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 Writes
Jemimah Steinfeld: "[Sasha] Gong was part of
the sent-down youth movement at the time, which saw thousands of
children taken away from their parents and sent to work in the
countryside. Writing the book was "a cathartic experience -- a
way to go back to a recent, difficult period," she said...Gong
admits the irony of writing a cookbook about a period that had
little food. But even though it was a time of austerity, her
generation learned how to cherish food and create delicious,
healthy dishes." Jemimah Steinfeld,
CNN.
 National
Public Radio's Rachel Martin cooked three dishes from
The Cultural Revolution Cookbook with Sasha and Scott
in honor of Chinese New Year and reported about it on "Weekend
Edition." "A new book combines the
memories and culinary skills of one Chinese political dissident
who lived through the country's Cultural Revolution. Since food
was rationed, Sasha Gong learned to cook with whatever she could
find. 'There's something about humanity,' she says. 'It's hard
to suppress.'" Listen to the broadcast
here or read the (somewhat shorter) text version here:
NPR Weekend Edition. It was NPR's "most e-mailed story" the
next day.
 Jim
Stevenson of the Voice of America interviewed Sasha about the
cookbook. He writes, "China's Cultural Revolution is
remembered as a time of hardship for many on the mainland, who
were sent to the countryside by Mao Zedong to live alongside
China's peasants and farmers. It is not a time in Chinese
history readily associated with food, and cooking. Yet, people
at that time had to be very creative given the few culinary
resources available." Listen to the interview, which aired
on
Daybreak Asia.
 Even
the official China Daily published a report on
The Cultural Revolution Cookbook.
Quoting Sasha, reporter Kelly Chung Dawson wrote,
"When
Scott first suggested the idea of a book based on 'cultural
revolution'-era recipes, I said, 'Are you nuts?' People didn't
have enough to eat during that time," Gong says. "But the more I
thought about it, the more I realized that if we could
incorporate the stories of Chinese history in the book, it would
be fun and very educational." You can read the story on the
ChinaDailyUSA website.
 "We
have come a long way since Chinese food meant Chun King’s canned
bean spouts, chow mein noodles brown sauce, and Chun King’s
cookbook that featured chop suey for 50 people," writes
Raymond Lum of the Harvard Yenching Library - an aficianado of
Chinese food - in a thoughtful review of the cookbook for
ChinaInsight, an English-language newspaper focusing exclusively
on connections between the U.S. and China. "Even the
cooking-impaired will enjoy this book because it puts a personal
face on the experiences of the 'sent down' youth that is largely
lacking in academic histories of the Cultural Revolution and
because the book is visually enthralling. It is also a
significant addition to our understanding and appreciation of
China’s culinary legacy, which is always in a stage of
development and discovery." Raymond Lum in
ChinaInsight.
 "新出版的《文革菜譜》
(The
Cultural Revolution Cookbook) 一書的作者之一Gong
Sasha, 來自中國廣州，現居美國。文革時她下放到廣東農村 . . .
從當地人那裡學來很多簡單又健康的菜式，她一一記錄下來。這本書也成為對時代的反諷." "Sasha Gong, one
of the authors of
The
Cultural Revolution Cookbook, a newly
published book of recipes from the Cultural Revolution, is
originally from Guangzhou, China and is currently residing in
the United States. During the Cultural Revolution she was "sent
down" to the Guangdong countryside, and . . . learned a lot of
simple and healthy dishes from the local farmers, which she has
recorded in a book that chronicles the irony of the times."
The
Wen Wei Po (文汇报), quoting Time
Magazine.
 Scott
was interviewed about the cookbook by Markus Hippi on Britain's
Monocle 24 Radio's "The Menu," a "weekly one-hour show about
eating and drinking, introducing you to the players you need to
know, from food growers to restaurateurs and chefs." The
interview aired on January 27. You can listen to the six-minute
clip here.
 “我们能表现创造力的机会不多，所以做饭变成很重要的事情。你想，一共给你三样东西，要你做十道菜你总得想出办法，会想出很多花招来把东西弄得很好吃."
"We had few opportunities to demonstrate creativity, so
cooking became a very important endeavor. If they gave you three
ingredients and asked you to make ten dishes with them, you had
to come up with a lot of tricks to make them taste good."
Chow Yian Ping (周雁冰) quoting Sasha Gong in an article called "A
Nothing-to-Eat Cookbook" ("一本没有东西吃的食谱") in Singapore's
Lianhe Zaobao (联合早报).
 The
authors tell the significance behind four of their favorite
recipes: Shallow-Fried Potato Shreds, Scrambled Eggs with
Tomatoes, Honey-Braised Duck and Tofu with Scallions and Sesame
Dressing. Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, in
TimeOut Beijing.
 "「文革食譜」分門別類，有蔬菜篇、雞鴨篇、豬牛羊篇、海鮮篇、米飯麵食篇、湯品、甜點篇，以英文寫成，所有食材、調味料均可在美國
Safeway 一般超市買到，讓洋人對做中國菜不再視如畏途."
"'The
Cultural Revolution Cookbook' includes recipes for
vegetables, poultry, pork and lamb, seafood, rice, pasta, soup
and dessert. It's written in English, and all the ingredients
and seasonings can be bought in an average American Safeway
supermarket. This allows Westerners to make Chinese food without
fear." Amanda
H. Chen (許惠敏) in the
World Journal (世界日報).
 "The
Cultural Revolution Cookbook
is a landmark publication whose easy-to-prepare dishes include
classics like dry-fried green beans, duckling steamed with
ginger and beef braised with star anise. While the cookbook
documents with an unflinching eye an unimaginably difficult
time, its...recipes also reflect the indomitable spirit and
ingenuity of everyday cooks - among them, Gong and her family -
making do with very little." Daven Wu, in
Destinasian Magazine.
 Sasha
tells how the cookbook got its start, and shares memories of the
Cultural Revolution in an interview with Rachel Will: She says
the book features "more home cooking than restaurant cooking
or fancy food . . . in our cookbook we made sure that you can
find everything at an American supermarket . . . The cooking is
not fancy or difficult, it’s just easy and I want people to
enjoy cooking." Rachel Will in
US-China Today,
the online magazine of the University of Southern California's
US-China Institute.
 "These
recipes, from a "cheerless decade," are actually well suited to
today' s harried cooks who are looking for quick, healthy food.
The limited ingredients and simple techniques make for easy
cooking, and all of them have been tried and tempered to get the
most flavor out of the least ingredients." Claudia
Kousoulas, Culinary Historians of Washington, D.C., in
CHoWLine.
 Read
Danish? The Danish newspaper Weekendavisen reviewed
The Cultural Revolution Cookbook on January 6, 2012 and
quoted Sasha Gong: "It's one thing to understand history
through books. But you get a deeper understanding of history by
actually tasting the food people ate in the past...Our focus has
been on memories of coping despite enormous difficulty."
Peter Harmsen in
Weekendavisen.
From the
Blogosphere
 NPR
also has a food blog - "The Salt" - and reporter Eliza Barclay serves
up lots of stories behind what's on our plates. In "Chow Under
Mao," she writes: "Part narrative, part history, part recipe
compendium, the book is an ode to the spirit of creativity in
lean times. . . Few recipes in Gong and Seligman's book have
more than six ingredients, and they are easy to prepare."
Eliza Barclay in
The Salt.
 International
careers expert Stacie Nevadomski Berdan, author of
Get Ahead by Going Abroad and
Go Global, wrote in the Huffington Post food
blog about an adventure in Chinese cooking involving her two
daughters, a few flat-bottomed pots and pans and
The Cultural Revolution Cookbook. She writes:
"These colorful additions of historical context sparked
conversation as we sat down to a traditional Chinese table set
with chopsticks and a bowl of rice for each, and the dishes
served family style. Although I admit we focused on the
delicious dishes at hand -- every one of them a tasty treat --
we also discussed China then and now. It was rich family
experience on many fronts." Stacie Nevadomski Berdan in
Huff Post Food.
 Elise
Bauer, one of the most respected and followed food bloggers on
the web today, tests all the recipes she posts and has adapted
our Steamed Ginger and Mushroom Chicken recipe into a delightful
soup.
"...The combination of the ginger, chicken, mushrooms, soy sauce
and a touch of salt and sugar is just lovely," she writes.
See her version on her
Simply Recipes
blog.
 "This...is
the starting point for the recipes in this book – a limited
number of readily-available ingredients, simple substitutions,
and straightforward instructions – and in this the authors have
been highly successful. Anyone intimidated by the idea of
cooking (much less cooking something as exotic as Chinese food)
will find this cookbook invitingly simple...In summary, from
professional chefs (who will likely make tweaks as they go) to
the average or aspiring home cook (who follows recipes to the
letter), this book has a lot of food for thought as well as for
cooking and enjoying with family and friends. I would not
hesitate to recommend it, whether it’s for your own use in the
home kitchen, as a gift for a fellow or aspiring cook, or for
someone who has an interest in the Cultural Revolution period of
modern Chinese history." Food Blogger
Liza Baker, in
Tangstein's Blog: Healthy Chinese Home Cooking.
 Philadelphia-based
blogger Curtis Roberts, whose favorite Christmas book this past year
was The Cultural Revolution Cookbook, writes: "Sasha Gong .
. .has in this handsome, beautifully written and sensibly priced
book, transformed proverbial lemons into lemonade as she tells
the story of learning by necessity to live, cook and eat simply
in the countryside, growing, preparing and sharing pure, good
and traditional food. I have been cooking from the excellent,
delicious recipes in this book non-stop."
Acravan.
And in a follow-up post, he featured
four recipes from the book, together with his own commentary
on them.
 Joan
Robinett Wilson, a blogger with an eye for a good recipe, caught
the NPR broadcast, swore she could smell the Braised Pork in Soy
Sauce through the radio, and then tried her hand at it,
quintupling the recipe for her large family. She found it
"very simple and easy to make and very tasty." Joan
Robinett Wilson, in
Architect Mom: Drafting a Life.
 "Overall,
The Cultural Revolution Cookbook reminded me that Chinese
cooking can be simple, inexpensive, unintimidating and
delicious. It does not require special trips to unfamiliar
stores for ingredients you’ve never bought before. All you
really need is fresh ingredients, simple kitchen supplies, and a
healthy dose of China nostalgia." Food Blogger Leslie
Forman, in
Beyond Chile's Single Story.
 "It has some wonderful dishes, many of
which you won't find in your local take-out joint, 'though you
maybe surprised to find some old favorites in simpler (but
tastier) form." Food Writer Gary Allen, in
On the Table.
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