Invitation to a Banquet by Fuchsia Dunlop review — Chinese food revealed
The food writer Fuchsia Dunlop grew up in 1970s Britain believing that “Chinese food” meant deep-fried battered pork balls with a bright red syrup of sweet-and-sour sauce. A “Chinese” takeaway of egg-fried rice, spring rolls and chicken with tinned bamboo shoots was a rare treat. It was only years later, when Dunlop went to live in China as a student, that she saw that these takeaways — created by immigrant chefs to appeal to British palates — were “hardly Chinese food at all”.
All around the world Chinese food is both adored and almost completely misunderstood. If we knew the true greatness of China’s many cuisines we would adore it even more. That, in a nutshell — or in a grain of rice — is the theme of this wonderful book. Dunlop was the first westerner to study at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine in the 1990s and in the years since has published a number of excellent cookbooks on different regions of China. Invitation to a Banquet is something different: a brilliantly informative appreciation of Chinese food past and present, told through a series of essential ingredients and dishes, from soybeans to seafood, from noodles to dumplings. Dunlop argues that “bastardised” versions of Chinese food have blinded us to the real thing.
Consider “stir-fry”. When British people speak of stir-frying something, as Dunlop writes, they often use the term lightly “as if it were just a matter of flinging some ingredients into a wok”. Yet stir-frying is not a single way of cooking, but a whole series of methods that include chao xiang (to “sizzle aromatics in oil until they smell delicious”), liu (“pre-cooking pieces of food in oil or water and then marrying them with a sauce that has been separately made in the wok”) and bao (to “explode”, a term used for cooking over the highest heat for a short period of time). Dunlop argues that wok cookery is “the most fiendishly challenging of all Chinese and perhaps global cooking techniques”. When a hollandaise sauce doesn’t taste quite right, a French chef has a chance to adjust it with a little extra lemon here or salt there. But a stir-fry, like Chinese calligraphy, “must be executed perfectly the first time” because the seasoning comes from the heat itself.
The subtle skills required by wok cookery partly explain why it now plays a smaller part than it used to in the globalised versions of “Chinese food” in other countries. All around the world Chinese restaurants are moving towards hotpot, noodles and dumplings (aka dim sum) and away from traditional wok-cooked dishes. Dunlop refers to this phenomenon as the “hotpotisation” of Chinese cuisine.
Opening a hotpot restaurant is cheap and easy. All you need is a big pan of “master broth” and then the customers conveniently cook their own food. Dim sum, likewise, can be prepared in advance and steamed to order. By contrast, Dunlop explains, wok cookery is a high-risk business. “A dim sum chef may pause for a moment and the heavens won’t fall. If a stir-fry chef does the same: catastrophe.”
Another area in which Chinese cuisine is far more complex than most western cuisines is in the realm of texture. One of the most enjoyable chapters is called Tongue and Teeth and concerns the pleasure that Chinese people take in “mouthfeels” that many westerners consider slightly disgusting. In Cantonese it is not an insult to call a food slimy (saan). Rather, this is a much-loved quality to be found in taro, okra and mallows, among other foods. Dunlop explains that there are also multiple terms for prized textures in China that have no real equivalent in English, such as xinen, which she translates as “delicately tender and fine-textured”, the texture to be found in silken tofu and crème caramel, but also in chicken testicles.
Despite the deep sophistication and artistry of Chinese cooking, Dunlop notes that the status of its food in other countries has often been “cheap, low-status and junky”. She attributes some of this to the fact that in the UK and US the first waves of immigrants from China arrived mainly from the Cantonese south, and so never reflected the full range of Chinese flavours, such as the spiciness of central China (Sichuan and Hunan) or the lightness of the food of eastern China. Another reason, she says, is simply “crass racial prejudice”.
Stir-frying is not a single way of cooking, but a whole series of methods
If the West were not so blinded by its own sense of superiority, Dunlop suggests, we might have noticed that many phenomena assumed to be European (such as pasta) had been perfected in China long before. Occasionally Dunlop’s advocacy for Chinese food can feel one-sided. She persuasively explains that the traditional Chinese sense of balance at the table has taught her “how to eat simultaneously for health and happiness”, but does not discuss the fact that modern China has seen rapid increases in obesity and heart disease, fuelled by junk food and by the oil and meat used increasingly in home cooking.
As a whole, however, this book is an erudite joy that makes you yearn to taste the delights Dunlop describes. Her sensory writing is so vivid that I felt I was actually there with her in the food markets of China, tasting everything from spiced goose and “bright emerald” chives to innumerable varieties of tofu, from waffle-like blocks to “custardy curds”. Any non-Chinese person who thinks they love Chinese food should read this book to be shown that we don’t know the half of it.
Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food by Fuchsia Dunlop (Particular Books £25 pp480). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.
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