Mary Sia's Chinese Cookbook has been a classic of Chinese cookery since it was first published in 1956. This fourth edition features all 300 of the original recipes, ranging from simple, everyday fare to more elaborate dishes for entertaining, as well as essays by Mary Sia. An all-new food glossary provides up-to-date names for ingredients along with advice on appropriate substitutions and sources for 21st-century cooks. The work also includes an introduction by Rachel Laudan, renowned food historian and author of The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawai'i's Culinary Heritage.
"The YWCA where [Mary Sia] had taught for so many years named its kitchen after her. Her cookbooks sold steadily: some twenty thousand copies having left the shelves by the 1980s and doubtless many more by now. Jacqueline Newman, founder and editor of Flavor and Fortune (a magazine dedicated to Chinese cooking) who assembled the premier collection of English-language Chinese cookbooks, commented that Mary Sia's Chinese Cookbook remains one of the finest introductions to home-style Cantonese cooking all these years after Mary Sia first created the recipes. Dr. Newman commented to me, "She was years ahead of her time, a better cook with a better set of taste buds than most folk I know, as well as a better writer." —from the Introduction