‘Bored with Chinese cuisine? Then you are bored with life!’
View(s):It’s likely, Fuchsia Dunlop gets some of her willingness to experiment with food from her parents. Her mother, she has told journalists was “eating goat’s cheese when everyone else thought it was weird and cranky” and her father was into wildly experimental cooking. He would make things like “very architectural cakes with towers and elaborate details. Or a huge standing pork pie, which he made recently. When I was very small, he stuffed four or five different birds inside each other,” Dunlop told a writer from The Gannet.
Today, Dunlop is an award-winning cook and food-writer specialising in Chinese cuisine. Her career trajectory has seen her go from a complete novice to the first-ever foreigner to be accepted into the prestigious Sichuan Culinary Institute in Chengdu. She is the author of five books, including most recently, ‘Land of Fish and Rice: Recipes from the Culinary Heart of China.’ Her first book, ‘Sichuan Cookery’ (2001), won the Jeremy Round Award for best first book; ‘Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet and Sour Memoir of Eating in China’ (2008) won both the Jane Grigson Award in the US, and the Kate Whiteman Award for Food and Travel in the UK.
Her memoir catalogues an English woman’s attempt to immerse herself in Chinese food and Chinese culinary culture. It follows a decade-long journey, and when Dunlop undergoes an apprenticeship at the Sichuanese cooking school, she is the only foreign student in a class of nearly 50 young Chinese men.
Despite any travails, she has emerged with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Chinese cooking few westerners can rival: “The main dividing line in Chinese cuisine is between the wheat-eating north and the rice-eating south. Beyond that, it gets more complicated. The most widespread convention is to talk of four great regional cuisines,” she explained to a journalist from The New York Times.
In her book she also discusses her attempts to enlighten Chinese people she encountered about the pleasures of Western food. “When I lived in Chengdu in the nineteen-nineties, it was rare for people there to have tasted “Western food” of any kind; even now the range available is limited, unless you are enormously rich and living in Beijing or Shanghai,” she said, explaining that “just as many Westerners think of Chinese food as “junky” or “gloopy,” many Chinese people think that “Western food” is “simple” (jiandan) and “monotonous” (dandiao).
Dunlop is a great advocate for culinary experimentation. She sees cooking as “life-enhancing.”“If you can do it, it makes your life and the lives of the people around you so much nicer – even if you only know how to make a nice omelette or scrambled eggs.” Her own skills, of course, are much more considerable and she has become a notable ambassador for Chinese cooking. She told a journalist from the Hong Kong Tattler that “If someone is bored with Chinese cuisine, they are bored with life!” adding that her books are designed to “encourage people to see that Chinese home cooking can be quick, easy, healthy and ethical. So I’ve highlighted vegetable recipes, and tried to show how brilliant Chinese cooks use small amounts of meat, poultry and fermented foods to make cheap everyday ingredients taste scrumptious.”
She was named ‘Food Journalist of the Year’ by the British Guild of Food Writers in 2006 and won the James Beard Award for Food Culture and Travel in 2012.
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