In Chinese, there’s a phrase for intentionally leaving out ingredients when teaching a dish to your apprentice: liu yi shou, or holding back a trick or two.
Fuchsia Dunlop doesn’t hold back any tricks in her new cookbook about the cuisine that might just be China’s best-kept secret.
Fluent in Mandarin, the British writer and cook has been travelling around China for more than two decades, bringing Chinese regional cuisines into home kitchens across the world. After studying at Cambridge she worked as a sub-editor on the BBC’s Asia desk, which sparked her interest in China. Dunlop won a scholarship to study at Sichuan University, but her love for the region’s food became all-consuming, and she became the first Westerner to train at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine in the 1990s.
In her fourth cookbook, Land of Fish and Rice, she’s fallen in love with the cuisine of Jiangnan.
Dunlop’s enthusiasm is completely infectious in writing, and it hasn’t waned any when I speak to her on the phone from London. “I could just spend the rest of my life researching the food of this region,” she says.
If you’re not sure where Jiangnan is, you’re not alone. It’s little known in the West, and yet in China, it’s considered the birthplace of modern Chinese gastronomy.
Fuchsia Dunlop.
“It’s quite strange that we haven’t [heard of it] because you could say it’s ‘the’ Chinese cuisine. I think one reason is just patterns of immigration,” says Dunlop. “You’ve had the Cantonese domination of what Chinese food was seen as abroad for many years and there just aren’t very many overseas restaurants or chefs from this region. Another reason is there are different names by which this region is called… which I think has been slightly confusing.”
Jiangnan means ‘south of the river’, and refers to the Lower Yangtze Region, encompassing the modern capital of Shanghai. The food of this region is renowned in China for its elegance, delicacy and balance. Referred to as the ‘land of fish and rice’ by writers and poets, it’s an incredibly fertile area with spectacular produce, and the cuisine was born of a wealthy and sophisticated culture that expressed itself through various artistic forms, including food. “It’s the place where Chinese gastronomy came to fruition and flourished in the Song dynasty,” says Dunlop. Add to that a number of famous culinary traditions, including Jinhua ham, Shaoxing wines, and a strong culture of pickling and preserving, and it’s evident why this classical cuisine is so highly prized.
The selection of recipes was always going to be a challenge with such a wealth to choose from, says Dunlop, but she’s managed to give us a clear taste of the region, balancing the unfamiliar with the accessible, the laboured with the simple.
Some of her favourites include the , a favourite quick lunch, and the sumptuous centrepiece, Dongpo pork, large pieces of pork belly slow-cooked in Shaoxing wine until the sauce is glossy and rich, the meat falling apart at the touch of a chopstick. True to the book’s name, there are many seafood recipes, but also beautifully simple vegetable dishes, pickles, soups, and more. Jiangnan cuisine focuses on ben wei, or the true tastes of an ingredient, and so you’ll find ingredients that are cooked with nothing more than salt and oil.
Cooking Chinese at home
Fuchsia Dunlop’s top tips for Chinese home cooking, and more
Like all her books, this one is also useful beyond the kitchen. “I know that people do use them as guide books,” says Fuchsia.
There are the wonderful insights that come from someone truly immersed in the culture, able to pick up the stories and facts that passers-by would miss, and that locals may not recognise as interesting to an outside audience.
And so we learn that tomatoes are called ‘barbarian aubergines’, a reference to its foreign origins, and the fact that if you eat rice at a Chinese dinner, your host may assume you’ve finished drinking because of the belief that rice and alcohol do not mix. I discover that Shaoxing wine is actually drunk in Shaoxing (of course it is), and that you should only use drinking quality when you’re making Dongpo pork. You follow Fuchsia to farmers’ gardens and friends’ kitchens, and learn of the legends behind many of the dishes.
“You won’t necessarily be taught all this even if you do speak Chinese,” says Dunlop.
Should you never pick up a wok, Dunlop’s cookbooks simply make great reads, her intelligence, excitement and curiosity plain in every recipe introduction.
“I’m trying to not just give readers recipes that are from the region and that work, but to make them fall in love with it,” she says.
From the moment you pick up this book, it’s an irresistible fate.
Cook the book
Source: Bloomsbury
Source: Bloomsbury
Source: Bloomsbury
