Fuchsia Dunlop’s new book is called Invitation to a Banquet and, true to her word, she has asked me to join her for just such an event: dim sum on a Monday lunchtime at the Royal China Club, a Cantonese restaurant in central London. After she has a quick conference with the waiter in Mandarin, our table starts filling up: oolong tea arrives first; followed by little domed pastry puffs encasing char sui pork; and turnip cake, which is much more delicious than it sounds. Then a long strip of Barbie-pink cheung fun, stuffed with crispy seafood; a bamboo basket with elegant sui mai, one-bite pork and prawn dumplings with little pops of crab roe on top; and – eek! – a bowl of chicken feet poking out of black bean sauce. Finally, just as I’m beginning to forget what vegetables even look like, a plate of Chinese broccoli dressed in ginger arrives.
It seems unlikely that every reader of Invitation to a Banquet will be afforded the privilege of sitting with Dunlop and having her curate a personal, multi-course feast, but you never know. Dunlop, an English food writer in her early 50s, loves nothing more than matchmaking Western eaters with what is to them unfamiliar and sometimes intimidating Chinese food. In 30 years of exploring and documenting the country, she has done for China what Elizabeth David did for Mediterranean food and Claudia Roden did for the Middle East.
Only two hours later, at the end of an enjoyable and gently mind-expanding meal, does Dunlop explain how much thought went into her seemingly casual selection. Choosing what to eat in a Chinese restaurant is like “composing a symphony but it has to feel effortless,” she says. The biggest mistake British diners make is going out with friends and allowing everyone to pick one dish. “It’s going to be a disaster!” she exclaims. “Because you might have three chicken dishes, even if you share them, and everything sweet and sour. You have to have a masterplan.”
There are lots of rules then? “No rules!” Dunlop barks, only half-serious (I think). “There are no rules, but there is a principle, which is variety of main ingredients, cooking method, flavour, colour, mouthfeel… The more difference there is, the better. So I deliberately chose things with a mix of cooking methods: so we have some steamed things, some fried things and then something baked. All with different ingredients: pork here, chicken there, seafood, scallops. And the green vegetable makes it a very healthy meal and it’s a nice colour.”
Dunlop has something of a school teacher vibe. She’s tall and sits with straight-backed posture, hands in her lap. Her modestly wavy brown hair falls just below her shoulders and today she wears a white shirt, crimson scarf, trousers and running shoes. But mainly, she has a clear and lifelong passion for informing and communicating ideas. This started with reviews of Chinese restaurants in London for Time Out in the 1990s, and led to cookbooks on Sichuan and Hunan cuisine, and a 2008 midlife memoir of her travels in China titled Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper. In 2012, she published Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking, which is so diligently researched that it now has a large fanbase in China.
But Dunlop’s desire to educate and enlighten finds its fullest expression in Invitation to a Banquet. The book tells a history of Chinese food through some of its classic dishes, from dongpo pork to mapo tofu to plain steamed rice. It’s a tale personal to Dunlop, bursting with hard-won wisdom that started when she became the first Westerner to train as a chef at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine in China and has continued over three decades travelling around the country, meeting chefs, restaurateurs and producers. But Invitation to a Banquet is also Dunlop’s attempt to correct many of the misconceptions that still persist about Chinese food in the West: that it is all full of MSG; that it is unhealthy; that it can be cruel or weird.
That last misapprehension is part of the reason that Dunlop ordered chicken feet today. As she assumed, I had seen that dish on menus in London’s Chinatown for 20 years and studiously avoided it. Even in an age of nose-to-tail eating, chicken feet asked the question: why would you want to eat that? And I never found a strong enough reason to find out.
Dunlop gets this: chicken feet have what she calls a high “grapple factor”, a term she’s borrowed from her father. It doesn’t relate just to Chinese food: lobster, shell-on prawns and quail all rate highly on the scale. But, in China, gourmets are especially obsessed with texture and kou gan, “mouthfeel”, such as you experience eating sea cucumbers or deer tendons. And Dunlop found herself bemused with the concept when she first arrived in the country. “When I went to live in Sichuan, I was always being given all these rubbery things to eat and I would munch through them politely,” she recalls. “But I would just think, ‘What’s the point? There’s no taste…’”
Over time, though, Dunlop’s mind and palate woke up to the joys of unusual textures, and she wants to take others on the same journey. “Try to feel them as well as taste them,” she advises, as I tentatively pincer a chicken’s foot with my chopsticks. “And not to be English and embarrassed about the grapple. You can take out the bones or gently spit them out, so you don’t have to be anxious about being rude. And just enjoy the game with your teeth and tongue teasing apart the delicious skin.”
I take a bite and Dunlop’s right: it is a bit wriggly, even shimmery at first, but then a dreamy succulence when it melts. “It’s so wonderful to see people change their ideas and start to enjoy eating chicken feet,” she says, obviously pleased. “Chinese food has something for everyone. So there are plenty of things without bones or without grapple. But if you don’t like things for their texture, or slithery things like jellyfish, you can’t access a whole aspect of Chinese gastronomy, which is really interesting. And which, I think, enlarges the possibilities of pleasure.”
The pursuit of pleasure is at the heart of Dunlop’s adventures in China. She grew up in Oxford, with parents Bede and Carolyn and her brother Merlin. Her mother taught English as a foreign language and would often invite her students to eat at the family home, eagerly swapping recipes: Dunlop recently found a photo of a party from back then – she would have been eight or nine – and the guests came from Greece, Lebanon, Sudan and Japan. She also unearthed a birthday card made for her father when she was 10. “It was a picture of a table covered in food, including a roast pig’s head,” she says, with a giggle.
After school, Dunlop studied English at Cambridge University, then took a job in the Monitoring department of the BBC, where she sub-edited news reports from Asia. In 1992, when she was in her early 20s, she made a trip to Hong Kong to visit her cousin, and then continued on to mainland China; not long afterwards she returned, this time to Taipei, to do a two-month immersion course in Mandarin. On each trip, she fell a little bit harder for the country, and especially the food. Growing up in the 1980s, Chinese food had meant sweet-and-sour pork balls; now she was devouring dishes such as fish-fragrant aubergines, which was buttery and spicy and combined sweet and sour flavours with a sophistication she never believed possible.
The move that would change Dunlop’s life came in 1994 when, bored with her daily commute from London to Reading, she took up a British Council scholarship to study in China, specifically in the laid-back Sichuan city of Chengdu. What was she like in those days? “I guess adventurous,” she replies. “I wanted to travel. And I loved eating. It’s quite funny, because now it looks as though I have a very coherent career path. But, actually, that wasn’t really the motivation at all. I never would have imagined that I would be in the position I am now.”
At home, she had toyed with the idea of becoming a chef and this led to her foundation course at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine, where she was one of three female students in a class of 50, mastering a razor-sharp cleaver, the main tool of the Chinese kitchen. “When I look back now, it seems like an extraordinary thing to have done,” she says. “Everything was taught in Sichuan dialect, the textbooks were in Chinese: it was quite a stiff challenge, especially the technical vocabulary. But I was just up for it.
“To be in China at all in the 1990s, you had to be up for a challenge,” Dunlop continues, “because it was a country that had been very closed, and was just opening up. Almost everyone that you met had never met foreigners before, and there was still a bit of staring. Sometimes it was like battering your head against a brick wall, it had its challenges, but that was part of the fun. It was like a big puzzle.”
The trips have continued ever since, often for months at a time and Dunlop always tries to explore one region she’s never been to before. She had a small wobble around 2007 when she felt her “gastronomic libido” slipping away. “I went through this phase of just thinking maybe I’d had enough and I wanted a normal life and I was fed up with China,” she says. “I had loved Chengdu and it had all been demolished and everywhere there was this relentless modernisation of everything. And I just felt quite tired of it.” That lasted until, a short time later, she first visited Dragon Well Manor, a radical, produce-driven restaurant in Hangzhou – Dunlop’s favourite dining spot in the world – and the fire was rekindled.
Dunlop is enigmatic about her life outside of food. She lives in Stoke Newington, north London, and enjoys going to galleries and classical music concerts, but prefers not to say if she has a partner. She is equally reticent in her books and journalism. “The first time I read this memoir,” writes Bee Wilson in her foreword to Dunlop’s Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper, “I wished nosily that Dunlop had revealed more about her personal relationships. She never tells us, or so I thought, of one passionate love. It was only on re-reading it that I thought how stupid I had been. Dunlop’s great passion, the jasmine-blossom in her tea, is the food of China.”
The Covid pandemic, during which China was off-limits to visitors for three years, made Dunlop realise how deep her connection with the country had become. Invitation to a Banquet, which was written during the lockdowns, from 150 notebooks of recipes and descriptions that she has compiled over 30 years, is an expression of this feeling. “I was missing it so much,” she says. “I was missing people. So I think this longing maybe has given a particular flavour to the book.”
The project has also made Dunlop realise that writing about China will probably be her life’s work. She has long been known in the West as an influential commentator on Chinese food – the New York Times noted she had “done more to explain real Chinese cooking to non-Chinese cooks than anyone” – but Dunlop’s books are now translated and published in China, too. Knowing that she has many Chinese readers made her especially keen to put sustainability at the heart of her new book. There are many areas where China needs to improve, but also, Dunlop believes, lots of lessons that the West can take from Chinese gastronomy: not least how to eat less meat and how to make the meat we eat go further.
This might not mean we will all be tucking into chicken feet, but Dunlop has a powerful belief that we need to be open-minded, endlessly curious. As we finish at the Royal China Club, her mission for Chinese food to be regarded as the world’s most diverse and exciting cuisine continues. “With Invitation to a Banquet, I really wanted to do something that was both intellectual and sensory, because that’s what Chinese food is,” says Dunlop. “It’s like a physical pleasure. When I go to China, people ask me, ‘Why have you come to China?’ And I say, ‘I’ve come to eat.’ They think I’m joking, but it’s true, because I’ve really tried to understand through eating.”
Invitation to a Banquet: the Story of Chinese Food by Fuchsia Dunlop is published by Particular Books, 31 August, at £25. Order it now for £22 at guardianbookshop.com
‘I eat to understand’: cook and writer Fuchsia Dunlop on her lifelong love of Chinese cuisine - The Guardian
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