Fresh Chinese is not your neighborhood takeout Chinese cookbook, and the first clue appears quickly.
Don't use a wok, says author Wynnie Chan. Use a nonstick saute pan.
"I prefer this type of pan to a wok when low-fat cooking because the temperature from an electric stove top or gas ring often isn't high enough to properly heat the sides of a wok," she writes when listing the equipment you will need.
And that is just the beginning of Chan's efforts to break us of our love affair with notoriously unhealthful, but exceedingly flavorful, takeout Chinese food - next to pizza, perhaps the most popular takeout food in the United States. Throughout Fresh Chinese (Hamlyn, 2004, $15.95), she offers healthful alternatives to preparing meat and deep-fried appetizers, like shrimp toast and spring rolls.
Her cookbook was prepared in the United Kingdom as part of the Chinese Takeaway Project, an effort to educate Chinese chefs who were wooing customers with greasy dishes heavily dosed with monosodium glutamate, or MSG - and clogging their arteries in the process.
Chan offers more healthful recipes for such all-time favorites as sweet-and-sour pork, chicken chow mein, crispy duck and beef in black-bean sauce, often by recommending the use of another nontraditional piece of cookware for preparing Chinese food - the stove-top grill pan.
This is a laudable effort to move Chinese cooking back to its origins, when a variety of vegetables, seared quickly in a hot wok and seasoned with spices, was served with rice and noodles. Meat, a precious commodity, was used only as a garnish.
Chan's alternatives include: aromatic duck that is broiled instead of deep-fried; spring rolls that are wrapped in dried rice paper sheets instead of deep-fried; and potstickers that are boiled or steamed.
The result of a sampling of recipes, however, was predictably mild. Eating healthful Chinese food may be good for you, but it necessarily loses its appeal as a guilty pleasure.
But, if you have made the commitment to a more healthful lifestyle, this cookbook will provide easy adaptations of your takeout favorites. And Chan offers side-dish suggestions with every recipe and includes menu plans for every event, from a modest family dinner to a banquet for 10.
She also provides a helpful pantry list (some of her ingredients are not easily available in supermarkets) and recipes for stocks and sauces. And her recipes are for traditional Vietnamese, Szechuan, Cantonese and Thai dishes - not for some American notion of stir-fry.
