Fuchsia Dunlop

I’m quite chuffed to read this thread on a Chinese web discussion board about Gong Bao chicken (apologies to those of you who can’t read Chinese). The poster said she’d tried more than ten different recipes without any success – until she tried mine from Land of Plenty/Sichuan Cookery, which she said produced as good as dish as one in a good Sichuanese restaurant!

shui zhi yu - as seen on the Barshu menu

An illuminating little story from Sichuan, told to me by my friend Dai Shuang, the wife and business partner of the Sichuanese chef Yu Bo (who you will meet in the ‘Rubber Factor’ chapter of my ‘Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper’):

A friend of Yu Bo and Dai Shuang’s, an American chef who works in Shanghai, was complaining that many Sichuanese dishes, including mala yu, were too oily. As I’m sure you blog readers, will agree, this is a common western complaint about Sichuanese cuisine, and even Chinese cuisine in general.

Anyway, later that day, Dai Shuang and Yu Bo watched their American friend make some mashed potatoes, and they were incredulous at the amount of milk and butter he added – Dai Shuang said it was so rich she could hardly bear to eat it.

That evening, they offered him some of that classic Sichuan supper dish, hui guo rou (twice-cooked pork), and asked him if he found it oily – he did. So Dai Shuang pointed out that his mashed potato had been full of butter, and that they had been expected to eat it all, whereas with the Sichuanese dish, almost all the oil had remained on the serving dish. Moreover, the oil used in Sichuanese cooking was mainly vegetable oil, whereas in Western cooking it was often less-healthy animal fats. ‘It’s very funny’, she said, ‘The way Westerners think Chinese food is so oily, while we think Western food is so oily!’ Continue reading…

In October, I posted something on this blog about unsavoury flavours in Chinese cuisine (‘Stinky to sublime’, 17 October 2008). And last week a New York Times journalist who was researching an article about science and superstition in the kitchen emailed me to talk about them. This is the piece he wrote; it was published alongside one of the recipes from my Sichuanese cookery book. The recipe, for a whole fish braised in chilli bean sauce, has a particular resonance for me, because it is the first Sichuanese dish I ever attempted to cook! This was some time before I went to live in  Chengdu, and I made it from a recipe in Yan-kit So’s Classic Chinese Cookbook. Little did I know how important this kind of cooking would become in my life…

The Financial Times this weekend has published one of my articles, about how most of my Christmas recipes have been infiltrated by Chinese ingredients and cooking techniques. Even that archetypal English staple, mince pies – for years now, I have made them in the shape of Chinese jiaozi dumplings. If you follow this link to the FT website, you will be able to see some lovely colour photographs of a salad made with leftover turkey and some jiaozi mince pies. Otherwise, here are the basic recipes: Continue reading…

Last night, I finally made it to Gourmet San (or ‘The Old Place’ as it’s known in Chinese) on the Bethnal Green Road in East London, spurred on by Jay Rayner’s enthusiastic review in the Observer. It was filled with trendy young Chinese people, and the atmosphere was immediately charming.

Spicy Sichuanese dishes feature heavily on the menu – Geleshan chicken in a pile of chillies, twice-cooked pork and so on – with some Xinjiang-style lamb kebabs laced with cumin for good measure. It’s hearty, colourful food, served on vast platters. Despite the lavish use of dried chillies and Sichuan pepper, however, the food we ate didn’t seem to me very Sichuanese – there was a noticeable absence of chilli bean paste and sweet fermented paste, the classic spices of twice-cooked pork, and various ‘Sichuanese’ dishes weren’t cooked in the Chengdu or Chongqing style. Continue reading…