Invitation to a Banquet

May 1, 2023

A James Beard Award--winning expert in Chinese cuisine, Dunlop isn't here to offer recipes. Instead, she uses a menu of 30 dishes from Mapo tofu to drunken crabs to reveal the history, philosophies, and techniques of a cuisine that has linked diet and health for two millennia. Dunlop is the first Westerner to train at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine. Prepub Alert.

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September 1, 2023
An acclaimed chef and author argues that a better understanding of China's food can do much to build cultural bridges. Dunlop has been exploring Chinese cuisine for more than two decades, and she says she is nowhere near the end of the journey. She has written a series of award-winning cookbooks focused on Chinese food, as well as her memoir, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper, and she was the first Westerner to train as a chef at the prestigious Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine. In her latest book, she chronicles her travels around China, framing each chapter with a famous dish. She believes that most Westerners, especially in her native Britain, think of Chinese food as coming in cartons from the local restaurant, but she emphasizes that there is little connection between that and the real cuisine. Many Chinese restaurants in the West have two menus: one where the dishes are modified and simplified for Western tastes and another for Chinese customers (she suggests asking for and ordering from the second one). Genuine Chinese food is defined by precise dicing and a careful balancing of flavors, using top-quality ingredients with medicinal qualities in mind. The range of seasonings is massive and can require a lifetime to learn. Large slabs of meat are not common, and vegetables are often the center of a meal, rather than merely a side. Dunlop describes dishes like Shandong Guota Tofu and Sweet and Sour Yellow River Carp, and she highlights the cultural importance of rice, soy, and cabbage. The resulting narrative will have readers reaching for the chopsticks. Dunlop acknowledges the political tensions between China and the West, but she believes that food "offers the possibility of a different type of relationship and an alternative window into Chinese culture." Dunlop delves into a complex, subtle cuisine with an insider's expertise.

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December 4, 2023
Dunlop (The Food of Sichuan) takes a rich and textured tour through the history of Chinese cuisine, from the mythical tribal leader Suiren’s discovery of fire to the spread of Chinese takeout restaurants around the world. Chapters center on steamed rice, the “sacred grain” first domesticated in the Yangtze River valley in Neolithic times, and so central to Chinese culture that chi fan (“to eat cooked grain”) also means “to have a meal”; mapo tofu, which was created in the north of Chengdu in the late 19th century for workers carrying toasted rapeseed oil to the city’s markets; and “gloriously rich” dongpo pork, which was discovered by an 11th-century servant of the Song dynasty poet Su Dongpo, who misunderstood his master’s cooking instructions and accidentally braised the meat with rice wine instead of serving the two separately (Dunlop segues this anecdote into an intriguing discussion of pork as “lowbrow, perhaps even a little vulgar... pork is what you eat at home, greedily and happily”). Adeptly employing food as a window through which to capture the complexity of Chinese culture, Dunlop stirs in lush and endlessly creative descriptions (song sao yu geng, a fish stew that’s “neither solid nor completely liquid, is a swirling kaleidoscope of colour, like Venetian glass made edible, the flow of the ingredients held motionless by the starch that thickens the broth”). This is sure to whet readers’ appetites.