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Beijing expat Lise Floris with her ayi Zhang Ting as she cooks focaccia ai pomodorini, or focaccia made with potatoes and cherry tomatoes – a special Italian dish. Photo: Simon Song

How to teach a Chinese maid to cook Western food: write a cookbook

  • Expats families in China can find it hard to teach their maids to cook their favourite dishes from back home because of language and cultural barriers
  • These Beijing expats found a solution in writing their own cookbooks, covering French, Italian and wider Mediterranean-style family cooking

Page 120 of Cuisine Mei Wenti is slightly faded and daubed with grease stains. That’s because Zhang Ting, my full-time maid, or ayi, in Beijing, has been using it once a week for the past three years to cook French Brittany crêpes for my family.

She prefers to have the cookbook in front of her, even though she has already mastered the recipe for the crêpes and makes our family happy every week with her tall piles of the thin, golden treats.

Cuisine Mei Wenti – or “Cuisine no problem” – by Frenchwoman Olivia Guinebault is one of a number of bilingual cookbooks written by foreigners living in China. The book, and others of a similar vein, are inspired by a lifelong passion for cooking combined with the desire to teach Chinese people about Western food.

In a country where many foreigners’ everyday lives are hindered by the language barrier, bilingual cookbooks have proven particularly useful to families whose Chinese ayi – which directly translates as “auntie” – cooks for them.

Cuisine Mei Wenti (centre) with other expat-written bilingual recipe books for Chinese readers: CinCucina, which covers Italian cuisine, and A Mediterranean Cookbook. Photo: Simon Song
Recipe and ingredients for focaccia ai pomodorini in Cuisine Mei Wenti. Photo: Simon Song

When Guinebault moved to Beijing more than 10 years ago, she became aware that French cuisine was often associated with renowned chefs and regarded as something extremely complicated to cook.

Wanting to debunk that myth, she started teaching authentic French family-style cuisine. As she got to know Beijing’s expat community better, Western families began talking to her about their desire to have traditional Western meals cooked by their ayis.

“Families would try to teach their ayis some ‘survival recipes’, like lasagne, pancakes and potato gratin, but realised that they would need a bigger variety of dishes to stay in touch with their culinary roots,” she says.

Guinebault discovered that Beijing’s ayis were eager to learn how to cook Western food. After months of intensive Mandarin classes she founded the Cuisine Mei Wenti cooking school, providing long-term courses for the Chinese domestic helpers.

“My concept is to first explain the cultural differences, such as ingredients, tools and how to set up a menu, and once the ayis understand these key points, it’s easier for them to cook authentic recipes,” she says.

Olivia Guinebault wanted to debunk the myth that French cuisine is extremely complicated to cook. Photo: Olivia Guinebault

She wrote the Cuisine Mei Wenti cookbook based on her experience with the cooking classes. First published in 2009, the book has two versions: French-Chinese and English-Chinese.

The Italian authors of CinCucina (“Chinese cooking”), Anna Cappelloni and Anna Cincotto, met in Beijing in 2017 and quickly discovered they had a shared passion for cooking. They started organising cooking classes at the Italian Cultural Institute in Beijing, and after noticing that most participants were Chinese, they hired an interpreter to help.

“The Chinese participants kept asking about our recipes, because it was not easy for them to find good Italian cookbooks translated into Chinese with easy-to-follow recipes,” Cappelloni says.

“The ones you could find at the bookstore were written by renowned chefs and often featured recipes that were difficult to replicate at home,” Cincotto says. “That’s how we first thought of publishing our very own cookbook.”

Anna Cappelloni (left) and Anna Cincotto, authors of CinCucina.

The pair contacted a number of publishers but quickly found that they were more interested in producing cookbooks by famous chefs.

“Luckily we don’t give up easily so we decided to self-publish our book with the help of [Consorzio del] Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, who were one of our main sponsors,” Cappelloni says of the Italian company.

For the two Annas, sharing Italian recipes with others meant sharing their culture; learning about another culture was an added bonus. They realised that, even though Chinese and Italian cuisines are very different, they do have some things in common. For example, both tend to use very few and simple ingredients. “And we like to work with our hands to prepare ravioli like the Chinese prepare dumplings, or tagliatelle like the Chinese prepare noodles,” Cincotto says.

The Italian focaccia made with potatoes and cherry tomatoes is one of my favourite things to cook. I feel proud when I get it nice and crisp on the outside and soft on the inside
Zhang Ting

Chef Sandrine Contier Delabrière arrived in Beijing in 2016. Hailing from the south of France, she had dreamed of writing a cookbook from an early age.

“As a child, I would keep little notebooks in which I recorded my favourite food experiences and wrote down tips that I had gathered from friends, relatives or even regional chefs,” she recalls.

With time, her passion for food grew even stronger. When she met Canadian nutritionist and fellow Beijing expat Stella Chan Marinaro in the queue at a Beijing coffee shop and started talking about food, the idea for A Mediterranean Cookbook was born.

Stella Chan Marinaro (left) and Sandrine Contier Delabrière presenting A Mediterranean Cookbook at the Western Academy of Beijing’s charity bazaar last year. Photo: Stella Chan Marinaro

The publication contains recipes by Delabrière, and nutritional comments and advice by Hong Kong-born Chan Marinaro. It was first published in English in 2018, and later a Chinese translation was produced due to popular demand.

“Our readers wanted a version so that their ayis and Chinese friends could easily cook healthy meals for their families every day,” Delabrière says.

The duo not only translated but also rewrote the whole book to make it more suitable for Chinese readers. In included an even more detailed step-by-step approach and a little variation for each recipe to make it more familiar to Asian palates.

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The selection of recipes is one of the trickiest processes for these cookbook authors. Cincotto and Cappelloni’s main criteria was to publish traditional, well-known recipes that are simple to make and require ingredients that are affordable and easy to find in China.

Delabrière jokes that Chan Marinaro was the “guardian”, helping to make sure A Mediterranean Cookbook did not contain too many pages.

“I had accumulated so many recipes from so many countries that it really would have been far too thick,” Delabrière says.

Zhang Ting cooking focaccia ai pomodorini. Photo: Simon Song

Chan Marinaro explains that their aim was to provide a balance of dishes, with a selection of meat-based, fish-based, vegetarian and vegan recipes using a wide palette of ingredients.

“It was important for us to have a clear index at the end of the book in order to easily direct the reader – whether they are looking for recipes that are particularly quick, suitable for dinner parties, or vegetarian/vegan-friendly,” she explains.

For Guinebault, simplicity and variety were a must. “Coming from the south of France I like healthy and light cuisine, so I wrote some recipes with a Mediterranean twist, such as eggplant loaf with basil and tomato sauce, and zucchini velouté with lime. But I also wanted some traditional French recipes like quiche Lorraine and boeuf bourguignon … and finally Western classics like soups or chocolate fondant,” she says.

Simplicity and variety were a must for Guinebault for the recipes in Cuisine Mei Wenti.

Despite the common features in Western and Chinese cuisine, there are also some important differences. In the dos and don’ts section of her book, Guinebault reminds Chinese readers never to use MSG and not to use substitute ingredients, because the flavour will be different.

“For instance, Chinese vinegar is not the same as red wine vinegar,” she says.

Zhang Ting is from Gansu province and has been with our Italian-Danish family for roughly three years. As my cooking leaves a lot to be desired, I felt I had hit the jackpot when she said she would be delighted to cook for us as often as we wished.

Zhang is a keen user of the bilingual cookbooks that sit in our kitchen cupboard, and she has some favourite recipes of her own.

“The Italian focaccia made with potatoes and cherry tomatoes is one of my favourite things to cook,” she says. “I feel proud when I get it nice and crisp on the outside and soft on the inside, and I know that the kids are happy when they get home from school and are greeted with the smell of freshly made focaccia.”

Zhang says it took some time for her to get used to Western cooking. Photo: Simon Song

It took some time for Zhang to get used to cooking Western food. “For example, we use a lot of garlic in Chinese cuisine,” she says. As family is not keen on garlic, she says she has “learned to tone it down a bit”.

Zhang and I have had some good laughs about our very different cooking styles. I will never forget the time she added mayonnaise to a fruit salad I had asked her to prepare.

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