‘The English Person With a Chinese Stomach’: How Fuchsia Dunlop Became a Sichuan Food Hero

Every autumn in the mid-00s, when I lived in China, my friend Scarlett Li would invite me to Shanghai to eat hairy crab. Named for the spiky fur on their legs and claws, the crabs are said to have the best flavour during the ninth month of the lunar calendar. They’re steamed and served whole, with a dip of rice vinegar spiked with ginger. The most prized specimens come from Yangcheng Lake near Suzhou, which is not far from Scarlett’s home town of Wuxi. She had moved to Hong Kong as a child, attended high school and college in Australia, and returned to China to pursue a career as an entrepreneur. Despite her years abroad, she remained Chinese through and through – and eating hairy crab with her, I became Chinese, too.

Beginning in the Tang dynasty in the seventh century, crabs were harvested from the lakes and estuaries of the Yangtze delta and sent as tribute to the imperial court. Twelfth-century Hangzhou had specialised crab markets and dedicated crab restaurants. “I have lusted after crabs all my life,” wrote the 17th-century playwright Li Yu. “From the first day of the crab season until the last day they are sold, I … do not let a single evening pass without eating them …. Dear crab, dear crab, you and I, are we to be lifelong companions?”

A hairy crab festival in Huai’an, Jiangsu province, in October. Photograph: VCG/Getty

In Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food, Fuchsia Dunlop traces the history of this remarkable cuisine through 30 dishes, from slow-braised pork belly to steamed rice. (There are 10 mentions of hairy crab – not to be confused with crab that’s roasted, baked, shredded, stuffed into soup dumplings or steamed buns, or marinated in liquor and served raw in a dish called drunken crab, which gets its own chapter.) Dunlop, who is British, explores the staggering ingenuity and range of a cuisine that she feels has not won the respect it deserves in the world of fine dining: “Only the Chinese have placed [cooking] at the very core of their identity. For the ancient Chinese, the transformation of raw ingredients through cooking marked the boundary not only between humans and their savage ancestors, but between the people of the civilised world (that is, China and its antecedent states) and the barbarians who lived around its edges.”

The result is a gastronomy that is unparalleled for its diversity, sophistication, subtlety and “sheer deliciousness”. Many supposedly modern ideas about eating, Dunlop points out, have been accepted in China for centuries. Consuming the freshest meat, fish and produce, local and in season, has been important since the earliest dynasties. “Certainly to have a fresh fish and to cause it to become unfresh is a terrible act,” wrote Yuan Mei, an 18th-century gourmet and poet. Educated gentlemen through the ages have searched obsessively for the freshest bamboo shoots, the finest vinegar, or the perfect bowl of congee. (It tastes best, according to one connoisseur, when made with rainwater in early spring.) Ingredients should be cooked in small quantities using refined methods that reveal their benwei, or “root flavours”.

The passage of seasons was marked by the fruits and vegetables available in the markets, starting with apricots and cherries in early summer, followed by peaches and melons, then chestnuts, grapes and oranges at the mid-autumn festival and goose pears and quinces at the onset of winter. Everyone knew that the best handmade tofu came from Xiba in Sichuan, just as Nanjing was the place for salted duck, Pixian for chilli bean paste, and the hills around Hangzhou for the most delicate leaves of dragon well green tea. “Concern for the provenance and terroir of ingredients, so important to modern western gourmets, was not the invention of the French or Californians, but has been a preoccupation in China for more than 2,000 years,” Dunlop writes. The Chinese also pioneered imitation meat, free-range chickens, molecular gastronomy, sushi, tofu, soy sauce, ramen and restaurants, which were fashionable gathering places in 12th-century Kaifeng, six centuries before they first appeared in Paris.

Pleasure in eating has always been paired with the need for restraint, and classical texts warned against overindulgence. “Even if there is plenty of meat, [a gentleman] should not eat more meat than rice,” counselled Confucius in the Analects. The ideal has always been to achieve moderation and balance – yin and yang, heating and cooling ingredients, main dishes and rice – in order to nourish the body while living in harmony with nature. (...)

The seductive flavours of China’s local specialities have defined Dunlop’s career. Educated at the University of Cambridge, she first went to live in China in 1994, on a one-year scholarship at Sichuan University in Chengdu to study the government’s policy toward ethnic minorities. She was fortunate to have been sent to a place with one of China’s most distinctive cuisines and found herself taking notes on the food. She quit her studies and enrolled at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine as one of its first foreign students. Over the past three decades she has built a career explaining Chinese cooking to western readers, initially focusing on Sichuan and then expanding to other regions.

More surprisingly, Dunlop has gained a large following by explaining Chinese food to the Chinese. Her memoir Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper sold about 200,000 copies when it came out in China in 2018. Invitation to a Banquet has sold 50,000 copies since its publication there last year, and two of her cookbooks have also done well. Among Chinese food lovers and chefs, Dunlop is praised for her deep understanding of the country’s culinary history. She’s known, like a celebrity, by her first name: “Fu Xia” in Chinese.

How exactly did a waiguoren – a Cambridge-educated white woman who grew up 5,000 miles away – become accepted as an authority on matters so important to the Chinese? Amid China’s rapid transition to a modern industrialised nation, traditional ways of eating and living are disappearing. It has fallen to Dunlop, an outsider, to study the history, to sift through the tradition, and to taste the dishes as if for the first time. Along the way, she has become the voice of a more authentic past. “It kind of shames us, because it’s our own culture,” He Yujia, her Chinese translator, told me. “She helps us rediscover what we’ve neglected for too long.” (...)

Of course, Dunlop’s foreignness also sets her apart. In the extensive coverage of her work and life in the Chinese media, she is “the Cambridge graduate who came to China to cook”, “the English person with a Chinese stomach”, “the foreigner who understands Chinese food best”. “She lends legitimacy to Chinese culture and Chinese cooking at a time when Chinese people really need that affirmation,” Tzui Chuang, a Taiwanese-American food writer, told me.

One of Dunlop’s goals is to rescue Chinese food from its reputation in the west as “popular, but … cheap, low-status and junky”. As she explains in Invitation to a Banquet, the earliest Chinese restaurateurs abroad – beginning with those who went to California during the Gold Rush in the 1840s – were uneducated labourers with no culinary training. The dishes that they made, like deep-fried wontons and sweet-and-sour everything, were nothing like the sophisticated cuisine back home. (...)

In the three decades since Dunlop first went to China, the country’s food system has also been transformed. Western fast food restaurants arrived, followed by supermarket chains and megamarkets such as Carrefour and Walmart, all of which led to increased consumption of western-style processed and packaged foods, saturated fats and sugary beverages. “Just like much of the US, it was becoming easier for Chinese urban consumers to buy out-of-season fruit from thousands of miles away than it was to get fresh produce from the farm just outside town,” writes Thomas David DuBois in China in Seven Banquets, a history of Chinese food that gives a good picture of contemporary developments.

A generation ago most Chinese people knew how to cook; in some parts of the country, including Sichuan, it was common for men to be the primary cooks in the family. But rising living standards and a hyper-competitive work culture have changed that. Many Chinese in their 20s and 30s don’t know how to cook or are too busy to do so. According to recent surveys, more than half the population now eats most of its meals outside the home or relies on food delivery services, which have become ubiquitous over the past decade.

Many Chinese are losing touch with the tradition of healthy eating that Dunlop so earnestly celebrates. Consumption of whole grains, legumes and vegetables is in steep decline. According to a 2021 article in the journal Public Health Nutrition, the Chinese now get 30% of their calories from animal products and 29% from industrially processed foods. In 1990, the figures were 9.5% and 1.5%, respectively. Obesity has increased fivefold; the Chinese suffer increasingly from the chronic ailments, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease, that afflict so many millions in the developed world.

by Leslie T. Chang, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: VGC/Getty Images/Lai Wu

[ed. An expert's expert. If you don't have any of her cookbooks you really should find a few (they'd make great Christmas gifts).]