A Tradition of Soup Flavors from China's Pearl River Delta

Through recipes that use traditional medicinal ingredients, A Tradition of Soup provides a narrative of the Southern Chinese immigrants who migrated in large numbers during the last half-century, the struggles they faced and overcame, and the soups they used to heal and nourish their bodies. Author Teresa Chen, PhD, who was born into a Cantonese family that valued the many traditions of its regional cuisine, weaves in colourful threads of Chinese culture including food, medicine, festivals, pottery, language, and geography. She covers soup tradition, terminology, techniques, and utensils, and presents close to 150 delicious recipes. Consistent with the Chinese approach to health, Chen groups her soup recipes according to seasons and health concerns and presents a range of soup categories from Cantonese taxonomy: tong (simple broths, soups, and stews), geng (thickened soups), juk (rice soups or porridges), and Tongshui (sweet soups), as well as noodle soups, wonton and dumpling soups, and vegetable soups. She also focuses on dahn (steaming) and louhfo (slow-cooking) soups associated with medicine and healing. Chen's recipes feature fresh, natural, and seasonal food for nurturing and her ingredients are selected to balance a person's physical constitution, be it cold or hot or leaning toward dampness or sluggishness. This conscious integration of medicine and food is especially prominent in the preparation of soups, which can be looked upon as a palatable version of herbal tea. While the recipes in A Tradition of Soup call for ingredients that may seem foreign to Western readers, most of them are available in Chinese grocery stores. To help readers identify and procure these items, Chen provides a beautifully photographed ingredients glossary complete with Chinese names, pronunciation, and detailed descriptions.

Teresa M. Chen, PhD, and her husband, Yi-Po Anthony Wu, MD, founded Pacific Complementary Medicine Center in Stockton, California, in 1993. Dr. Chen oversees community outreach and health education, organizes seminars, conferences and workshops, leads breathing and Liu Tong exercise classes, lectures to college extension and community groups, and contributes articles about food, nutrition, exercise, and complementary medicine to publications such as APA (Asian Pacific American) News and Review and Connections, an alternative newspaper published by the Peace and Justice Network.

Named the Chinese Cultural Society of Stockton's 2007 Citizen of the Year, Dr. Chen has also served on the board of the United Way of San Joaquin and of Jene Wah, Inc., a Chinese multi-service and senior citizen center. She has developed and secured funding from San Joaquin County for an Asian Nutrition Lunch program and an acupuncture-based chemical-dependency treatment program. Raised in Hong Kong, Dr. Chen graduated from Radcliffe College and received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Hawaii. Before settling in Stockton, she was a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley and taught at San Francisco State University.