Yan-kit So (13 July 1933 – 22 December 2001) was a Chinese food historian and cookery expert who lived and worked mainly in

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

since the 1960s.

Career

So became known among a wider public for her commercially successful and critically acclaimed cookbooks, which contributed much to the popularization of

Chinese cooking Chinese cuisine comprises cuisines originating from China, as well as from Chinese people from other parts of the world. Because of the Chinese diaspora and the historical power of the country, Chinese cuisine has profoundly influenced many ...

in Britain. She joined the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery of Alan Davidson in 1981.P. Levy: "Yan-kit So (1933–2001)", ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' (Oxford: OUP
Retrieved 13 July 2019.

Life

Born in

Zhongshan Zhongshan ( zh, c=中山 ), alternately romanized via Cantonese as Chungshan, is a prefecture-level city in the south of the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province, China. As of the 2020 census, the whole city with 4,418,060 inhabitants is n ...

Guangdong province ) means "wide" or "vast", and has been associated with the region since the creation of Guang Prefecture in AD 226. The name "''Guang''" ultimately came from Guangxin ( zh, labels=no, first=t, t= , s=广信), an outpost established in Han dynasty ...

into the family of a tea merchant, Yin Moo So, she grew up in

Hong Kong Hong Kong)., Legally Hong Kong, China in international treaties and organizations. is a special administrative region of China. With 7.5 million residents in a territory, Hong Kong is the fourth most densely populated region in the wor ...

, where she graduated from University with a degree in history, and went on to acquire a

DPhil A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

at the

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a collegiate university, federal Public university, public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The ...

. She was married twice, to a Chinese surgeon, Po Yat Iu, whom she divorced, and then to the American historian Briton Martin Jr, who died of a brain tumour in 1967 and with whom she had a son, Hugo Martin (born 1965). She died in London on 22 December 2001.

Works

*''The Classic Chinese Cookbook'' (1984) *''Wok Cookbook'' (1985) *''Party Eats'' (1988), with Paul Bloomfield *''Classic Food Of China'' (1992)

References

Chinese food writers 1933 births 2001 deaths Food historians 20th-century Hong Kong historians Writers from Zhongshan Historians from Guangdong Chinese women food writers Chinese cookbook writers 20th-century Chinese historians 20th-century Chinese women writers Chinese women historians 20th-century Hong Kong women writers 20th-century Hong Kong writers {{China-historian-stub