Chinese was the earliest truly global cuisine. When the first Chinese labourers began to sojourn and settle abroad, restaurants appeared in their wake. Yet Chinese food has the curious distinction of being both one of the world's best-loved culinary traditions and one of the least understood. For more than a century, the overwhelming dominance of a simplified form of Cantonese cooking ensured that few foreigners experienced anything of its richness and sophistication - but today that is beginning to change. In this book, the James Beard Award-winning cook and writer Fuchsia Dunlop explores the history, philosophy and techniques of China's rich and ancient culinary culture. Each chapter examines a classic dish, from mapo tofu to Dongpo pork, knife-scraped noodles to braised pomelo pith, to reveal a singular aspect of Chinese gastronomy, whether it's the importance of the soybean, the lure of exotic ingredients or the history of Buddhist vegetarian cuisine. Meeting local food producers, chefs, gourmets and home cooks as she tastes her way across the country, Fuchsia invites readers to join her on an unforgettable journey into Chinese food as it is made, cooked, eaten and considered in its homeland. Weaving together historical scholarship, mouth-watering descriptions of food and on-the-ground research conducted over the course of three decades, Invitation to a Banquet is a lively, landmark tribute to the pleasures and mysteries of Chinese cuisine.
This book by Dunlop elicits two reactions: the first is enthusiasm and admiration for the fine cuisine, or rather for the cuisines of that great nation. A consistent millennial development in search of the extreme enhancement of the most humble ingredient. It is a culture in the most original sense, the one born from cooking food, from fire. It rejects the uncooked, the raw, the unprocessed. Roasting is also seen as a primitive practice: the preferred cooking modes are boiling, steaming and, more recently, “salting” in the woke. The primary dishes of Chinese cuisine are the fan: steamed rice, very pure without any seasoning, not even salt, the geng: a very thick soup of vegetables with very fine pieces of fish, eggs, meat, chicken to taste, and finally the tang: the broth of meat or chicken, aromatic herbs, filtered until transparency. From these bases Chinese chefs come to sublime and complex recipes that practically do not exclude anything from human nutrition. Just one example: the slices of perch and water lily. Because this soup an imperial official left his position at the Northern court, where wheat and millet were eaten mainly, to return to his homeland in southern China, at Jiangnang The dish in Chinese is called Chun lu zhi si; where “white fish fillets mix in the broth to the gray-green pointed leaflets are put in.Pulling on a sheet with chopsticks you will find it wrapped in a layer of transparent jelly. In the mouth you will feel a moist and slippery sensation, a perfect combination with the silkiness of the fish. The water lily of the species Brasenia schreberi ... only when it is very fresh develops its incredible mucilaginous mantle.” This is an essay of the author's great ability to convey to us the charm and sensations of Chinese cuisine. A perfect book, wonderful, if it did not have its dark side: the author is unfortunately the cosubject of writing, always present on almost every page, with its history, its judgments and its values. The presence of the West and England continues, in particular the uncritical adherence to Western ideologies that condemn animal breeding and the Chinese State, also proposing terrorism on COVID, born, of course, in a Chinese wild animal market. The author who in words distances herself from racist and colonial attitudes, assumes in fact the role of a person of superior civilization who accesses everything and to whom everything is offered, almost a predator of flavors to take home from an European colony, as was done with India, whose chicken dish “Tikka Masala” has become the rich national dish of the otherwise gastronomically sad United Kingdom.