Barbara Tropp and China Moon, part two--the cookbook

Is there a cookbook you find both inspirational and frustrating?

The China Moon Cookbook was the first cookbook I ever bought for myself at full price. I still have it, stained, dogeared, torn—and even though I haven’t cooked from it in years, it has always been at the center of my collection.

It is, objectively, a cookbook filled with recipes that are not easily accessible. Most, but not all, cookbooks based on restaurants try to make a restaurant’s food accessible to the regular kitchen. At the most extreme, this results in cookbooks where the illustrations reveal dishes with ingredients and garnishes not even mentioned in the given recipe. Corners are cut in the name of the common reader, or cook. Home kitchens do not have the same resources as restaurant kitchens.

China Moon demands a commitment. The entire first section of the cookbook is made up of recipes you need to make before you can even attempt most of the dishes in the rest of the cookbook. At the least you need: Chili-orange oil, pickled ginger, roasted szechuan pepper salt, and ma-la oil (or five flavor oil). For a more complete kitchen, the book suggested all of the above, and chili oil, chili-lemon oil, and Serrano-lemongrass vinegar. And I’m not even touching on her precise instructions for making stocks and double infusions.

When you did make the recipes, everything had to be precisely cut and measured. The recipe for pickled didn’t just call for rice vinegar. Instead, it required rice vinegar, cider vinegar, and distilled white vinegar. However, while distinct from the usual rice vinegar, the differences were small, and became even smaller when the ginger was integrated into other recipes. The book made similar absurd demands on the reader; to make a recipe, you had to recreate the experience of cooking it in the restaurant’s kitchen.

Yet I remember not thinking any of this when reading it first. Barbara Tropp, and the people at Workman who helped her fashion the cookbook, were reassuring throughout. Everything was explained; it all made sense and it seemed while you were reading it that it could not be otherwise.

And I fell for it. I made most of the oils, the salt, the ginger, even the double infused stocks. I probably made a couple dozen recipes from that cookbook, if you include the pantry recipes.

In particular, I loved the pickle recipes, for orange carrot coins, for ma-la cucumber fans, for ginger radishes, ginger pickled red cabbage slaw, and spicy cabbage pickle—all were great. There were other recipes—the hot and sour short ribs, the bunny stew, the chili-orange noodles, and most importantly, her Chinese style gravlax.

Her recipe for gravlax, with ginger and cilantro instead of the usual dill, and served with ginger slaw, became one of my standby recipes for years. I still make gravlax, but with more traditional seasonings—and the addition of a little single malt whiskey to the salmon before coating in salt and sugar.

What makes her cookbook so great is exactly what is frustrating about it. It is the China Moon Cookbook, and it gives the best approximations on how the food of her restaurant can be made at home, down to the right brands of soy to use.

And for me, it forced me to thinking about cooking differently, more seriously. One couldn’t just jump in and cook a Barbara Tropp recipe. Instead, you had to construct it from the bottom up; using the right stock, the right oils, the right vinegar, the right salt, even. You had to plan in advance: making buns, for example, was a multi day process. A mise en place was absolutely necessary, you couldn’t just cut as you went. There was a meticulousness to her approach; one that might have been overwhelming without her accompanying voice.

Reading her book, making her dishes led me to be a better cook in general, to make my own dishes with more precision.

Again, it is strange to realize a person’s passing so long after the event. You are acknowledging a lack you didn’t know you felt.

But it is a lack I’ve felt since I finished her cookbook. There are other cookbooks I love, ones that are even perhaps more in tune with the kind of food I love, but her voice is one I’ve never encountered since. It was intensely personal and professional, academic and approachable. You could hear her erudition behind her voice, but it never overwhelmed or became pedantic. That we only have her two books is our loss.