American Piper Stremmel collects recipes from chefs in Shanghai, where she lived for more than two years, to come up with the book Shanghai Chefs: A Cookbook. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Stremmel says she loves Mexican food, having grown up in California, and Turley "let me go back and see how he makes the tacos, the special way he puts the cheese on the tortilla, etc. So that's a favorite in the book, too."

Aren't they all?

"I've always really loved food," says the slim author, who notes both that she eagerly tried sea cucumber in China and can't live without cheese anywhere.

"I think that came to a head in China, which for me was the most enjoyable place to love food. I had been living in London before, and LA before that. Those are big food cities, full of people talking about food and pawing through coffee-table books full of appetizing dishes."

In China there are plenty of blogs and magazines about food, she says, but there didn't seem to be the sort of book that lovingly embraced the food scene.

In the book's foreward, Baoism chef-owner Jenny Gao salutes the author for delivering not only "a masterfully crafted cookbook", almost evenly split between Chinese and Western chefs, but a celebration of a food city that they both love.