Chinese food followed a global trajectory from obscurity to ubiquity, says scholar and James Beard Award-winning author Fuchsia Dunlop. Dedicating the better part of her life to the study of the cuisine and writing numerous cookbooks, her latest project, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food, examines the history of Chinese food through a menu of 30 dishes.
Evan Kleiman: Every time you come up with a new book, I'm just so happy.
Fuchsia Dunlop: I'm so delighted to hear that.
I'm so excited. So much has been discussed about you being the first Westerner to study at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine but you had experiences before that with Chinese food in the landscape of Britain from the 1950s to the 1970s. Tell us a little bit about your childhood experiences.
I guess that [it was] very similar to the childhood experiences of many British and even American people, which was that it was Chinese takeout food. Occasionally, my family would get a Chinese takeout. It was that very appealing, quite simple, easy, inexpensive Chinese food based on the style of the Cantonese south but very much tailored to Western tastes. So we had chop suey and chow mein and these floppy pancake rolls stuffed with bean sprouts and then my favorite dish, which was sweet and sour pork balls, when you had a little nugget of pork dipped in batter and deep-fried until golden and served with this absolutely bright red sweet and sour sauce. That was the real treat. That was the only Chinese food I knew.
Chinese cuisine is so epic. It goes back millennia. Can you talk about how Chinese culture is guided by food?
I think that the Chinese, as I argue in the book, have identified themselves since ancient times as people who eat cooked food. In the distant past, in the classic texts, you find this idea that the Chinese were people who civilized their food after the discovery of fire by cooking it. At that point, they left behind this very dangerous world of raw food and disease. They also used to see themselves as being people who ate cooked food and the foreigners or barbarians who live beyond the boundaries of China as people who ate raw food.
Also, the Chinese have, since the beginnings of their civilization, communicated with gods and ancestors through the offering of food and drink. That's also been fundamentally important in Chinese culture. Very early on, for about 2,000 years, there was this idea that diet was the foundation of good health and the identification of food with medicine. So again, food is tremendously important in living properly and living well. Apart from that, right from the beginning, in very early literature, from the third century BCE, you find these rapturous descriptions of food, great banquets or different dishes. I think it's true to say that the Chinese are a culture that's particularly centered around food.
Given that, is the same thing happening in modern day China as is happening here, where more and more young people are choosing not to cook?
Absolutely, yes. It's really noticeable. When I was a student in Sichuan in the 1990s, everybody cooked. People couldn't afford to eat out very much. People were actually very good cooks, and they could not only rustle up supper for their family from fresh ingredients but the elder generation were really excellent at making their own pickles. They could cure winter sausages and other meats. They were very capable. It's noticeable that young people these days often don't cook at all. I think that's partly because in families of single children with huge academic pressure to achieve, cooking just isn't seen as a useful way to spend your time. I know so many young people who really don't know how to cook. Coupled with that you have this great expansion in the availability of really delicious and diverse takeout food and delivery food. So yes, there seems to be a very marked decline in cooking skills.
You write, "Chinese food has been a victim of its own success." What do you mean by that? And could you talk about the more prominent misconceptions about Chinese food?
What I mean by "Chinese food was a victim of his own success" is that it was a very early immigrant cuisine. In America and later in Britain and in other parts of the world, Cantonese immigrants were incredibly successful at developing this style of cooking that everyone loved. You have takeouts in every town in America. It's the same in Britain. This style of takeout food was very easy for Westerners. No bones or shells, very appealing flavors, lots of sweet tastes, lots of deep-fried foods. It was inexpensive, it was accessible and people loved it. So Chinese food became established in a way that was, on the one hand, really successful, but on the other hand, was a very poor reflection of one of the world's grandest and most diverse and most sophisticated cuisines.
In China itself, you have deep-fried food, you have inexpensive takeout food, you have street food. But you also have incredibly light and delicate cooking, a wealth of seasonal vegetables, lightly cooked and extremely labor-intensive, time-consuming, and expensive banquet cuisine. What we were seeing in the West was just one facet of Chinese cuisine and that became established in people's minds as what Chinese food was. I think because of that, we have all these misconceptions of Chinese food that I think, to a certain extent, are lessening, but it's still quite prevalent.
One is that Chinese food is not something that you spend a lot of money on. It's tasty and nice but it's not prestige food. This is so misleading because China has an ancient history of really serious gastronomy and sophisticated cooking. Another misconception, which for me is the most ridiculous of them all, is that Chinese food is unhealthy. I think that's because people look at deep-fried takeout food with lots of sugar and strongly flavored sauces, and Westerners almost always order their takeout food with fried rice or fried noodles, which is actually not very typical of the way Chinese people eat themselves, so there is this idea that Chinese food may be delicious but you don't want to eat it every day because it's not that healthy. But I think no other culture in the world is probably as obsessed with the intimate links between diet and health as the Chinese.
The earliest Chinese recipes were actually manuscripts of medicinal tonic foods. Anyone who has Chinese friends or family will know Chinese people talk all the time about how to eat and what to eat to maintain health, to treat disease, to deal with changes in climate or seasons. So that's a misconception that is so completely bizarre when you look at the real culture of Chinese gastronomy.
The other, I suppose, and this is a stereotype that really fascinates me, which is this idea that the Chinese eat everything. Westerners have always seen this in a really negative light. China is a huge country with a vast range of geographical terrains and hugely diverse produce. So the Chinese eat a vast range of ingredients because that's what's available to them. They also have a really adventurous approach to ingredients. They eat sort of unusual things, like chicken's feet, for example, which are discarded by people in other cultures. The thing that perplexes me is this negativity.
The Western stereotype has always been that the Chinese ate everything because they were very poor and they were desperate and they would eat anything. This is so misleading because, if you go to China... in any agrarian culture and society, people, if they kill an animal, they want to make the most of it and they eat parts that maybe modern Western consumers don't tend to eat. In addition to that, if you look at the highest echelons of Chinese gastronomy, imperial cuisine, you'll find delicacies like goose feet or duck tongues, which are eaten not because they're just any old awful but because they are really prized. That's partly because the Chinese have a very developed appreciation of texture and mouthfeel and really enjoy the slithery texture of a goose foot or the intricacy of duck tongue, the sort of game that you play with your tongue and teeth to extract the edible bits from the little bones and so on. That's all part of the fun of eating.
Also in Chinese culture, there's a real psychological thrill to having something that is a privilege that other people can't have. For example, you have a whole duck. Well, anyone can have the duck breast but the tongue is a tiny, delicate morsel. In the era before refrigeration, anyone who could afford to have a whole plate of duck tongues, that was an extraordinary delicacy. One of the dishes that I write about in the book is something that completely blew my mind that I was served in Guangzhou a few years ago, in the Jiangnan region near Shanghai, and that was a dish that contained the cheeks of 200 little catfish. So 400 little cheeks, each the size of a fingertip, in a soup and just the psychological frisson of privilege of being at the table that was gifted these treasured morsels from 200 little fish was extraordinary.
That's so amazing. Could you speak a little bit of the bifurcated nature of Chinese home cooking and food that is more the purview of specialists?
Like any great cuisine, Chinese cuisine is extremely diverse and it has lots of different levels and lots of different styles. In home cooking, the equipment used is minimal. You might have a Chinese cleaver, a Chinese cutting knife, a chopping board, a wok steamer and a pot. You do tend to have several dishes even at quite simple Chinese meals. Whereas a Western cook might cut up a lot of ingredients and make them into one stew, in China, you would tend to stir fry your tomatoes with some beaten egg and then separately stir fry your spinach and then separately cook something else.
Most Chinese cooking is done on the stovetop. You cut your food into little pieces then you stir fry it in a wok or maybe boil it in a soup. Chinese people at home generally don't have ovens so there's no baking or roasting, traditionally. When it comes to professional cooking, in some senses, the equipment is equally simple. Often, the main tools are the Chinese cleaver, the cutting board, the wok and the steamer. But there's a dazzling diversity of different cooking methods. If you want an example of a dish you'd never make at home, it's something like Peking duck because Peking duck is made in not just an oven but a particular sort of oven built of brick in which you can hang whole ducks. It's traditionally fueled by a fruit wood fire at the mouth of the oven.
When I was at the chef school in Sichuan, we learned 56 different cooking methods. Many of these were using a wok but there were different ways of handling the heat. Very fast stir frying was called bao or bao chao, which literally means "explode frying." That's when you're cooking your ingredients at a very high heat, very quickly. Also in Chinese professional cooking at the highest levels, you get what are called gongfu tai or kung fu dishes, which means dishes that are made with really particular art and labor. For example, a classic Sichuanese banquet dish, Jidouhua, it's called Chicken Tofu. Traditionally what you do is you pulverize a chicken breast with the back of a cleaver or two. You reduce it to a puree just by hammering it with the back of your cleaver. You make this very fine puree then you mix it with a little egg white and a little bit of starch. Then you set it at a very low temperature in a fine soup made with chicken and ham. You create something that looks and has the texture exactly of tofu, which is a cheap street snack, but is actually made from luxury ingredients, like chicken breast and this beautiful stock.
That was just a snapshot because there are so many regional differences and so many grand dishes and it's really quite complicated. On the other hand, as you said with home cooking, Chinese food can also be what someone who's tired rustles up at home from few ingredients when they get home from work.
What three roles do beans play in mapo tofu that exhibit the central importance of the soybean in China?
Mapo tofu is a really interesting dish because the main ingredient is tofu, which is made from soybean. The main flavoring is Sichuan chili bean paste, which is made with fava beans fermented with chilies. That's what gives it that really deep, savory, punchy flavor. It's also made with fermented black beans, which are those little black beans that you have in black bean sauce, which have been made in China for more than 2,000 years. So you have a dish in which the flavors and the main protein and the main ingredient are all made of beans. What you get is not just nutrition, but also those really bold umami flavors that you also get from meat and other cuisines. That's one of the reasons that the Chinese were able to enjoy and be so inventive with a traditional diet that was very light on meat and consisted largely of vegetables and grains. Because if you cook with fermented beans, you get these rich, bold, satisfying tastes that make vegetarian dishes taste much more appealing.
Knife work is such an important part of bringing Chinese food to life in so many different ways. Can you explain how the art of cutting factors into the cuisine?
It's another key characteristic of Chinese food, and it's really part of what makes Chinese food Chinese. As long as about 2,000 years ago, during the Han Dynasty, the Chinese were already settling into the habit of eating food that had been cut into small pieces and eating it with chopsticks. As you can imagine, cutting food into small pieces is intimately bound up with the use of chopsticks. If you're eating with chopsticks and knives are never on the traditional Chinese dinner table, then all your food has to be carved into small chop stickable morsels or it has to be soft enough to tear apart with chopsticks. So very early on, the Chinese were cutting food into small pieces. Long before they had stir fried food, they were eating these thick stew soups, which were full of ingredients cut into small pieces.
As that great translator of Chinese culture to the West, Lin Yu Tang, once said, Chinese cuisine is all about the art of mixture. Whereas an American might just have a slab of meat, a steak for dinner, in China, you'd be much more likely to cut that piece of meat into thin slivers and stir fry it with a vegetable ingredient. Many Chinese dishes are like that. You cut food into small pieces then you combine it. That's one of the reasons why Chinese restaurant menus are often so famously long because you can have a limited range of ingredients and you can cook them in different combinations, like lottery numbers, and come up with a vast range of dishes.
How should we order in a Chinese restaurant the next time we go out with a group of friends?
There's not one hard and fast rule. I would say the most important principle is that firstly, you want to have a master plan. Don't just have each guest ordering the dish they fancy because then you might have a great repetition. You might have three chicken dishes on the table or two things that are sweet and sour.
The art of ordering a Chinese meal is all about ensuring that there's great variety on the table with minimal repetition. So if you've got one dish which is made with pork, then maybe the next dish you want fish or a vegetable. If one dish is very dark in color, like red braised pork cooked with soy sauce and sugar and wine, then how about having something that's a vibrant green, like a stir-fried vegetable. You want to have a contrast of colors, of cooking methods, of ingredients. If you have one dish that is dry and fragrant, like deep-fried spare ribs, then you want to have something that's liquidy.
You can look at your menu and try to have dishes that are all different from each other and not to repeat. That means that every bite is going to be interesting and the palate never becomes tired.
You're a Brit. Brits are famous for their Sunday roasts. Have you entertained your Chinese friends with such a roast and how do they respond to it?
I have tried on many occasions to impress Chinese friends with Western cooking with no success whatsoever because they just prefer Chinese food. But funnily enough, I have managed to impress quite senior Chinese chefs with roast potatoes, which I parboil then roast in duck or goose fat. The Chinese don't really go in for potatoes in the same way that Europeans do. So they have found that lovely crunch and the golden fragrance of red potatoes [to be] utterly delicious.
In "Invitation to a Banquet," scholar and cook Fuchsia Dunlop explores the history of Chinese cuisine through a menu of 30 dishes. Photo by W.W. Norton & Company.