Nellie C. (Nellie Choy) Wong

Born in Guangzhou in 1893, Nellie Choy Wong became a pioneer on two fronts: she is remembered as the first Chinese woman to become a pharmacist in America and the first Chinese woman to publish a cookbook in English. She studied in the United States and built a career that moved between science, education, and food writing.

Her best-known book, Chinese Recipes (1927), presented Chinese cooking in a clear, usable way for English-speaking home cooks. A later expanded edition, Chinese Dishes for Foreign Homes, continued that effort, showing how seriously she took the idea of making Chinese food better understood beyond Chinese communities.

What makes her especially interesting is how many worlds she connected at once. Through her professional training and her writing, she stood at the meeting point of Chinese and American life, and her books now offer a rare glimpse of how Chinese cuisine was introduced to a wider audience in the early twentieth century.