Fuchsia Dunlop

According to this piece in the Los Angeles Times, Greenpeace China estimates that 100 acres of trees need to be felled every 24 hours to keep up with Chinese demand for disposable chopsticks. The article says the Chinese government is so concerned at the waste that it’s trying to clamp down on their use – although with little effect so far. As anyone who has lived in China will know, many Chinese people are becoming obsessed with hygiene – it’s one of the reasons that middle-class parents prefer buying their children packaged snacks in Walmart to  old-fashioned street snacks sold by itinerant vendors. Now that everyone expects restaurants to supply either disposable chopsticks (made of wood or bamboo) or those that have been properly sterilised, it’s hard to go back to the old days when many small eateries would simply have a potful of reusable wooden chopsticks on each table.

Perhaps the solution is to revive the old Manchu and Mongolian habit of carrying around a personal set of chopsticks and other implements. The one pictured on left and right, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, is a rather fine ornament that can be attached to a belt, and it contains not only a pair of bone chopsticks, a knife and a file for sharpening, but also (not pictured) a tiny bone toothpick and an ear scoop! Of course the set pictured is rather elaborate and unnecessarily heavy, but imagine a funky, well-designed set of chopsticks in a little holder you could slip into your handbag…  (Actually, I remember on my very first trip to China, and indeed to Asia at all, I carried round my own pair of plastic chopsticks because I was paranoid about hygiene, and just rinsed them after use.) Continue reading…

My first book, Sichuan Cookery (published in the US as Land of Plenty), was chosen by the Observer Food Monthly as one of the ten best cookbooks of all time! Crazy, but delightful!

A blog reader called Tom emailed me recently to say that he was enjoying cooking from my books, but:

I am trying to figure out whether there is any way to reduce sodium in these
recipes, though. Like many Americans, I have high blood pressure and am trying
to manage it through diet modification. That means really watching salt intake.
I see that my soy sauce has nearly 1600 mg of sodium per tablespoon. It tastes
fantastic, but wow! That's a huge number. And that's hardly the only source of
sodium in Sichuan and Hunan cuisine. Continue reading...

I’ve just written a guest post for the Guardian’s Word of Mouth blog, which you can read here.

A fascinating piece in the Guardian today about an FAO policy paper on the eating of insects. Apparently, senior figures in the UN and elsewhere are looking for ways to boost consumption of creepy-crawlies as a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Rearing livestock such as cows, pigs and sheep guzzles agricultural land and spews out 20% of global greenhouse gases, and so we all need to start eating less meat. Insects, it seems, are a promising alternative, since they are rich in protein, vitamins and minerals, and breeding them produces far less pollution than breeding conventional meat animals. The only problem, according to the experts cited in the article, is the Western taboo on eating insects.

If you are interested in this subject, I heartily recommend this extraordinary book by the Victorian Englishman Vincent Holt, which deploys powerful, rational arguments in favour of eating insects – and offers some recipes that sounds rather interesting. It’s a delightful, amusing and provocative little book. You might also like to read my thoughts on the subject in a piece for the FT a few years ago, which is on this website. The photographs that accompany this post are of some of the ingredients (raw and cooked) on the menu of Zou Haikuan’s restaurant, which is mentioned in my article.

Continue reading…

A blog reader called Graham wrote to me to ask advice about how to get a decent high-powered flame for cooking Chinese food in a UK kitchen.

This is part of what he said:

“I am staying in a modern flat in Beijing over the summer and one of the great things is being able to cook on a high-powered burner. I can actually get some smoking happening quickly, and attempt to flash-fry things.

“I’m sure this is nothing  compared to restaurant kitchen stoves, but it would be great to cook like this back in England, and it makes me realise how puny my UK cooker is. I guess it might be possible to buy Chinese stoves in England, but even then is out domestic gas supply suited to them?

“I know Chinese restaurants in the UK must be able to do it, and I saw the guys from Yang Sing in Manchester do a cooking demo last year, and instead of using the outdoor kitchen provided, they rolled in their own can of propane with a wok-holder attachment fitted to the top! Great, but I’m guessing this isn’t very wise (or probably legal) in the UK to have indoors.”

Continue reading…

Shanghai fried wontons in London

What’s the appropriate food for a quick picnic in Holland Park before the opera? As I’d been experimenting all day in the kitchen, I took a Chinese first course: garland chrysanthemum leaves with roasted pine kernels (松仁蒿菜）and Shanghainese pot-sticker wontons （干煎馄饨） filled with minced pork and spinach (spinach as a substitute for the traditional shepherd’s purse greens 荠菜) served with a dip of Chinkiang vinegar with a little soy sauce. The wontons, wrapped in foil and stored in a plastic box, were still warm when we ate them. And then we had strawberries and cream.

My review of possibly my favourite Shanghai restaurant, Fu 1088, appears in today’s Financial Times.

Apologies to anyone who has been trying to use the contact page on my website – we updated it recently, and the contact page got left behind. It is now working properly, so I look forward to receiving stacks of emails!!

I’ve also started using a Twitter account – name fuchsiadunlop – still only a fledgling tweeter, but getting the hang of it…

Last week Barshu (the Sichuanese restaurant where I work as consultant) ran a team-building awayday for some corporate clients in the beautiful private room on the second floor.  The programme? A demonstration by two of the chefs, Xiao Wei and Xiao Hua, followed by a Chinese wine-tasting and a fabulous banquet. Xiao Wei and Xiao Hua showed the guests how to wrap various kinds of jiaozi dumplings, glutinous rice balls (tang yuan), and leaf-wrapped glutinous rice zongzi – the latter particularly appropriate as the event took place on the Dragon Boat Festival 端午节, when they are traditionally eaten. Some of the guests had a go themselves. And then they tasted a few Chinese wines and some sake, and then sat down to feast…

The pictures show Xiao Wei wrapping zongzi (top), Xiao Hua making tangyuan (right), and one of the guests trying his hand at wrapping jiaozi (below left).