There is a diary used by Soong Ching Ling to record recipes in the Soong Ching Ling Memorial Hall. The dishes recorded in the book are both Chinese and western. Most of them were collected by Soong Ching Ling according to her own experience or from friends and written in English or Chinese. There are also many "printed manuscripts" cut from newspapers and pasted on books.
Soong Ching Ling spent most of her life as a cook or nanny. How did she learn to cook? 1937 in order to express her gratitude to secretary Liu Yun for her hard work, she once "stubbornly" left a light meal at lee woon-jae's house. The food is extremely simple, but Soong Ching Ling made it herself: everyone has a cup of seaweed soup, followed by fried pork heart with green pepper, stuffed meat with lantern pepper, salted purple radish and other side dishes. Soong Ching Ling told Liu Yun that she had learned cooking skills from Sun Yat-sen. Sun has been wandering for a long time and learned to cook. He is also a doctor and knows nutrition. Soong Ching Ling said that green peppers contain a lot of vitamin C, and she often eats them. Salty purple radish is pickled by herself, which is nutritious and refreshing. She likes it very much.
1928 In May, Soong Ching Ling and Deng devoted themselves to studying land issues in Berlin. She likes potato pancakes, a traditional local diet, and learned how to make them. Epstein, a close friend of Soong Ching Ling and a foreign expert, once mentioned in the biography of Soong Ching Ling, "Many years later, in wartime Chongqing, she searched everywhere for a long flat-bottomed iron pot to cook this food, because the local sharp-bottomed pot was not easy to use, and pans were rare in China." In Soong Ching Ling's cookbook, she wrote down the recipe in English: prepare 6 potatoes, 2 eggs, fried bacon, chopped onion and nutmeg, chopped parsley and butter, wash the potatoes, peel them, crush them, add onion, flour, eggs, salt, pepper, nutmeg and parsley and stir them into a paste. Put a tablespoon of mashed potatoes in a hot pot and fry until golden and crisp on both sides. You can fry three or four cakes at a time.
According to Zhang Jue, Soong Ching Ling's secretary, Soong Ching Ling often cooks in person and distributes the cooked dishes to the staff. Soong Ching Ling said several times, "When I have red carp, I will cook red carp with Hainan Island flavor." In Soong Ching Ling's cookbook, she found a way to record this kind of red carp in English: first, choose male red carp. After the fish is washed and hollowed out, it leaves fish fat and scales. Stir-fry shallots and Jiang Mo, add water to boil, add red carp, cover and simmer, then take the juice.
1April, 978, Soong Ching Ling brought a box of candy and a bottle of hawthorn jelly to her cousin Niu Enmei, who was studying in Beijing, and wrote to tell her how to store and eat hawthorn jelly. "Hawthorn jelly should be kept in a cool place." "When it is hot, you can put a spoonful of jelly in a glass of cold water to make a refreshing drink or spread it on bread." Although Soong Ching Ling said that this jar of hawthorn jelly was made by a person who is good at making jelly, she can actually make it herself. One of the recipes she recorded was very special, which was recorded in Chinese: "Put the hawthorn into the pot, add water, and add water until you can see the top layer of the hawthorn. Boil for half an hour, and mash the hawthorn, so that it is deformed and filtered, without retaining too much hawthorn meat, so that the purer the juice, the more transparent it is frozen. Add a cup of sugar to each cup of hawthorn juice (I usually use five or six cups of sugar) and cook the juice and sugar slowly until it solidifies and begins to condense, forming a sugar paste. Anyway, it takes 45 minutes to 1 hour, depending on the quantity of hawthorn jelly. It is cooked when the ice cubes start to drip small pieces from the spoon instead of falling. Pour the ice into the bottle and let it cool. The freezing at this time is only half of the original cooking. In other words, five cups of juice and five cups of sugar can only make five cups of freezing. " Soong Ching Ling also wrote a note suggesting that juice and sugar should be "cooked slowly", that is, "cooked slowly".
Soong Ching Ling regards cooking and eating as a good opportunity for cultural exchange. In the mid-1950s, Soong Ching Ling searched everywhere for the English version of China's cookbook, and wanted to give it to the wife of Indonesian Prime Minister Ali Chaste Romizzoyo for trial. Because the couple liked Chinese food very much, the lady specially asked for a China cookbook. Soong Ching Ling made a special trip to write to Epstein and asked his wife Cholmeley to help him find it. After finding it, Soong Ching Ling wrote a thank-you letter to Cholmeley, saying that the Prime Minister's wife was "very happy after receiving it, because she never found it during her visit to China".
A small cookbook embodies Soong Ching Ling's love for life and care for relatives and friends, and carries the pyrotechnic and delicious love of this "great woman of the 20th century". (Zhu Xianyu)