Finding art on a plate in Shanghai

Updated: 2016-02-26 08:00

By Mike Peters (China Daily)

American Piper Stremmel collects recipes from chefs in Shanghai, where she lived for more than two years, to come up with the book Shanghai Chefs: A Cookbook. [Photo provided to China Daily]

"The dishes, people and street life seem to jump from the page," she writes, obliquely hinting at one of the passions that underlies the book: While fine restaurant fare blossoms on the pages, Stremmel has a real passion for street food. In the final section, we follow her on a quest for pan-fried pork dumplings, traditional Shanghai soup dumplings, fried scallion pancakes, tea eggs and much more. Personal favorites included the jianbing vendor behind IAPM mall on Nanchang Lu and the baozi sold on the corner of Changle Lu and Xiangyang Lu.

"This book is as much about my love of Shanghai as it is about food," Stremmel says. "So much Shanghai imagery today focuses on the new: Pudong, the glittering modern skyline, all that. But we lived in the former French concession, and while we ate at the Bund occasionally, what we really enjoyed was the lifestyle and the food on the streets that became home to us."

Details

Shanghai Chefs: A Cookbook is available at various restaurants around the city, including The Commune Social,Maya, Scarpetta, Coquille, Baoism, The Grumpy Pig, Sumerian, Egg, el Willy, Mr Willis and Henkes. The self-published volume is also available online at www.piperstremmel.com.