In one chapter, Grace Young, goes to great length to emphasize the need to cut food properly to achieve a balance in taste. Here is where the book fails to live up to its promise. While the author explains the need to cut food properly, she fails to provide complete descriptions, illustrations and photographs of exactly how the food should be cut. Cutting techniques for Cantonese food may not be a mystery to those who already know the dishes, but for those of us are new to Chinese cooking, they are. While there are some descriptions of how to cut in the recipes, no where are the kind of helpful, explicit details that might be learned by a novice learning French cooking by reading Jacques Pepin or Julia Child.
Pictures dealing with other aspects of preparation are also scarce. The chart identifying food is too small to be of much use. The photographs showing finished dishes are too few and, again, too small to be helpful to a novice looking for clues about a dish's preparation.
