Blending Cultures: A Cookbook Journey

Last year I came across an article in the Gothamist titled, A Taiwanese food crawl in the East Village with NYC writer Cathy Erway. I have of course heard of Cathy Erway and her cookbook and thought to myself, Why haven’t I had her on Talking Taiwan as a guest yet? For those of you who aren’t familiar with Cathy’s work, she is a James Beard Award-winning food writer and author based in New York City. Her cookbooks include The Food of Taiwan: Recipes From the Beautiful Island and Win Son Presents: A Taiwanese American Cookbook.

Her cookbook, The Food of Taiwan which was published in 2015 is the first cookbook from a major U.S. publisher to explore the food culture of Taiwan from home-style dishes to authentic street food. We talked about how publishers rejected the cookbook at first and how it eventually got published.

She also has a Facebook page called The Food of Taiwan, and if you’re a Taiwanese food lover, I highly recommend liking and following it. On the page, Cathy shares news about Taiwanese food like where to get the best Taiwanese food in and out of Taiwan, and new Taiwanese restaurant openings.

Cathy Erway’s journalism has appeared in The New York Times, Food & Wine, Eater, Grub Street, T: The New York Times Style Magazine and more. She is a columnist at TASTE, and received the James Beard Award for Home Cooking journalism in 2019. In 2021, she received the IACP Culinary Award for her column.

 This episode is part of the trailblazing Taiwanese women's series sponsored by NATWA the North America Taiwanese Women's Association, which was founded in 1988. To learn more about NATWA visit their website, www.natwa.com.

Here’s a little preview of what we talked about in this podcast episode:

• How Cathy started off writing a blog called Not Eating Out in New York, which led to her first book, The Art of Eating In

• Cathy’s cookbook The Food of Taiwan

• The article in the Gothamist about Taiwanese restaurants in the East Village

• Cathy’s Facebook page The Food of Taiwan

• How Cathy has had a Google alert set on the term Taiwanese food for 20 years

• How things have changed in the 10 years since The Food of Taiwan was published

• How the owners of Taiwanese restaurants in New York City (Win Son, 886, and Ho Foods) are all friends

• How Yun Hai Taiwanese Pantry has contributed to the interest in Taiwanese cuisine

• How Cathy learned to cook and her parents’ cooking styles

• How Cathy’s family is foodies

• Cathy’s connection to Taiwan

• What went into creating The Food of Taiwan

• How the photography of The Food of Taiwan was an important part of the cookbook

• How The Food of Taiwan got rejected by several publishers

• How The Food of Taiwan is a snapshot of all the foods in Taiwan including home-style foods and street food, up to 2015, the year it was published

• How The Food of Taiwan includes foods that are unique to Taiwan

• How the recipes in The Food of Taiwan suggests substitutions for certain ingredients that might be hard to find

• How Cathy met Josh Ku and Trigg Brown of Win Son

• How Cathy collaborated with Josh Ku and Trigg Brown of Win Son on Win Son Presents a Taiwanese American Cookbook

• How hard it was to convince the editor to publish The Food of Taiwan

• Other Taiwanese cookbooks that have been written by  Clarissa Wei, Frankie Gaw, Tiffy Chen, and George Lee

• How Cathy is working on an article about the frozen dumpling business for Taste

• Topics that Cathy writes about like how tamari is a different product in Japan vs. the U.S.

• Té Company tea house in the West Village, Yumpling restaurant in Long Island City, Ho Food restaurant in the East Village

• Cathy’s favorite Taiwanese dish is sān bēi jī (three cup chicken)

• How Taiwanese breakfast foods are now available at Win Son Bakery and Ho Foods

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