How an old Chinese cookbook collection changed one Hong Kong chef’s life, empowering her to cook modern Cantonese food

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How an old Chinese cookbook collection changed one Hong Kong chef’s life, empowering her to cook modern Cantonese food

30 Years in the Kitchen (1956), by Chan Wing, is a collection of vintage cookbooks featuring traditional Cantonese recipes written by a chef with 30 years of professional experience.

ArChan Chan Kit-ying, head chef at Cantonese restaurant Ho Lee Fook in Hong Kong’s SoHo neighbourhood, who took up the job in 2021 after 13 years cooking in Australia and Singapore, tells Richard Lord how it changed her life.

I read it back when I was in Australia. I grew up in Hong Kong and only moved to Australia in 2008, after I finished university, to continue studying to be a chef.

In 2016, I got my first head chef role, at Andrew McConnell’s Ricky & Pinky, a modern Chinese restaurant (in Melbourne). I’d done my internship at the JW Marriott in Hong Kong and then moved to Australia, so I didn’t really have Chinese kitchen cooking experience.
“30 Years in the Kitchen” (1956), a collection of cookbooks by Chan Wing. Photo: ArChan Chan Kit-ying

I asked my family, “OK, what is traditional Cantonese food? I can find books about modern food and fusion, but I want to know more about before I was born.” My grandfather talked about who was writing when he was young, and he mentioned this set of books to me.

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They had some very usual things in them, home cooking, but also going back to dynastic cooking. It’s not only a cookbook; it also gave me dreams about what people were eating back in the day. Through these dishes, you can see how people were living.
A lot of chefs would look at a cookbook and at a dish in it and think, “How can I translate that to one of my dishes?” To me, it’s background knowledge. There might be something I put into a dish because I read about it three years ago.
It’s an interesting thing about Cantonese cooking: with most dishes, you probably come to them (as a diner) with an expectation of what they’re like. So the book is very interesting to me, because there are a lot of things in it that are still relevant.
The interior of Ho Lee Fook, in Hong Kong’s SoHo neighbourhood. Photo: Facebook/Ho Lee Fook

I had to learn the cuisine, and then I had to learn how to modernise it. People expect that I’ll do an update or a changed version of a dish, but I think more about how I can make it the best possible version.

I’ve been going back to this book, and it’s still a joy to look at, but it also shows me how much I’ve changed since I read it the first time. Then, I wanted to read a lot and just get a general understanding from it.

There have been times since then when I’d read one recipe from the book before I went to bed, so I could then research it in more depth. These days, I want to take it slowly.

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