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Yan Can Write
"Whoa!" "Look at this!" "Beoootiful!"
If you're hearing such enthusiastic exclamations, you must be watching the popular cookery program Yan Can Cook.
The kinetic chef Martin Yan has dished out rapid stir-fries for years and just might be the best-known Chinese master chef in the United States.
In a new PBS series that debuted in late October, Yan takes us on a culinary tour of the world's great Chinatowns.
Not too long ago, there was a survey done about the effective teaching qualities of television's celebrated master chefs Martin Yan and Jacques Pepin. Even the acrobatic wok and cleaver techniques of Martin Yan seem almost do-able when he shows us. As Chef Yan once exclaimed in an interview, "Chinese cooking is a lot of fun, and it's easy and versatile too. I call it a minimal cuisine. We cook things fast and with very ingredients... We're really frugal, making do with what we have."
Along with his new TV show, Martin Yan has published Martin Yan's Chinatown Cooking. In it he gives us 200 recipes from 11 Chinatowns around the world.
Since childhood I have loved Chinatowns and visit them wherever I happen to be -- Cho Lon, Paris, London, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston. Martin Yan is noted for making television programs which provide not only the flavors of the cooking traditions of China and Asia but also let viewers travel along. From the Chinatowns of cities such as Melbourne, Yokohama, Singapore, Vancouver, Toronto, London and New York, Martin Yan has walked into the musty shops with their aromatic dried herbs, exotic fruits -- such as hairy melon -- and live eels slithering in tanks.
The companion book to the PBS series has abundant photographs of the foods and places Martin Yan visited. Each Chinatown receives a personal profile along with recommended restaurants where Yan frequented and his expert recommendations. What a way to travel!
Of great interest to the sociologist within me were Martin Yan's informed comments on the changing nature of many Chinatowns. Unlike the earlier Chinatowns which were, in essence, urban ghettoes where immigrant Chinese banded together for mutual support, some of the new Chinatowns really cannot be said to have an urban center to them.
Take for instance Toronto, with its large Asian immigrant population. There are five Chinatowns serving Toronto's 250,000 Chinese. Besides the core Chinatown along Dundas and Spandina, there are the suburban Chinatowns which are "pushing the boundaries of the 21st century Chinatowns," the book says.
As an aside, I would like to recommend Wang Gungwu's The Chinese Overseas: From Earthbound China to the Quest for Autonomy. It's a fascinating history of the 30 million Chinese living outside China. Their cultural and economic impact on not only the mother country but their host countries cannot be underestimated.
Wang's book affirms Martin Yan's personal observations on the overseas Chinese quest for autonomy combined with a desire to preserve traditions. Yan describes the suburban Chinatown malls with their "climate-controlled roof (and) sprawling parking lots, where everything Chinese -- from the latest Canto-pop CDs to calligraphy scrolls to herbal cough syrup -- can be found."
The rich diversity of Chinese cookery is celebrated in Martin Yan's Chinatown Cooking. I found especially fascinating the unique Sino-Portuguese hybridization of Macau cookery. Yan has great recipes for such Macau favourites as "Bacalhau Macau" -- which uses Portuguese-style salt cod with unsalted butter, olives, minced garlic and Chinese five-spice powder.
Chef Yan gives us a guide "How to order in a Chinese restaurant" with such reminders as "always order soup" to "who says it's not polite to point?" For the delights of dim sum, Martin Yan gives us highlight dishes with their Cantonese and Mandarin pronunciations in case of servers with limited skills in English. And then there's the accompanying Chinese characters to show the server in case you are mangling the great Chinese language with your mispronunciations.
As Julia Child writes in her introduction to Martin Yan's Chinatown Cooking: "Thanks to this seminal book you are holding in your hands, we now have the best of all China and Chinatowns to savour. How lucky we are to have (Martin) here with us."
In Depth
 Listen to a June 26, 2001, Morning Edition report on the history of Washington, D.C.'s Chinatown.
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