Fuchsia Dunlop

You can hear me talking about eating shark’s fin (or not) on the BBC today (or read the piece here).

While I was writing it, I came across a page I tore out of the South China Morning Post in October last year. It includes a letter from Dr Choo-hoo Giam, a member of the animals committee of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. What is particularly interesting about the letter is that Dr Giam points out the extent to which it is not only the Chinese and their notorious shark’s fin soup that are to blame for the devastation of worldwide shark stocks. The main points Dr Giam makes are as follows: Continue reading…

Slow-cooked bear paw with duck wings - image from an old Chinese cookery book

The Chinese penchant for eating endangered species is in the news again. Today the BBC ran a report by Moscow correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes about the poaching of Asiatic black bears in northeastern Russia. The culprits? Suppliers of bear’s paws and gall bladders to China, where the paws are an ancient delicacy, and the gall is prized for its medicinal properties. And last week, the official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported that a man in Yunnan Province had been jailed for 12 years for killing, and then eating, a rare and endangered Indochinese tiger (in this case, the man at least claimed that it had been shot accidentally, after dark.)

Bear’s paw is one rare Chinese delicacy that I have never been offered, thank goodness. If in the future I do see one on a dinner table, rest assured that I will restrain my curiosity and refuse it. And yet I can’t help wondering if eating such things, gross and unconscionable though it may be, is any worse than driving a car, travelling by plane, using consumer goods whose manufacture and disposal causes catastrophic pollution, or eating a lot of factory-farmed meat. It’s much easier to make a moral point by refusing bear’s paw (particularly if it’s not part of your own culture) than it is to address seriously the impact of our consumerist lifestyles on the planet and its biodiversity, isn’t it?

Camellia oil, hot off the press

There’s an article of mine in the Financial Times Weekend today, about the dilemmas facing China’s artisanal food producers.

The picture on the right was taken at the camellia oil press described in the article, just after I’d tasted the oil.

Mango pancake at the Sea Treasure restaurant in Sydney

I was intrigued while in Sydney to find ‘mango pancakes’ an apparent staple of Chinese restaurants there. I’ve never come across this speciality anywhere in China, even in Hong Kong (which some chatters on the Web suggest is its place of origin). For those of you who haven’t come across them, mango pancakes consist of a normal sort of pancake stuffed with whipped cream and chopped fresh mango – delicious, but not typically Chinese at all.

Is the mango pancake the General Tso’s chicken or the fortune cookie of Sydney (or the whole of Australia), i.e. a Chinese diaspora creation that has become an indispensable part of a particular immigrant Chinese culinary culture?

I’d love to hear from any blog-readers out there who know more… Has anyone seen this kind of mango pancake anywhere else in the world? Hong Kong? Other Australian cities? Anyone have any idea when it started to appear in Sydney Chinese restaurants? Do all Cantonese restaurants in Sydney, or Australia, serve them, or just a few? Please let me know!

Sekerci Cafer Erol

While I was in Turkey, my friend Aylin took me to a marvellous sweet shop in Kadıköy – Sekerci Cafer Erol, an old family business specialising in lokum (Turkish delight) and pulled sweets in all kinds of exotic flavours. The proprietor, M. Nurtekin Erol, let us taste various things, including some experimental lokums made with flavourings such as Turkish coffee and black pepper.

Of course I’d arrived in Istanbul with a small supply of Chinese cooking spices, just in case, and so I returned to the shop a few days later with a pot of top-grade Sichuan pepper from my friend Yu Bo’s restaurant in Chengdu. I thought they must have fun playing with it, and told them a little about its uses in Sichuanese cookery. Continue reading…

It’s been a while since I posted here, mainly because I was away on holiday for a couple of weeks, and then came back to an avalanche of things to do. Still, it was a fantastic break, staying in with friends in Istanbul and then on Büyükada, the largest of the Princes’ Islands.

For once, instead of just biting everything I came across, I was actually bitten myself, by the pet dog of a friend of a friend. The small, ferocious, yapping creature jumped up my skirt and bit me, hard, on the leg. It was shocking, and painful, not quite deep enough to draw blood, but enough to leave me with a vivid, jaw-shaped ring of toothy bruises. Continue reading…

A bizarre story in the Guardian this week: apparently Chinese immigrants are surprising the people of Tuscany by gathering and eating jellyfish. Actually I always recommend jellyfish as an initiation into the pleasures of mouthfeel in Chinese food: a cool salad of ribboned jellyfish and cucumber with a light sesame oil fragrance is not in any way frightening, and very easy to enjoy, even for people who dislike the idea of eating jellyfish. But I’ve never come across them deep-fried – have any readers of this blog? I’d be interested to hear about it.

You can hear me on BBC Radio Four’s The Food Programme, talking about suckling pigs in Chinese culinary culture.  The programme went out yesterday, and will be broadcast again this afternoon, at 4pm UK time. It’s also available on the web.

Imagine my surprise to find that hairy crabs, that legendary Chinese delicacy of the autumn, eulogised by the seventeenth century Chinese playwright (and erotic novelist) Li Yu, are appearing in vast numbers in the Thames in London! Just look at this article in today’s Independent newspaper.

Hairy crabs from the Yangcheng Lake (photo taken in Suzhou)

I love the idea of being able to steam them, and eat them with Chinkiang vinegar, ginger and Shaoxing wine, at home in London.

If you haven’t tasted hairy crab, and wonder what all the fuss is about, here is what Li Yu had to say about them:

‘While my heart lusts after them and my mouth enjoys their delectable taste (and in my whole life there has not been a single day when I have forgotten them), I can’t even begin to describe or make clear why I love them, why I adore their sweet taste, and why I can never forget them… Dear crab, dear crab, you and I, are we to be lifelong companions?’

There is a chapter featuring hairy crabs in my Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper book. And if anyone is interested in Li Yu’s outrageous and hilarious erotic novel, The Carnal Prayer Mat, follow this link.

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