1929 Book on Chinese and Japanese Vegetables
Utilization and Composition of Oriental Vegetables in Hawaii
Publication: Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture, Office of Experimental Stations, 1929. First Edition.
Notes: A remarkable and largely overlooked contribution to early Chinese-American culinary literature—issued as a government agricultural bulletin. While Shiu Wong Chan’s The Chinese Cook Book (1917) remains the best-known Chinese cookbook of the era, its recipes are meat-centered and rely on preserved vegetables like canned bamboo shoots and dried mushrooms. This slim pamphlet offers a striking contrast: dozens of recipes, each built around a fresh Asian vegetable, many of which were under cultivation in Hawaii at the time. It wasn’t until Henry Low’s Cook at Home in Chinese (1938) that fresh Asian produce would again feature so prominently in American Chinese cookbooks.
This pamphlet includes descriptions and half-tone photographs of more than fifty vegetables, from bok choi (white-mustard cabbage), Napa cabbage (Chinese cabbage), and long eggplant, to snow peas, long beans, and bitter melon (balsam pear). Also notes lesser-known plants such as Malabar spinach (nightshade), goji (matrimony vine), perilla, and jicama (yam bean root). The plants are identified with common English names, Chinese and Japanese transliteration, in the Chinese and Japanese languages, and by Latin name.
The recipes were contributed by Mrs. Shao Chang Lee and Miss Lilian Moo (Chinese) and the Japanese Committee of the International Institute of Honolulu; the text does not distinguish which dishes are from which tradition, though most appear Chinese in origin.
Hung Lum Chung (1893–1976), the lead author, was born in Hawaii to Chinese immigrant parents and earned a Master's in Agronomy from the University of Missouri. He dedicated several decades to the Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station.
Published as Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin No. 60. 64 pages.
Edition + Condition: First edition (first printing). A very good to near fine copy in printed wrappers. Uncommon.
Item No: #365194
Price: $850