Hi! Welcome to the food glossary for The Duke Who Didn’t.

You might say: Courtney, why do you have a food glossary? The answer is because I love food, a thing you may have noticed if you read The Duke Who Didn’t, and I spent most of my time writing the book experimenting with recipes so I would know how the things I wanted to put in the book tasted and were made.

I am not a food blogger. Sometimes I can manage to make something look pretty, but often I can’t. I’m also... how do I say this... it’s not that I’m a lazy cook, because obviously I spent the entire book making a crapload of food, and I don’t think this qualifies as “lazy.”

I am, however, both wildly impatient and extremely silly, and it shows.

I inherited a grand total of about five Chinese recipes from my mother, none of which are present here. Everything I learned about Chinese cookery (aside from my mom’s contribution, which was “slice everything thinly, no more thinly, argh, why do none of my daughters understand the concept of thin”) I learned as an adult.

The places that I think most influenced these recipes:

The Hakka Cookbook, by Linda Anusasananan. I made so many of these recipes while I was writing this book. I only wished I could have crammed more of them into this book, but alas, I could not.

The Woks of Life. Seriously one of the best Chinese cooking blogs out there—I’ve learned so much from them, and go back to them again and again.

The Omnivore’s Cookbook. Also an amazing Chinese cooking blog, with a lot of comments on modernizing cuisine to make it easier to make for Westerners.

If you want to learn more about Chinese cooking, I highly suggest the above resources!