The Taste of China

Even cosmopolitan California chef Ken Hom has turned to his roots for his new book, The Taste of China: a sampling of the home cooking still practiced throughout provincial China. Beginning in his ancestral Cantonese village, where relatives welcomed him with an 11-course banquet made from their homegrown ingredients, Hom and photographer Leong Ka Tai traveled off the beaten path and enjoyed both plain and splendid fare prepared for them in primitive kitchens. For armchair tourists, Hom’s enthusiastic narrative and Leong’s 200 color photos offer an exceptional view of rural China’s foods, markets, and homes. For American cooks, there are 100 attractive recipes. And for travelers, a warning: He found the tourist fare uniformly tasteless and the state-run restaurants nightmarish. A-