Chinese cookbooks

Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper

Fuchsia Dunlop, Ebury Press, £8.99

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Author Fuchsia Dunlop is a young Englishwoman who bridges East and West. She is already the leading writer on Chinese food in the English language, and her previous books – ‘Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook’, and especially ‘Sichuan Cookery’ – have helped rank her as one of the UK’s top Chinese food experts.

But this latest book is not an ode to China’s regional cooking – it’s the story of how Dunlop fell in love with China, and illuminates the complexities of both Chinese food and Chinese culture.

Although not unique, Dunlop’s story is nevertheless very unusual, and the early chapters detail how she ended up living in Chengdu in the south-western province of Sichuan, learning Mandarin, and training to be a chef in the city’s chef training college – she became the first westerner to successfully graduate.

But the real journey is allowing herself to eat and think like a Chinese person, and discard her Western prejudices and squeamishness about the very different Chinese approach to food. We travel with her as she learns to relish eating roasted rabbit heads, a late-night snack in Chengdu; as she adjusts to the appreciation of gristly and rubbery textures; and to the unsentimental treatment of animals that in the West we consider cruel.

As well as the apparent horrors of Chinese food, the delights are beautifully described too, from the sublime street dishes of Chengdu in the mid-1990s to the banquets held in Dunlop’s honour as her fame grew.

However, Dunlop’s love affair with China is not blinkered – we travel with her as she discovers bureaucracy and corruption, xenophobia, the senseless destruction of historic architecture, the terrors of the Cultural Revolution, and China’s huge and growing pollution problem. Much more than just a book that helps explain Chinese food (which it does par excellence), this book is also a brilliant travelogue.

Guy Dimond, Time Out London Issue 1963: April  2-8 2008

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Sichuan Cookery

Fuchsia Dunlop, Michael Joseph, £16.99

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You might have read Fuchsia Dunlop’s riveting account of her transition from Chinese-speaking lao wai (foreigner) to the first-ever foreign chef enrolled on a professional cookery course in Chengdu.

You may also have seen her reviews of Chinese restaurants in Time Out magazine, and in the Time Out Eating & Drinking Guide – she writes the Chinese chapter almost singlehandedly. Two years before writing this book, she downsized her job as a journalist at the BBC World Service to write this cookery book.

It’s a Herculean labour but also a work of love, immediately apparent in the evocative descriptions of fishes and places. It is also one of the very few really good books on Chinese cookery, and virtually the only one specialising in the sophisticated and diverse cooking of Sichuan.

The depth of knowledge is impressive, but it’s no academic text: besides the essential context and principles of Sichuan cookery, there are scores of recipes which (with the help of the right stockists, listed at the back with tips) can be prepared in a London kitchen. It’s destined to be a classic, and is already one of the essential texts written in the English language (the others are by Yan Kit-So, in case you’re wondering).

Time Out London Issue 1610: June 27- July 4 2001

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