Born: 23 August 1899, China
Died: 15 April 1999
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Grace Anna Zia
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40. For more on her story, check out Mayukh Sen’s Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America.
Grace Zia Chu is credited with introducing countless Americans to Chinese cooking and cuisine through her popular books The Pleasures of Chinese Cooking (1962) and Madame Chu’s Chinese Cooking School (1975). Born in Shanghai in 1899, she received a full scholarship to Wellesley College, graduating in 1924 and returning to China to teach. She married Chu Shih-ming, an army officer and government official, in 1928, and was vice president of the Young Women’s Christian Association from 1935 to 1947.
Chu returned to the U.S. in 1941 when her husband was assigned to the Chinese embassy as a military attaché. In her capacity as a political hostess, she became an ambassador for Chinese food. Chu took up permanent residence in the U.S. in the 1950s and began teaching cooking classes in New York City at the China Institute, the Mandarin House Restaurant, and her own apartment. She would continue doing this well into her 80s, but it was her books that brought her teachings far beyond the bounds of the city.
As recounted in The New York Times:
In an era when most Americans believed that chop suey was a classic Chinese dish, Mrs. Chu led her students and readers, step by step, down the complicated byways of Chinese cooking, which, she explained, differed from region to region and, ideally, relied on raw ingredients that did not come from a can. For home cooks bewildered by the unfamiliar ingredients and techniques involved, Mrs. Chu proved to be an ideal guide. Assuming, correctly, that her readers knew precisely nothing about Chinese cuisine, she wrote clearly and simply, tailoring her recipes to the realities of the American kitchen, even if that meant calling for creamed corn in the recipe for chicken velvet corn soup.
It was this understanding of not only her craft, but her audience as well, that made Chu such an effective teacher, whether in person or in writing. At a time when a reviewer of The Pleasures of Chinese Cooking had to explain to readers what a wok was, she opened up a world of delicious food to a hungry nation and brought the previously unfamiliar into American kitchens.