Wu's Cookbook was authored by a woman surnamed Wu who lived in Jinhua about 800 years ago in the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279). In traditional Chinese culture, women were housekeepers and had a say in family affairs. There were many educated women in the Southern Song Dynasty. They wrote poems and they wrote books and many of them were excellent cooks. According to ancient books, a nun in the Southern Song made a cold dish composed of various ingredients and the cold dish was made into a replica of a painting by Wang Wei, a famed Tang poet. The stunt dish was considered a masterpiece and the nun’s name Fanzheng comes down in history. Sister-in-Law Song’s Fish Soup, an 800-year-old delicacy in Hangzhou cuisine, still enjoys its legendary popularity today. Tourists come to Hangzhou and one of the must-eat local delicacies is this soup. The recipe was invented by a woman.  is a perfect example of what these women of the Southern Song accomplished.

There is little known about this wonder woman surnamed Wu. In the 1980s, someone assumed she was from Pujiang, a county in Jinhua in central Zhejiang Province. The woman was by no means a chef in the imperial kitchen. Nor was she a hired chef working at a governor’s residence. She was a woman of an ordinary house. Her recipe book isn’t the earliest cookbook in history. Cui Hao, a scholar in the Northern Wei (386-534), wrote a cookbook that recorded his mother’s recipes.  is the first of its kind written by a woman in Chinese history. It looks like a copy of a notebook without a foreword or afterword. One could imagine how the book was written. The cook herself didn’t want to write such a cookbook. She just worked in the kitchen. Then gradually she became well known in her husband’s family and then the fame spread among relatives and friends. Then one day someone suggested these recipes should be written out. Gradually, recipes accumulated and a book took form. Then copies were made and loved and passed on. And now we know there was such a wonderful woman who cooked and created so many recipes about 800 years ago in Jinhua.

Wu's Cookbook has about 70 recipes in three categories: meat and fish, vegetables, and desserts. More than 10 cooking and processing methods are recorded. All the recipes were common dishes back then.

The cookbook is pragmatic, straightforward, and useful. Instructions in the recipes are accurate and clear and simple. The names of these recipes are straightforward. The composition of these recipe names follows two essential rules: how a dish is cooked and what is in the dish. For example, steamed hilsa herring, or wine-pickled eggplant.  is written in a style in sharp contrast with some cookbooks by scholar foodies in the Southern Song Dynasty. Some highly educated gourmets loved to give highly fancy names to recipes. Reading the names of these recipes, a reader of today would often have the slightest idea of what the dish is and how it is cooked.

Wu's Cookbook is more than a kitchen guide for a chef. The historical record gives people of today a glimpse into a lifestyle in a rural county capital about 800 years ago. From the book, we can know that some cooking skills are very much alive today. For example, chefs in Zhejiang steam hilsa herring without removing scales, and many women in Pujiang are skillful cooks who process meat and fish in salt or soybean sauce in the traditional ways recorded in.