matcha a la Japanese school of their lineage. Others, like Fuchsia Dunlop, swear that the Dragon Well Manor restaurant in Hangzhou is the holy grail for food from China's Yangzi Delta, a haven shielded from a Chinese food scene becoming infected by mass production. These shokunin practices may be memorable, but sadly they are not scaleable, since if everyone was a shokunin, there would be not only no good £5 matcha left (the current situation), but no drop of matcha left at all. Indeed, shokunin can alienate the British-born ESEA community in their singlemindedness.
On the other extreme, however, I loathe to admit that there is not a loss in the approach taken by these performative hipsters who do not think a bit more about the context they are sitting in. One prime example would be a contact of mine who, with manifestly minimal drive to understand the cultural background, will soon take up a much coveted diplomatic post in Southeast Asia. Others are friends who love Greenwich but, puzzlingly, dismiss Deptford 10-minutes west, the other side of the colonial coin. Some are customers who walk into the latest Hunan restaurant offering hard-to-find dishes and techniques, and obliviously order exclusively, only, the 80s classics straight out of the takeaway kid nostalgia list. The most insidious are perhaps the bosses who hand an away day meal budget running into the hundreds of pounds to a mediocre restaurant that hits the palatable-exotic mix just right (see, for example, the newsletter from Mangal II, a Hackney restaurant). Sharing knowledge and enthusiasm in a nuanced way is clearly helpful to avoid these types of traps. As for what else to do, nobody seems to know.
Read this book. It is one of the most valuable pieces of work to come out of the ESEA movement and the next stage of ESEA food culture in London, something that is thrilling to be a part of and that makes living in London a joy amidst all the material constraints. If this movement has any leaders, one would be Jenny. This cultural exploration of a book bends disciplines, opens up vivid dilemmas and makes my mind wander. Yours will too.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews