Taiwan sojourn

Cathy Erway, author of The Food of Taiwan [Photo/China Daily]

A Chinese-American foodie explores the culinary richness of her mother's home and presents it to US readers in a new book, Mike Peters reports。

Cathy Ervay's semi-memoir about the foods of her heritage is such a luminous homage to the cuisine of Taiwan, it's surprising to learn that it came about almost by accident.

Her mother was born and raised on the island, but the cookbook author and food blogger herself grew up in America, and spent the spring of 2004 in Taipei when a teach-study scholarship there was offered to her by pure chance.

"The world of Taiwan - and especially its food - became three-dimensional to me almost from the moment I stepped off the plane. Suddenly, all the foods that I had grown up eating made so much sense to me."

Food, in fact, enmeshed itself in almost every experience during those scant weeks, including at a student rally after a controversial election.

"The familiar warm cabbagey smell of homemade dumplings wafted to my nostrils," she writes. "I held the morsel - a basic shui jian bao, crisped on the bottom from a hot, oil-slicked pan, and steamed through to the swirled pinch at the top. How good could protest-rally food be? I took a bite through the soft, delicate skin. Still warm, it burst with savory pork juice accented with white pepper and scallion. Of course it was good - this was Taiwan."

Years later, as an already published author, she tells China Daily, she was eager to write the just-published cookbook.

"I always thought Taiwan had an incredible, yet underappreciated cuisine in the West," she says. "It's where my mom was born and raised, so it's where a lot of my favorite comfort foods stem from.."

It took two years to find a publisher with the same enthusiasm, but when she did, the resulting pages were magical. She lauds her "photographer, videographer, translator, travel buddy and friend Pete Lee" for the images that grace the book - from inhalable food close-ups to street scenes that will have foodies with wanderlust buying air tickets before they get to the last chapter. (Some of Lee's images are reproduced here, with permission of the publisher.)

As Erway dug into the project, she was determined to seek out dishes that were distinctly Taiwanese. That was harder than it sounds, she discovered. She quickly ruled out things that were "merely a riff of something that you'd find in some part of the mainland". And Taiwanese pizza? Um, no.

She found herself looking at social factors that shaped the foods she found there, from military camps where families from all over China mingled and cooked their meals to the small businesses that catered to the temple worshippers at Tainan. But she also acknowledged immigrant groups and other overseas influences on the island's food culture. In the book, she decided to "universalize" the cuisine by focusing on dishes that could be translated easily using similar ingredients found in America, where most of her readers would be.

Those adjustments "were not a huge concern to me," she says, "having grown up in my mother's kitchen."