Early Look: 'Cheese Potstickers', a rare recipe
Added 2025-09-27 00:16:47 +0000 UTCSo... we have an increasingly problematic collection of old Chinese cookbooks.
The vast majority of them are from 70s, 80s, and 90s. And flipping through them, it really impresses on you just how different Chinese food was back then. While there's certainly a hunk of the classic dishes that we know and love... there's also a whole lot that's different, or that's missing. In our veneration of tradition, sometimes we forget just how dynamic Chinese cuisine is.
And so in the last year or so we've gotten a real kick out of sharing the older versions of classic dishes like Mapo Tofu or Chongqing Hotpot. But there's also something else that you see again and again, buried in those pages: a whole bunch of random dishes that you've never heard of before.
This is one of those dishes - 'Cheese Potstickers'. It was (from what we can tell) an old school Yunnan banquet dish, and we found recreating the recipe surprisingly easy. It's quite delicious too, and super internationally replicable - it's even a new member in our ongoing "western supermarket club" collection of recipe.
If you guys enjoy these random dives into our old cookbook collection, we'd love to make some more rare dishes :)
Comments
In fairness, all of those dishes with the exception of the banana meatball seem quite delicious. The Catholic Church chicken is quite similar to Koushuiji, and the Italian chicken is deep fried and steamed, then laid over deep fried noodles. Re the enthusiasm for banana, if I had to guess, I think people just see new ingredients available to them and get excited. The winners get passed down and we scratch our head at the stuff that didn’t. In 30 years it wouldn’t surprise me if people look back at the avocado creations of the 00s in a similar light.
Stephanie Li and Chris Thomas
2025-09-27 02:01:28 +0000 UTCOkay, that particular recipe looks odd, but still quite appetizing. I'd totally try that. Buuuut some of those other recipes you skimmed over at the beginning made me think, lolol, mid-20th-century wtf-horror-food happened in China just like in the US. But that's also pretty intriguing, isn't it? Two very different cultures which were going through very different moments in their social/political/economic histories, yet both came up with some spiritually-similar, dubious culinary innovations during that time period. (Or maybe it's just the ghastly '60s/'70s color-print look which is creating an illusion of connection.) Have you two, or y'all fellow patrons, spotted that sort of thing occurring in other cuisines, during those decades?
Adrian Slider
2025-09-27 01:53:24 +0000 UTC
