This recipe is brought to you by the SAVEUR Cookbook Club, our passionate community of food-loving readers from around the globe celebrating our favorite authors and recipes. Join us as we cook through a new book every month, and share your food pics and vids on social media with the hashtags #SAVEURCookbookClub and #EatTheWorld.
“Here in Taiwan, we mind our own business.” Thus begins Clarissa Wei’s debut cookbook, Made in Taiwan. It’s not the most expected way to start a cookbook, but it’s Wei’s way of staking a claim to her nation’s culinary and cultural self-determination. While many of the dishes enjoyed in Taiwan have Chinese roots, here Wei reclaims and reframes the Taiwanese culinary story as one that thrives independently of Chinese history and governance.
Wei’s parents were raised in Taiwan in the 1960s, while the island was governed via martial law by the Nationalist Chinese government, and at a time when, as Wei notes, schoolchildren were “taught more about the history of China than the history of their own people.” Yet Taiwan was considered the ideal place to sample regional Chinese cuisine at the time, both because of what the ruling political elite consumed and the many traditions and techniques brought by recent immigrants to the nation. For though the island may be relatively small, it has produced some of the world’s most extraordinary dishes—the proliferation of xiao long bao soup dumplings, made world-famous by Taiwanese vendors, “crystal” meatballs stuffed with pork and
