Soong Ching Ling loves cooking and pays great attention to collecting all kinds of recipes. Usually she doesn't accept gifts-except recipes. If a foreign female guest brings snacks, preserves and pickles cooked at home, she will ask them to tell her how to do it, and she will take time to roll up her sleeves and try it in the kitchen.
Soong Ching Ling Memorial Hall contains a diary used by Soong Ching Ling to record recipes. The dishes recorded in the book are both Chinese and western. Most of them are written down by Soong Ching Ling in English or Chinese based on her own experience or collected from friends. There are also many "printed manuscripts" cut from newspapers and pasted on the book.
Soong Ching Ling spent most of her life as a cook or a nanny. How did she learn to cook? In 1937, in order to express her gratitude to her secretary Li Yun for her hard work, she "stubbornly" kept a light meal at lee woon-jae's house. The meal was extremely simple, but it was all made by Soong Ching Ling herself: everyone took a cup of seaweed soup, followed by fried pork hearts with green peppers, stuffed meat with lanterns and pickled purple radish. Soong Ching Ling told Liu Yun that she learned the cooking skills from Sun Yat-sen.. Mr. Sun has been wandering for a long time and learned to cook and cook. He is also a doctor and knows nutrition. Soong Ching Ling said that green peppers contain a lot of vitamin C, which she often eats. Salted purple radish is pickled by herself, which is nutritious and refreshing, and she likes it.
In May, 1928, Soong Ching Ling and Deng Yanda 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 Soong Ching Ling's biography, "Many years later, in wartime Chongqing, she looked everywhere for a long flat-bottomed iron pot to make this kind of food, because the local sharp-bottomed pot didn't work well and pans were rare in China." In Soong Ching Ling's cookbook, she wrote down the practice in English: prepare 6 potatoes, 2 eggs, fried bacon, crushed onion and nutmeg, chopped parsley and butternut, wash, peel and crush the potatoes, add onion, flour, eggs, salt, pepper, nutmeg and parsley and stir them into a paste. Put a tablespoon of potato paste into a hot pan and fry until both sides are golden and crispy. You can fry three or four cakes at a time.
According to Zhang Jue, Soong Ching Ling's secretary, Soong Ching Ling often cooked in person and distributed 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 the method of recording this red carp fish in English: first, choose the 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 collect juice.
In April 1978, 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 the storage and eating methods of hawthorn jelly. "Hawthorn jelly should be kept in the shade." "When it is hot, you can put a spoonful of jelly in a glass of cold water to make a refreshing drink, or you can 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 a special one, which was recorded in Chinese: "Put hawthorn in the pot, add water, and add the water until you can see the top layer of hawthorn. Boil for half an hour, the hawthorn is boiled and mashed, so that it is deformed and filtered, without retaining too much hawthorn meat, so that the purer the juice is, the more transparent it is frozen. For each cup of hawthorn juice, add a cup of sugar (I usually use five or six cups of sugar) and cook the juice and sugar slowly until it freezes and begins to condense, forming a sugar paste. Anyway, it will take 45 minutes to 1 hour, depending on the quantity of hawthorn jelly. When the ice starts to drip from the spoon in small pieces instead of falling, it is cooked. Pour the ice into the bottle and let it cool. At this time, the freezing is only half that of the original cooking. In other words, five cups of juice and five cups of sugar can only make five cups of frozen. " Soong Ching Ling also wrote a special 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-195s, Soong Ching Ling searched everywhere for China cookbooks in English, and wanted to give them to the wife of Indonesian Prime Minister Ali Chaste Roamizoyo to try out, because the couple liked Chinese food very much, and this lady specifically asked for a China cookbook. Soong Ching Ling made a special trip to write to Epstein, asking his wife Cholmeley to help him find it. After finding it, Soong Ching Ling sent a letter of thanks 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 condenses Soong Ching Ling's love for life and care for her relatives and friends, and carries the fireworks-filled food love of this "great woman of the 2th century". (Zhu Xianyu)