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Chinese recipes from small-town Australia make for a cookbook about ‘community’
From lemon chicken to sweet and sour barramundi, recipes in Chopsticks or Fork? tell stories of Chinese immigration in rural Australia
Reading Time:5 minutes
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In 2017 Lin Jie Kong, at the tail end of a road trip, stopped for food in the tiny Australian town of Karuah, New South Wales.
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She was expecting the usual pub fare – fish and chips or chicken Parmesan.
Instead, she found a restaurant serving Australian-Chinese favourites such as sweet and sour pork, Mongolian lamb and a tasty selection of Sichuan classics.
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Kong ordered the special fried rice – it was blanketed in barbecue pork, chicken and prawns – and the sweet-sauce-smothered Peking pork, which was crisp and juicy.
“In this tiny town – the population was probably about 1,000 – I had one of the best Chinese meals of my life,” Kong says via a Zoom call from Sydney.
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