In one of my favorite old clips of Fu Pei-mei, it’s sometime in the 1980s, and the mild-mannered cooking instructor is demonstrating her technique for making “squirrel-fried” fish, one of her signature dishes. With a few well-placed strokes of a knife, Fu debones a whole yellow croaker, scores its flesh, and then fries the fish in a wok until the meat unfurls and puffs out like a squirrel’s bushy tail. On the bare-bones set of her long-running series, Fu Pei-mei Time, she wears a mom apron and sports a tidy Asian-mom perm. More than any other television chef I’ve seen, she looks like she could be my mom—if my mom gripped a giant meat cleaver at all times.
Before Martin Yan wisecracked his way into the hearts of PBS viewers in the early ’80s, and long before Ming Tsai spread the gospel of East Meets West cooking on the Food Network, there was Fu Pei-mei. Fifteen years after her death in 2004, Fu remains the most famous culinary figure Taiwan has ever produced. As the host of the country’s first cooking show, she was on television for about 40 years—nearly 2,000 episodes instructing on more than 4,000 Chinese dishes, and she never wore the same apron twice, it seemed, in all that time.
The show aired in Mandarin, but Fu also spoke English, Japanese, and Hokkien, allowing her to spend the latter part of her career traveling the world as a kind of culinary ambassador. She had a Chinese cooking show in Japan for several years. And if you talk to anyone who came of age in Taiwan in the last 20 or 30 years, chances are that they—or their parents—have a copy of Pei-Mei’s Chinese Cook Book stashed away somewhere. (The book’s first volume, now out of print, sold 500,000 copies.) The New York Times restaurant critic Raymond Sokolov called her “the Julia Child of Chinese cooking” in a 1971 write-up that highlighted two of Fu’s recipes for cold chicken salad—both of them “traditional” and “easy to prepare,” according to the Times.
The Julia Child comparison is made in every English-language article about Fu. But Michelle King, a historian at the University of North Carolina who is writing a book about Fu (tentatively titled The Pei-Mei Project: History, Gender, and Memory Through the Pages of a Chinese Cookbook), says the real sign of how large she looms in Taiwan is this: To this day, if the Taiwanese media wants to establish a person’s bona fides as an authority on a particular national cuisine, they inevitably describe him or her as, say, the Fu Pei-mei of British cooking (in reference to The Great British Bake Off’s Mary Berry), or the Fu Pei-mei of America (Child herself, naturally). “That is how all other cooks are described in Taiwan,” King says.
