Lessons In Chinese cookery in Tokyo conducted by American nuns may seem a little farfetched, but there's good reason for it. When Sister Regia and I first went to China in 1930 as missionaries at the Catholic University of Peking and later in Kaifeng, Honan Province, we learned to enjoy the tastinness and infinite variety of Chinese cooking. Of course we had to -- Western-style cooking wasn't generally available. When Ta Shih Fu, our cook, would prepare a meal, we were right at his heels, watching everything he did and sometimes stopping him in mid-swing to measure exactly how much soy sauce or how many bamboo shoots he put into the dish. Little did we know that our interest would some day provide our daily bread and (sometimes) a little butter!
Suddenly World War II was upon us, and within two hours after the aftack on Pearl Harbor the Japanese army (already in Kaifeng) had rounded us up in a civilian concentration camp for the duration. Fancy cooking was out, but we could always dream about Chinese food. After the war we returned to Kaifeng and enjoyed once more our favorite dishes. Then came the Communists, pushing us fmm Kaifeng to Shanghai and finally to Formosa. In 1950 the American Consul thought Formosa might become too dangerous, so we shipped off once more, joined by Sister M. Ursuline, who had been with us in China since 1936. This time we came to Japan. In Tokyo we had literally nothing, but with the kindness of the Very Reverend Hildebrand Yaiser, O.S.B., and the ecouragement of Hazel Zimmerman, Marie Richards, and Agatha Jones, we thought we might eke out an existence by teaching our friends in Japan what we had learned from Ta Shih Fu. This was a natural decision, since Sister Regia had always been interested in cooking and I had received an M.S. in Home Economics from the University of Minnesota in 1926 and taught home economics in high school and college in the United States for fifteen years before going to China. Our school has grown by leaps and bounds from six students a week to 150 a week.
We want to express our unbounded gratitude to those first few students who stood by loyally, even when many times they didn't get enough to eat. Without them our school would never have developed. And we want to thank Helen S. Agoa for helping us prepare this book.
Our recipes, most of which we use in our school, have been selected with the availability of ingredients in mind, and you should be able to prepare them in any part of the Western world. They are chiefly from northern China and are the type used in good Chinese homes, not necessarity in restaurants. Good luck with them!
Sister M. Francetta, O.S.G.
Tokyo, Japan
March 1956