Fuchsia Dunlop

On Saturday, to my amazement, I actually shot my first pheasant. A friend had invited me to go on a shoot in the Essex countryside, something I’d longed to do ever since, as a teenager, I persuaded my mother to buy me a brace of pheasants to pluck, draw and cook. Rain had been forecast, but it turned out to be a glorious day: bright, cold and blue-skied. So we spent the day tramping around the countryside, through ploughed fields and meadows, and a small wood, and then standing around with our guns, waiting for the birds to fly up out of the bushes. I hadn’t been near a gun since I messed around with an air rifle in my parents’ garden, many years ago, and was a bit nervous. But it was exciting, and difficult. Somehow, towards the end of the day, when the clouds were smudgy and the trees spidery against the declining light, I managed to hit one, and it fell. Continue reading…

I’m finally back in London after a crazy month’s travelling: first to Sydney for its International Food Festival, then to Singapore for a food and wine conference, then to Hong Kong and, at the end, Barcelona!

The Sydney food festival was a gathering of chefs and food-writers from all over Australia, Asia, and further afield, including Tetsuya Wakuda, Peter Gordon, David Thomson, Kylie Kwong, Neil Perry and Alvin Leung. The photograph on the left, taken at the opening night of the World Chef’s Showcase, was taken by Marco del Grande of the Sydney Morning Herald. Continue reading…

On the Scottish island, a friend and I picked our way across slippery seaweed-strewn beaches, through bogs and heather bushes, and finally down a rocky cliff, to gather wild mussels, kilos and kilos of them. Back at the cottage, we cooked some of them marinieres, and used the rest in a kind of Italian pasta sauce (onion, tomatoes, herbs) which we ate with spaghetti. The orange mussels themselves were delicious, but many of them had tiny, tiny pearls embedded in their outer layers, which made them somewhat perilous to eat. I crunched one quite badly, and it ended up firmly embedded in one of my back teeth! It was horribly uncomfortable at first, but then settled down. The following day some of it came out, grittily, in some chewing gum, but I had to visit the dentist to make sure that it was completely clear. My London colleagues laughed at me for having such a ridiculous ailment (‘Doctor, Doctor, I have a pearl stuck in my tooth!).

Funnily enough, within the week, something similar nearly happened, but with a piece of shot in a wild duck – and for a moment I dreaded the embarrassing prospect of a return visit to the dentist.

Has anyone else had amusing eating-related mishaps? Live octopus tentacles stuck to their cheeks in Korea？Bones through their cheeks during enthusiastic chewing?

When I was a small child, I once swallowed a small, painted metal ‘gollywog’ pendant that I had been sent after saving up the tokens on pots of Robertsons jam. My parents took me to the hospital in Oxford, where I was X-rayed, and the X-rays showed a perfect little gollywog shape suspended somewhere in my abdomen! (I’ve always regretted that we didn’t keep a copy of the image.)

The island holiday in Scotland turned into a wonderful adventure, and I caught my first mackerel! Two of them, in fact. (I was pretty impressed until I noticed that one of my friends, simultaneously, had pulled in SEVEN on a single line!) Between us, we  caught eleven, and I quickly remembered my old Sichuan cooking school lessons and gutted them all on the boat, with my Swiss army knife. Back at the cottage, we rustled up a mackerel feast: sashimi with soy sauce and mustard (no wasabi around); grilled mackerel, eaten with lemon; mackerel baked with mustard and white wine (a French recipe that used to make as a teenager, dimly remembered); and finally the mackerel fillets marinated in soy sauce, wine, ginger and stuff and then pan-fried. Has fish ever tasted so good?

Below are a few more pics of the fish.

Colours

Wild creature

Non-Chinese cooks often consider Chinese food as a complete world apart from other styles of food, but I find that Chinese cold dishes mix well with dishes from other traditions. I often rustle up some kind of Sichuanese chicken salad, dressed in a mixture of soy sauce, sugar, chilli oil, Sichuan pepper and perhaps a little Chinese vinegar, for a party, and it always seems to go down a storm. The spicy cucumber salad from my Sichuan book is another favourite – incredibly easy to make in advance, unusual and delicious.

Supper at my friend Anissa Helou’s place last week turned out to be a polyglot feast, with Gujarati snacks she commissioned from the mother of her newsagent, a magnificent Lebanese tabbuleh, a Sichuanese chicken dish and fish-fragrant aubergines, served cool. We all thought they went together rather nicely.

Altogether, it’s been an incredibly varied fortnight, foodwise: my first visit to the River Cafe in London for a close friend’s birthday (fabulous langoustines with marjoram), a Sichuanese supper at my place for my ‘kitchen sister’ Lipika, a glorious home-made bouillabaisse at another friend’s house, hog roast in a West London garden, extended family picnic in Waterlow Park (with another Sichuanese salad as my contribution), cocktails at Loungelover and dinner at my favourite Vietnamese place, Song Que, with Anissa and visiting food-writer Anya Von Bremzen! Anyway, enough of all that, tonight I’m off to a deserted Scottish island to make bread and attempt to catch fish.

General Tsos Chicken (a poor picture, sorry!)

I had some friends for dinner on Saturday and, for the first time in ages, cooked General Tso’s chicken. This, as some of you may know (especially any Americans), is the most famous “Hunanese” dish in America…. but is virtually unknown in Hunan itself. Exploring its origins was one of the unintended highlights of my research for Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, and the piece I wrote about it was excerpted in the New York Times.

Although it’s not the most traditional dish, it is incredibly delicious when done properly, with good chicken. On Saturday I used the Taiwan version of the recipe, which I was taught in the kitchens of the man who invented it, Peng Chang-Kuei, in Taipei.  I’d forgotten quite how good it was, but after the reception it got from my friends the other night, I suspect I’m going to be making it regularly!

The full menu on Saturday was Sichuanese cucumber salad, smoked beancurd with chilli oil, General Tso’s chicken, Red-braised beef with Asian radish, Pock-Marked Woman’s Beancurd (mapo doufu), stir-fried mixed mushrooms with garlic, stir-fried water spinach with chillies and Sichuan pepper, and stewed peaches with crystal sugar. With steamed rice, of course. And raspberry pavlova for pudding, thanks to my friend Penny!

The picture to the left was taken in Taipei in 2004. It was an incredible honour to meet Chef Peng, who is one of the most celebrated chefs of his generation, and used to be in charge of state banquets in Taiwan.

P.S. the recipe is at the bottom of the New York Times article.

One of the highlights of my recent trip to China was a lesson in braising a whole pig’s head. I couldn’t resist posing for a few photos with the half-cooked head. The final product, served with steamed buns, spring onions and sweet fermented sauce, was magnificent…

Pig

Pig 2

Pig 3

I’m just back from a weekend of unusually traditional English cooking at my parents’ place in Oxford. Roast lamb, new potatoes and a salad with land cress and dandelion leaves from the garden for lunch on Easter Sunday (and no caterpillar-type secret ingredients – people who have read my Shark’s Fin book will understand what I’m talking about here!). Inevitably a few Chinese characteristics crept in, though – like the finely-sliced spring onions 葱花 in the goose-egg omelette I made for supper the same day, with a soy-sauce garnish. 

The highlight of the weekend was a fleeting moment in which my aunt and uncle passed directly over the garden in a hot-air balloon! They called us from a mobile phone just before to say that they were headed in our direction, so we rushed outside to look. And sure enough, there they were, drifting in from the southwest. They were low enough when they passed over for us to see their faces hanging over the basket, and to exchange a few words with them. An extraordinary coincidence, because you have no control at all over the breezes that carry you around in a balloon. It was magical, like a scene from a fairy tale! And it reminded me of my own excursion with my balloonist uncle, years and years ago – a spur-of-the-moment evening jaunt that gave me the best excuse I’d ever had for not doing my chemistry homework.

Incidentally, someone called Martin C sent me a message through this website – and I managed to delete it accidentally before I had read it. Sorry, Martin! Please, if you are reading this, try to resend!

Last night I cooked a 60th birthday party dinner for my uncle and his family. As you might guess, it was mainly Sichuanese, although I did include a few dishes from other Chinese regions, such as a Cantonese steamed sea bass.

As usual, I asked the fishmonger to leave the head, tail and fins of the sea bass intact, and simply to remove its guts and gills. As he’s always done this properly before, I didn’t think to check. But when I was ready to marinate the fish (in a little salt and Shaoxing wine, with some crushed ginger and spring onions in its belly), I was dismayed to find that, while leaving the head, he had mutilated the tail, and sliced off the fins! Somehow he had destroyed the beauty and the balance of the fish, as I’m sure you’ll agree when you look at the following picture:

One of the things I like about cooking is the beauty of ingredients: a red pepper, a lemon and a dark purple aubergine on a plate together; the delicate laddered crispness of a fresh bamboo shoot; the pewtery gleam of a fish in my hands. And this fish – it just looked wrong, although I knew that it would taste as delicious as ever.

I wondered if, after steaming, the final scattering of slivered ginger and spring onion, the hot oil and the soy sauce would cover up its stumpy tail – but realised it would still look lopsided. I considered cutting a false tail from coloured paper or cardboard, but didn’t like the thought of its becoming soggy and leaking nasty dyes into the sauce.

Finally, I came up with a solution: a tail and fins cut from the skin of an aubergine (eggplant)! I shaved a thick curve of skin from a spare aubergine with my cleaver, and then cut it into shape. I steamed the pieces alongside the sea bass, and reassembled it on the serving dish before I added the finishing ingredients. It worked fantastically! I didn’t manage to take a decent picture of the final dish, but here is one of the raw fish, aesthetically enhanced:

I went to my parents’ place in Oxford for the weekend, and as usual spent most of the time in the kitchen. I love cooking there, listening to Radio 4, going into the garden from time to time to pick some herbs, stirring pots on the Aga. And it reminds me of my teenage years, when I spent far more time making pastry, creme patissiere, hummus and chocolate cakes than doing my schoolwork. Continue reading…