Cooking up a spicy plot with Yunnan as the main ingredient
Even though I'm accustomed to meeting real-life manifestations of friends I've met online, I can still be struck by Webby wonder when someone moored a continent or two away magically materializes three stations down on my subway line.
This time, shortly after I settled in China from Thailand, one of them will be coming through Beijing promoting her groundbreaking cookbook. Cooking South of the Clouds - Recipes and Stories from China's Yunnan Province (Kyle Books) is the first extensive English-language cooking guide to the cuisine of Yunnan.
Georgia Freedman first came to China in 2000, when she spent a summer studying Mandarin at Tsinghua University. Reading the tale of the dutiful scholar's wife who created Crossing the Bridge Rice Noodles soup (guoqiaomixian) made her hungry enough to seek out the authentic article in Kunming, Yunnan.
