Fu Pei-mei (傅培梅) talks the same way she slices a fish for frying—straightforward and precisely. And she can do both at the same time. As a television cameraman zooms in, she demonstrates how to prepare Pineapple Sweet-and-Sour Yellow Croaker. "When scoring the fish, your cuts should be evenly spaced," she says, "but they shouldn't be clear to the bone. The cut along the belly should be deep enough to the fish can stand upright on the serving plate. If the fish lies on its side, the underside won't be crispy." Fu's explanation is clear and logical, and under her skilled fingers, the large fish is quickly prepared for frying.
After all the ingredients are ready, she takes the fish by the tail and slides it into a pool of hot oil in a big wok. The movement of her hands is smooth and sure, despite the spitting oil. Steam and smoke fill the studio, but Fu is unperturbed. She gracefully turns toward the camera, smiles warmly, and launches into more details about the new dish she is preparing. It is a performance honed over three decades of hosting a television cooking program.
During a break, Fu changes quickly into a navy blue chipao tastefully complemented with a peach apron. Backstage is a large stack of clothes that she and her eldest daughter, Cheng An-chi (程安琪), have selected for today's taping of six shows. It is a familiar routine. Fu has hosted more than four thousand shows for her series "Fu Pei-mei's Time," an educational series that began only a few months after the first Taiwan television station was inaugurated in 1962. Despite the program's impressive longevity, which is undoubtedly some sort of record, Fu has lost none of her enthusiasm for spreading the good news about Chinese food and its preparation. She is still as excited as a first-time variety show host.
"It was a live show at first," Fu recalls, "and if I cut my hand, or red peppers brought tears to my eyes, or if I stumbled over my words, there was no way to cover up." The unpredictability of live shows was only one difficulty during the early days. Only a crude set was available at first, including her stove, which was nothing more than the small charcoal burner commonly used on the island until bottled gas became more available and affordable. Moreover, the original graphics for the program were basic in the extreme: just the lists of ingredients she wrote on the studio's blackboard. Fu also paid a physical price while perfecting her on-camera proficiency. Her hands and arms have numerous small scars from old knife wounds and burns.
Three decades on the air—Fu has a highly professional eye for detail in everything from personal appearance to the logical explanation of each dish.
Today's premier cooking expert was yesterday's frustrated housewife. Back in 1951, Fu was only eager to satisfy her husband's appetite and be a hospitable dinner hostess for his mahjong partners. The young newlywed had no plans to become a culinary expert. All that changed, however, on the day she served her husband a plate of pork dumplings with the juices leaking out through broken skins. Livid with rage, her husband simply threw his chopsticks on the table and stomped out of the room without a word. From that moment on, Fu was determined to master the art of Chinese cooking.
She had to start from scratch, because as a young girl born to a wealthy family in Shantung province in northern China, she had no experience in the kitchen, not even making soup. Her tycoon father doted on his third daughter, and by the time Fu was in kindergarten her father had decided that she would become an interpreter for the diplomatic service. For training, he sent her to a famous Japanese school in their hometown in hopes that she might be able to cultivate both graceful manners and fluent Japanese. But war and history intervened, the family moved to Taiwan in 1949, and Fu married instead of pursuing a career.
Marriage meant daily cooking, and after her unhappy experience with the dumplings, Fu took charge of the situation. First, she sought out the most expert assistance in town by writing to several of the cooks at Taipei's most famous regional restaurants—Peking, Hunan, Chiangche, Szechwan, and Cantonese—and asking them to consider teaching her how to cook at her home. Before long, Fu was using gold from her dowry to pay for each session. "A famous Chinese dish doesn't have to be complicated," she says. "For example Ma-Po Tofu is a famous Szechwan entree, but it's basically just bean curd." That may be so, but as all cooks know, the simplest foods are oftentimes the most difficult to prepare correctly.
Skill with the cleaver is essential in preparing Chinese food. Here, Fu scores the sides of a yellow croaker.
Of the regional styles, Fu found Peking-style cuisine the most difficult to prepare because of the special care needed to select ingredients. "For example, if a dish called for pork tripe, only the tip of each piece of tripe could be used," Fu says. "So a cook would have to buy a large number if the dish were served at a banquet. It's a waste of money."
During the first year of lessons, 1957, Fu learned to prepare about three hundred dishes, simple and complex, and by the end of the following year she mastered another hundred. Some of these were variations on the same well-known recipes. When different cooks taught her the same dish, Fu would decide for herself which she preferred, or would try her own style. By the end of the second year, she had exhausted her dowry, but had also become an exceptional cook. Not only was her husband well pleased, but she had acquired an enviable reputation among her relatives and friends, who often turned to her for cooking advice. From there, it was only a short step to set up cooking classes, which she started in 1961, and then move to television the following year.
Three decades have passed since that first televised cooking show, and during that time Fu Pei-mei has become a major figure in the popularization of home-cooked Chinese food. But how has traditional Chinese cuisine fared in Taiwan? "Famous provincial cuisines are still preserved in different restaurants," she says, "but there are also some changes. For example, most good Szechwan restaurants will feature traditionally famous dishes like Kung-Pao Chicken, but their chefs will also use Taiwan-grown ingredients to create new Chinese dishes which may have nothing to do with Szechwan." Some examples are bamboo shoots served with mayonnaise, and sliced celery stalks with hot mustard. "These were created here," she says.
The flavors of regional Chinese cuisine evolved in Taiwan by necessity when it became impossible to get condiments, dried foods, and other ingredients from the mainland. Restaurants therefore substituted with local items. Oftentimes, what was lost in traditional taste was made up for in new and creative dishes. For example, a great variety of Szechwan style dishes could be created with local materials. "Instead of just making Kung-Pao Chicken, we could change it into Kung-Pao Water Spinach, using a common local vegetable, or maybe Kung-Pao Bamboo Shoot," Fu says. "We use the same method to cook the dish, but with different ingredients. So, for instance, we can prepare Taiwan ingredients with a Szechwan or Shanghai taste."
As she coats the fish with corn starch, Fu gives her audience a running commentary on preparation techniques.
In short, Fu thinks that the decades of creative coping in Taiwan have been beneficial. "Here we have new tastes, new dishes, and different ingredients and condiments," she says. The tone in her voice is positive, carrying the message that cuisine, like culture, has to grow and change to be alive and well. And now there are some benefits from the growing contacts with the mainland. A great variety of traditional ingredients are available on the market, giving local cooks even more opportunity for creative experimentation.
This inventive approach to Chinese food is Fu's hallmark, and she is credited with creating over four thousand recipes since her debut on television. At the same time, she has authored a series of cookbooks, many of them bilingual, to help other cooks develop greater cooking skill. The cookbooks can help both novices and professional cooks. Fu pays special attention to giving all the basics before turning to the various regional dishes. For example, one cookbook lists twenty-seven commonly used condiments, along with illustrations. If a cook knows what is available, it is easier to make substitutions. "If you don't want to use salt and sugar," Fu says, "you can use sweet and sour sauce or shrimp paste. The dish will be just as tasty." But it will also be different. Fu says that Chinese cooks can choose from "around forty different cooking methods," from stir-frying, stewing, and poaching to simmering, broiling, or hot-mixing. This gives them great flexibility when they make their own variations on a basic recipe.
Fu promotes creativity in her television programs. If fish is the focus of the week, she shows how it can be steamed or poached, or fried and served with sweet-and-sour sauce. It may be the same fish, but there are literally scores of ways to prepare it. Also, whether a fish is cut, sliced, or shredded will also influence its taste and appearance. In fact, if a large fish is at hand, different parts of it can be seasoned and cooked in different ways for the same meal. Thus, an order of "one fish, four flavors" is common at local seafood restaurants.
Once a cook starts to make new combinations of foods, condiments, and cooking styles, work in the kitchen becomes fun. To see Fu Pei-mei whirling through one of her shows is to see a cook who truly enjoys life. And when she has an idea for a new dish, she jots it down in her ever-present notebook. She also looks abroad for new ideas. According to her daughter, Cheng An-chi, Fu often reads Japanese cookbooks in order to find new ideas for Chinese food. "They have done thorough research on the principles of cooking," Cheng says. "So my mother reads their books to get new ideas that can be applied to Chinese food." Since Fu speaks fluent Japanese, and lived for a time in Japan while her husband was there on business, she has considerable firsthand knowledge of Japanese cooking. Moreover, since 1971 she has taped her Chinese cooking program in Japanese for overseas distribution.
Fu Pei-mei is now ready to turn over the television kitchen to others while she assumes a more relaxed pace in promoting Chinese cuisine. She has some vocal cord problems because of talking so much over hot and steaming woks, and her eyes have also suffered from the heavy cooking-oil smoke that is part of stir-fry Chinese cooking. In addition, it is time to adjust her approach for the modern woman. "Society is changing," Fu says. "Being housewives and career women simultaneously, modern women are too busy to cultivate much interest in time-consuming Chinese cuisine. Besides the smoke from the kitchen deteriorates the home living environment. Lots of young people even refuse to cook at home."
One sign of a master chef—if the fish slides smoothly into the wok, burns from the spitting, boiling oil will be minimized.
The prevalence of this attitude was indicated by the decreasing number of students enrolling in her cooking class over the last five years. To help make it easier for career women, Fu started teaching how to make partial preparations beforehand, so that after work the dishes could be served more quickly by simply reheating. "That's what society needs now," Fu sighs. She says that housewives want to know the secret of making simple, tasty, but less time-consuming dishes. But this is not easy to do, because traditional cuisine stresses huohou, or carefully regulated "fire power," and that means time and patience is needed in the kitchen.
"The procedures required for cooking genuine Chinese cuisine are very complicated," Fu says. "There can't be any shoddy work, and no inferior materials can be used, otherwise the color, aroma, and taste of the food will be lost." Fu is not especially interested in using microwave ovens, which are increasingly popular among urban people, because they lack the necessary huohou. The only advantage to microwave cooking, she says, is "the ovens are cleaner to use."
Yet Fu admits that at least the methods of cooking Chinese food at home may have to change. Some of the procedures might not have to be so elaborate, more reliance might be given to prepared or frozen ingredients, and some reheating might be permissible. These issues will receive more attention at the end of this year, when she leaves her long-running cooking show. "Thirty years—it's a good time to conclude the program," she says.
But this does not mean retirement. Instead, Fu plans a possible round-the-world lecture tour on Chinese cooking, and she may accept some offers from large food companies to be an advisor. No matter what professional direction Fu takes, however, one thing is certain: the regular, melodic rhythm of Chinese cleaver on chopping block will be heard in her own kitchen, as she prepares yet another sumptuous feast for her fortunate guests.