“Be adventuresome—cook Chinese!”
So concludes the foreword of St. Mark’s Treasured Chinese Recipes, a spiral-bound yellow book that has been published for decades by St. Mark’s United Methodist Church in Stockton.
For more than 50 years, the humble volume — better known as the Stockton Cookbook, or just “the yellow book” — has been a staple in Cantonese households across California, and even the country.
“Everybody had this cookbook on their shelves,” said Geoffrey Why, a longtime Stockton Cookbook devotee from the Bay Area who lives in Massachusetts.
It began, like many church cookbooks do, as a way to fundraise. But since its first publication in 1966, it has had outsized influence. As one of the earliest cookbooks to lay out the rich milieu of Cantonese cuisine for a broader American public, it has become something of a foundational text for many Chinese households, particularly in the Bay Area.
The story of the Stockton Cookbook, now so integral to a community of hundreds, if not thousands, starts with the stories of the women who served their church, and the labor of love that helped define Cantonese home cooking in America.
In the 1960s, St. Mark’s United Methodist Church was one of the main cultural hubs for Stockton’s Chinese community.
“All of my aunts and uncles, including my parents, we all went to this church,” Rachelle Chong, a Clinton-era FCC commissioner who lives in San Francisco, told Gazetteer SF as she thumbed through her copy of the cookbook in her West Portal office.
The church — which sits on the corner of East Clay Street and South San Joaquin Street — had a diverse congregation, serving the city’s Black, white, and Filipino communities in addition to its robust Chinese population.
One of the church’s most prominent members was Blanche Ah Tye. Her mother, Rose, was considered the church’s matriarch. Blanche, Chong’s aunt, was a part of the church’s Women's Society of Christian Service, a group that Chong and her cousins lovingly referred to as the Mother’s Club.
Every so often, the church would host festivals, and the Women’s Society cooked up a smorgasbord of crowd-pleasing Cantonese food — chow mein, black bean chicken, egg rolls, and char siu, along with other American festival staples. The event was a perennial hit.
“Everybody loved this festival because the food was so good,” Chong said. “And it was cheap. You could come and get a whole plate for like five bucks.”
Whether it was because of these festivals, or just out of a spirit of generosity, the women wanted to share their recipes. As with most home cooking, their recipes were honed over years, and passed along informally. Translating instinct and muscle memory into cups and tablespoons is a tall order for anyone, let alone a group of home cooks.
But at some point, the church needed funds, and so the idea of a church cookbook was born.
The Women’s Society got to work (and put their families to work, too). Evelyn Wong, another well-known church member, took on the role as the chief writer and editor of the cookbook, aided by Blanche as her deputy, along with an army of parishioners, friends, and family members.
Over the course of two years, church members developed and shared traditional recipes that Evelyn compiled and edited.
The way that Gordon Ah Tye, Blanche’s son, recalled it, she was the “creative” mastermind of the book’s contents.
“Auntie Evelyn just had a way with words,” Gordon explained. “You know, how some people can just explain something and then people get it. Well, she had a way with words that she edited many of the recipes and ways that were just extremely understandable for people.”
But Evelyn literally put the words on the page, too: She hand-typed the stencils used to mimeograph the pages, a messy and laborious task. Each sheet of paper was mimeographed front-and-back.
“They would send out groups of 10 to 15 pages to different members of the church to collate the pages,” Gordon said. “There were no numbers on the pages; my mom just knew what the order was.”
Production was primarily inside a church gym kitchen, and in family homes and garages; the task of assembling the books fell largely to members of the church. All the kids had memories attached to the process: Blanche would lay out the pages in order on card tables in the garage, and press all the kids in the family into service, Chong remembered. Evelyn’s daughter, Valerie Wong Garrett, recalled assembling the pages of the original cookbooks “on a series of ironing boards” at the age of nine.
Once the books were printed and collated, Blanche’s husband, Edward, hand-punched the printed pages after he got home from his day job as a mechanic. Gordon remembered hearing the repetitive sound of the hole-puncher late into the night, calling his parents “the workhorses in putting the final product together.”
The final product contained hundreds of Chinese recipes and a handful of Western ones, in addition to numerous pages on Cantonese cooking techniques and ingredients.
The first run of 150 books was published in 1966. It was a hit: They sold out quickly, prompting two more publishing runs by the end of the decade. Later editions would nix the Western recipes to focus entirely on Chinese cooking, and included an index. The book eventually totaled 451 Cantonese recipes.
“It made a lot of money for the church and I think it was probably their primary revenue generator,” Gordon said.
As the copies spread beyond the immediate community of the church, so did the lore surrounding it.
Blanche received dozens of thank you notes after the cookbook was published.
“Someone…would send back a thank you note asking to order, you know, 10 more,” Gordon said.
One woman, he recalled, credited the cookbook with saving her marriage to her Chinese husband.
“‘I'm Caucasian and I didn't know the first thing about how to cook Chinese food, but your book and the way that it explained things, I could understand,’” he recalled the letter saying. “And so I started to be able to cook good Chinese food and it saved my marriage because then I could cook what my husband preferred.”
The ease with which the Stockton Cookbook explained Cantonese cooking was key to its popularity. A major part of the book is devoted to cooking techniques, such as stir-frying, steaming, proper wok use and seasoning, key kitchen ingredients, and substitutions to account for local availability. (Vodka, for example, is listed as a good substitute for the “difficult to obtain” white rice wine.) Many recipe names and ingredients are written in pinyin so that even non-Chinese people could say use those names at their local markets. Some recipes even have multiple iterations submitted by different home cooks, allowing readers to pick whichever one fit their tastes best.
At a time when homestyle Chinese cuisine was still at the fringes of American culture, this was revolutionary.
“There's a lot of cookbooks that have just recipes but this had unique Cantonese techniques at a time when there were not many people teaching that,” said Rachelle, Blanche’s niece.
The book’s spread was largely by word-of-mouth. Whenever someone from their community flew the coop — going off to college or getting married — they were given a copy of the cookbook. A lot of people bought copies for their loved ones after buying copies for themselves. As the circle grew, St. Mark’s started shipping copies of the book nationwide. Blanche was in charge of mailing copies.
“She felt very proud because she kind of lived this book,” Gordon said of his mother. “It became more than just making money for the church.”
As Stockton natives moved north, the book made significant inroads in the Bay Area.
“Every person I know in NorCal who is Chinese, they all know,” Rochelle said. “When I say I'm from Stockton, they go, ‘Oh, did you go to St. Mark's Church? And I say yeah. They're like, ‘oh so you know all about the yellow book.’ That's the first thing they want to ask me about.”
Geoffrey, the Santa Clara native and former Massachusetts state official, told Gazetteer that his mother’s entire community in the Bay Area had the book on their shelves, many annotated to suit their family’s personal tastes. The book was both a gateway and a reminder of the richness of Cantonese home cooking.
“Aunties — other women, peers of my mom — they all had this cookbook,” he said. They had other cookbooks, but there weren’t a lot of Chinese cookbooks that met them where they cooked. This cookbook spoke to them.”
When he got married in 1992, he and his wife received a copy of the book as a wedding present.
The book’s early contributors have since passed. Evelyn Wong died at 86 in 2006; Blanche Ah Tye died in 2018, at the age of 98. Blanche packaged copies of the book for shipment until a few days before she passed, Gordon recalled.
The book remains largely unchanged, though it’s been professionally printed since 1996. The church still sells copies of the book by email or mail order; Blanche’s eldest daughter, Judy Hong, is now in charge of mailing orders.
Glossier cookbooks have followed, authentic cuisine from all regions of China has entered the mainstream, and Google has become the primary way home cooks find recipes.
But, instead of killing off the yellow book, the internet has kept it alive. It’s been referenced in Facebook group comments and blog posts, often mentioned with reverence. A nearly-complete copy of the book (with a red cover) is available to read on the Internet Archive, including a few annotations from the book’s original owner.
For newcomers and true believers alike, the book holds weight as a piece of history.
“It time-travels me back to California,” Geoffrey told Gazetteer. “When I read the recipes, I’m in 1960s Stockton — or 1960s South Bay. I can see the dishes now, I can see the cover, I can see everything.”