Whether your first taste of Chinese food was sweet and sour pork with pineapple or your grandmother's home-made jook, 'Banquet' offers the best of both worlds. Like dim sum, it will touch the heart - and arouse the taste buds.
A lip-smacking celebration of Chinese food in Australia over the past 180 years, from early attempts to please the timid palates of the meat-and-potatoes brigade to the ongoing influences in the menus of leading chefs like Neil Perry and Cheong Liew.
Peppered with recipes and anecdotes from both sides of the Australian-Chinese connection, it offers a tantalising taste of both the exotic and the fondly familiar - the joys of 100-year-old eggs and stir-fried silkworms, as well as home remedies and how to feed hungry ghosts.
More fun than a social history and much more than a recipe book, 'Banquet' offers all the sweetness, bitterness, mystery and spice of the best Chinese meal.
