3 . It was May 1945 when what would become one of America’s most popular home-cooking techniques first entered the English dictionary. In her cookbook, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese, 55-year-old Chinese immigrant (移民) Chao Yang Buwei described a process common in her homeland, where cooks would cut meat and vegetables into small bites and tumble (翻滚) them rapidly together over heat. “The Chinese term for the technique, ch’ao, cannot be accurately translated into English,” Chao complained. For short, she decided, “We shall call it ‘stir-fry.’” The term soon made its way into the American language and has since taken on a life of its own.

Chao came to cooking unexpectedly. A doctor by profession, she gave up her medical career to move to the United States in 1921 after her husband, the famed linguist (语言学家) Chao Yuanren, was offered a job at Harvard. Bored at home and only able to speak a little English, she turned to cooking dishes that reminded her of China: soups with mushrooms and pork flavored with soy sauce.

She eventually agreed when a friend begged her to write a cookbook. Chao’s eldest daughter helped her translate recipes from Chinese to English, before her husband put the finishing touches on the language, often adding phrasing that even Chao recognized as awkward. This stylistic conflict resulted in a cookbook that Chao was “ashamed to have written,” as she declared in an author’s note.

The cookbook succeeded, going into multiple printings by the end of 1945, though critics largely overlooked the anger in Chao’s words. English-language Chinese cookbooks had been published as far back as 1911 in the United States, but Chao’s was the first that refused to westernize Chinese cooking. She may have given America a well-worn phrase, but she knew that some aspects of the immigrant experience resist translation. Chao’s contribution to American food culture should have been enough to make her into headlines, but the New York Times did not even honor her with an obituary (讣告) upon her death. How many other cooking pioneers like Chao, immigrants who didn’t silence their difference in order to gain broad approval, still await rediscovery?

6 . Join Sandra Oddo as she shares a variety of tips and skills for making wine at home using elderflowers and elderberries.

Items	Elderflower Wine Recipe (食谱)	Elderberry Wine Recipe
Ingredients	● Elderflowers (at least one quart); ● 1 gallon of boiling water per quart of flowers; ● 2 to 2-1/2 pounds of sugar per gallon of liquid; ● 2 lemons per gallon, juiced; ● 1 packet of dry wine yeast (酵母) per 5 gallons of liquid.	● Elderberries (at least 2 gallons); ● 1 gallon of boiling water per 2 gallons of berries; ● 3-1/2 to 4 pounds of sugar per gallon of boiled-down liquid; ● 1 packet of dry wine yeast per 5 gallons of liquid.
Instructions	● Cut a quart of flowers from the stems; ● Pour a gallon of boiling water over the flowers; ● Let the tea soak three or four days with the flowers pressed down under the liquid (they turn brown and ruin the color of the drink if they’re left in the air); ● Strain off the fluid and heat some of it to dissolve 2 to 2-1/2 pounds of sugar per gallon; ● Add the juice of 2 lemons per gallon along with yeast; ● Let the mixture work in a container with an air lock.	● Pick nice fat berries about two days ahead, remove them from the stems and smash up the fruit: ● Pour boiling water over the mixture, soaking for about a week; ● Keep the container covered with a towel to protect the working “must” from dust and the odd yeast floating around in the air; ● Strain off and save the juice and mix 3-1/2 to 4 pounds of sugar into each gallon of the liquid.

9 . Tomorrow’s menus could feature items prepared with complex cooking techniques and presentation — all at the push of a button. Columbia University mechanical engineers have designed a 3 - D printer that can produce and cook dishes at the same time with details at the millimeter scale.

The design combines a multiwavelength laser (激光) cooker, roughly the size of five smart phones piled together, with a microwave - oven - sized food printer. The system uses various light wavelengths to cook in different ways: a short - waved blue laser goes deep inside meat, for example, while infrared beams (红外线光束) brown the surface. As the device’s robotic arm places fine layers of chicken puree (酱, 糊), a high - powered beam moves over them and cooks the meat — with literally laser - focused precision. Thus, users can achieve perfect results — say, a machine - made burger that varies between rare and well done in a checkerboard pattern.

“It gives you a lot more control and customization,” says Jonathan Blutinger, lead author of the paper and a digital - cooking researcher at Columbia. The researchers tested only chicken for this study, but the system can work with other foods as well.

Beyond applying diverse materials and presentation patterns, this type of software - controlled setup could someday scan a QR code to automatically prepare dishes tailored to individual eating habits and dietary restrictions, Blutinger says.

The new technology is “astonishing”, says Megan Ross, a food scientist who studies 3 - D printing at Ireland’s University College Cork. Ross notes that the design is still at a beginning stage and that many technical challenges remain, such as preventing cross pollution between layers of raw and cooked meat. Still, Ross is impressed by the device’s ability to produce foods outside the field of conventional cooking. “Is this going to be sold in shops everywhere in the next few years? No,” she says. “But everyone has to start somewhere.”