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Michelle King sits surrounded by books. She holds her book, "Chop, Fry, Watch, Learn."

“Food is my love language,” said UNC historian and author Michelle T. King. “Somebody cooking for you is a powerful act of care.” (photo by Emmy Trivette, UNC Research)

UNC historian Michelle T. King’s new book pays tribute to Taiwan’s Fu Pei-mei, whose 40 year-career as a cookbook author, culinary teacher and TV personality brought Chinese cooking to the world.

Michelle T. King remembers the moment when she was flipping through one of her mother’s cherished cookbooks, looking for easy Chinese recipes to make for her toddler daughter.

Over the years, beginning as a child growing up in Michigan, King had occasionally perused Pei Mei’s Chinese Cook Book (1969).

But this time, King saw the cookbook’s author, Fu Pei-mei, in a new light — through a historian’s lens. Interspersed with recipes written in both Chinese and English, there were photos and newspaper clippings of the legendary Taiwanese culinary ambassador traveling and teaching around the world. Fu was a renowned TV personality who hosted a cooking show for four decades, from 1962 until her retirement in 2002. She influenced countless female home cooks — many of whom were entering the workforce as they navigated post-World War II economic and social transformations.

King is a UNC associate professor of history, specializing in modern Chinese gender and food history. In her latest book, Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food (W.W. Norton & Company), King weaves together stories from her own family, contemporary interviews with home cooks and research about Fu’s life to paint a portrait of a woman’s wide-ranging and enduring legacy.

King begins the book with a freezer inventory list from her mom, Ellen Huang King, handwritten in Chinese and English. The list outlines home-cooked Chinese dishes her parents stocked in her freezer when they came for an extended visit: scallion pancakes, sweet sticky rice cake, mushu pork, mapo tofu, beef with onions, tea eggs.

“More than any other document I possess, this list — at once maternal, bilingual and centered on food — explains my motives for writing this book,” King writes. “My family, like so many other immigrant families, speaks the language of food (in our case, in the dialect of dumplings).”

A 1971 New York Times article called Fu Pei-mei “the Julia Child of Chinese cooking,” but King argues that the label doesn’t make sense, given Fu’s worldwide reach.

“Fu Pei-mei was on television a few months before Julia Child’s show The French Chef, and she was well-known by people outside her own country,” King said, adding that the Taiwanese author’s cookbooks became beloved emblems of cultural memory as they traveled in migrants’ suitcases to the United States. “Generally speaking, she was one of the first people to introduce this idea of Chinese culinary regionalism to America.”

Fu embraced the arrival of innovative kitchen tools and modern conveniences, even consulting with food manufacturers as they developed a line of easy-to-prepare ramen noodles. But the one kitchen appliance she really couldn’t embrace was the microwave, King said.

King said that the college students she teaches shared with her that they are learning how to cook from TikTok. What she hopes they glean from Fu’s story — she was an “influencer” in her day — is that she had an “entrepreneurial spirit” and a successful career in a time and place when things were not as easy for women.

King ends Chop Fry Watch Learn with a bar graph from her daughter’s first grade English-Mandarin classroom proclaiming dumplings as the winner in a poll of favorite Chinese dishes. King said she tries to cook with her daughter, now 12, and her son, 9, as much as possible.

“Food is my love language,” she said. “Somebody cooking for you is a powerful act of care.”

By Kim Weaver Spurr ’88

Enjoy a recipe from the book and watch a video of Fu Pei-mei in our FINALE feature.

King’s book has been featured in media outlets including National Public Radio, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Read more books by College faculty and alumni.

Listen to an Institute for the Arts and Humanities podcast with Michelle T. King.


Published in the Fall 2024 issue | Chapter & Verse

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