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.
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.