A Conversation with Fuchsia Dunlop on her book, Invitation to a Banquet
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Hello from London. Welcome to the New Voices podcast. I'm your host, Lydia Zhang, a New Voices board member and a rocket factory worker, tent writer and social commentator. Our guest is Fuchsia Donald, a British award-winning food writer. In fact, she's one of the best writers on Chinese food in the world, if not the best.

She was the first Westerner to train as a chef at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine. In the past 30 years, she has been eating her way across China and exploring the country through its food.

Her best-selling books include The Food of Sichuan, Shark's Fing and Sichuan Pepper, and The Land of Fish and Rice. Today, we're going to talk about her latest book, Invitation to a Banquet, the story of Chinese food and her own story with China and its food culture. Welcome to the show, Fisha. Hello, Li Zhao. Great to be here.

I've been so looking forward to interviewing you. You know, I'm a big foodie and I've written about Chinese food and food culture myself. To start with, may I ask you, how did you become interested in Chinese food? Not just because of those sweet and sour pork balls you had as a child.

Exactly. Well, I first went to China in 1992 and I went backpacking around the country and that was my first taste of real Chinese food. But at the time, you know, I didn't speak Chinese and it was a little difficult. But I tried a few things, but it was really when I after that first trip, I started learning Mandarin in evening classes and then.

Eventually, I got a British Council scholarship to study in China. That was in 1994. So I arrived in Chengdu, the Sichuanese capital, in 1994. I was there just a few months ago. It was lovely. Yes, and the food was just incredible. So at first, I just started eating very enthusiastically. I wanted to learn how to cook. And ever since I was a teenager, I'd been jotting down recipes and recipes.

menus in my journals. So I started asking local restaurants around the university if I could just visit their kitchens to learn a little from their chefs. Because at the time, as I'm sure you'll remember, foreigners were a real curiosity in China. And so quite a lot of them just said, yeah, come in, come in. And so I spent quite a lot of time in restaurant kitchens, just being

beginning to learn about what went into Sichuanese and Chinese cooking. And then a German friend and I heard about this famous cooking school, the Sichuan Institute of Cuisine. We cycled over there one day and managed to persuade them to give us some private cooking classes. And it was just the two of us, private classes with a translator, that kind of thing. But anyway, to fast forward after my year at the university,

I went back to say hello to my teachers and they said, oh, Fuchsia, we have this professional chef's training. Why don't you join in? And I immediately said yes. And so I spent the next few months in a class of about 50 young trainees, so 20 chefs, all but two of them men, actually. And that was my real grounding. So by then, I guess you...

didn't need an interpreter anymore, your Chinese was good enough to follow what was going on. Yes, I had a good foundation. But I mean, all the classes were taught in Sichuanese dialect, not in Mandarin. And of course, the vocabulary of cooking, I hadn't learned that in schools. So it was still a steep learning curve, although I had conversational Chinese by that stage.

The Chinese people are obsessed with food. We have a saying, 明日食为天, for the people, food is heaven. How would you translate 明日食为天?

Well, I think, you know, to the people, food is heaven. I mean, I think food is everything. It's the sort of foundation of life. Well, I cannot agree with more. I'm a good Chinese because I love food. I also love cooking. Everywhere I go, I try to take a cooking lesson. I guess food is quite a good way to understand the Chinese culture. Am I right to say so?

Absolutely, because I think that in my experience, people in China, you know, everyone practically is interested in eating and food and likes talking about it. And it's a real conversation opener. It's a way to make friends. And it's very revealing about, you know, about Chinese culture and all kinds of things. I mean, also art and society. I mean, things that you wouldn't immediately necessarily associate with food.

Now let's talk about your book, "Invitation to a Banquet." I must say it's a treat to read it. I've noticed it has been enjoying raving reviews. The New York Times wrote, "This book will not only entertain and instruct you, it might make you go mad with longing." Perhaps you wouldn't mind reading a short passage for us?

Okay. "It is raining when I arrive in Longjing one September afternoon. Someone greets me at the entrance to the Dragon Well Manor with an umbrella and shelters me through the sodden garden, the surrounding hills blurred by mist and water, the rain scribbling violent patterns on the surface of the pond.

We walk up stone steps to the main hall, and then into a side room lined with exotic stones on wooden plinths, where Adai is waiting for me. The chef has arranged a special dinner for the two of us. There are stir-fried river shrimps, little freshwater crabs, slivers of wild rice stem in a rich broth, and faintly bitter greens, but it is the final dish that most entrances me.

Red braised paddle, a Hangzhou speciality, is made with the tail of a giant carp and named after the way it swishes powerfully through the water. The tail is braised in stock with Shaoxing wine, dark soy sauce and sugar until its most intimate secretions have melted into the liquid, yielding a sauce as dark as mahogany and rich as double cream.

A waitress serves each of us with half the tale, a piece as long as a man's hand, laid alluringly on the plate in a sheeny slick of sauce. You should only eat a giant carp's tail in the company of someone you know well, because it's a brazenly messy business, with an unavoidable soundtrack of sucks and slurps.

The only actual flesh is a tiny nugget, cradled in a curve of cartilage at the distal end of the tail, which you might even tackle with chopsticks. After this easy picking, you must take the tail in your fingers so you can prise apart its two layers of spines, which are interleaved with thin seams of a sticky, ambrosial jelly. This you will want to lick out like nectar.

using your teeth to scrape and your tongue to suck along each quill to extract every last delicious thread leaving nothing but clean spines on the plate of course we wouldn't serve this to a normal foreigner says adai eyeing the ecstatic sore-strenched me sitting opposite him i lick my lips and carry on prizing out my treasure

by the time we have finished our hands lips and cheeks are streaky with sauce glossy with dark molten jelly outside the rain still drips softly through the osmanthus trees

Well done. So well chosen. I love your book. It is so well written. They just bring you there, fill you with longing for food. Now, please tell us what you have written quite a few books about. What inspired you to write this particular book and what it's about?

Well, it was really the fact that I think Chinese food is so popular and loved all over the world, but it's also terribly underestimated.

Many people in the West have got to know Chinese food through the takeaway, takeout culture, through a rather simplified style of food that was always tailored to the tastes of Westerners. And I think that that's changed certainly in the last few years, that there are more regional cuisines, there's more authentic food available.

But I think that Chinese food is still seen as kind of inexpensive, middle of the road. It's a cuisine that feels very familiar, but that actually people hardly know at all. So what I wanted to do with this book was try to look beyond those stereotypes and look at this culture.

absolutely enormous and diverse cuisine. I mean, China is huge. It's more of a continent than a country. And it has a very rich food gastronomic culture go back for hundreds, if not thousands of years. And so what I wanted to do was just in the way that my mind has been blown by traveling around China and just experiencing some of this shimmering diversity, I

to give readers a chance to look at many different aspects of Chinese food and cooking. And so the book is a collection of 30 dishes. So each chapter takes a dish as its theme and then uses that dish to look at a particular aspect of Chinese cooking. Some of the aspects historical, some of them technical cooking methods and also philosophical, the way people think about food.

So I'm just trying to show many different sides of this extraordinary cuisine. I like the way the book is structured. And also, I cannot imagine a better person to write a book like this because you have all the skills required. You can cook well, you can write well, and you know China well. Most importantly, Liji, I think I can eat well. LAUGHTER

I don't think eat well don't require much skill, or they do? Oh, I think it does. I think it does. You mentioned Chinese takeaway. So just about everywhere in the world you can find Chinese takeaway. But those dishes don't necessarily represent the Chinese cuisine, right?

Yeah, I mean, I think that historically, the first thing is that the vast majority of immigrants to America, to Britain and many other places came from the Cantonese South. And in fact, many of them from a relatively small part of this Cantonese South. Most of them were rice farmers who went abroad in search of a better life. They weren't...

skilled chefs necessarily. And then in the West, in America particularly, they faced terrible racial discrimination and the Chinese Exclusion Acts of the late 19th century. And what happened was an awful lot of them ended up working in catering and the laundry business. And if you can imagine that time, these people who weren't skilled chefs, who were facing

some social hostility, many of them were living not in Chinatowns, but spread out, you know, the only Chinese family in an otherwise white town. And they came up with a sort of formula of Chinese food that suited the circumstances, which was accessible, which was quite simple, which was very tasty and appealing, with lots of fried food, sweet and sour tastes,

these kind of things, and which was inexpensive and accessible. And it really hit the spot. I mean, it was a huge success all over the world. It's become an institution, but it was always...

very, very different from what even the people running the Chinese restaurants themselves were eating. So, you know, gone were all those lovely sides of Cantonese cooking, like the, you know, the simple, fresh stir-fried vegetables, the light soups, the steamed. So, yeah,

So Westerners were just seeing a sort of tiny aspect of Chinese food, let alone the fact that, you know, Cantonese is just one region. Chinese food in some way has been the victim of its own success, that it became established very early and it became very popular. And then people felt, well, this is what Chinese food is and didn't really see beyond it. Right.

Personally, as a Chinese person, I don't particularly like Chinese takeaway and some even Chinese restaurants abroad, I don't find the food there particularly appealing. The worst Chinese food I ever had was in Iowa. I was there, I got a fellowship to be on the International Writers Programme and I lived there for three, four months and I loved the experience.

the only downside was the food. The Chinese food was so bland. The Kung Pao chicken was not spicy at all. Sweet and sour pork was not sweet or sour. And every dish tasted more or less the same. Yes, so it was quite interesting you talk about how those Chinese food went abroad.

In your book, you mentioned that the Chinese cuisine is one of the best loved, but yes, also one of the least understood. In fact, there were plenty of misunderstandings about it. Could you please elaborate on that?

Yeah, well, I mean, I think one of the most ridiculous misunderstandings is the idea that Chinese food is unhealthy. So many Westerners like eating Chinese food, but they don't, you know, there's a stereotype that it's unhealthy because they associate it with lots of deep fried food. If there are noodles, rice, they're always fried. And this is the reason I say it's most ridiculous is that I think no other culture is as obsessed with

with the connection between diet and health as the Chinese. I totally agree. Food is medicine. And Chinese people, particularly the older generation, they talk constantly about how to eat, to maintain good health, to respond to the season, to any symptoms you may have, to changes in climate. And I think that, again, it came out of the takeaway culture and the fact that Westerners were not experiencing food

It's a typical traditional Chinese home cooking, which is all about steamed rice with lots of vegetables, a little bit of meat, deep frying really playing quite a minor role. Another stereotype, which is very misleading, is the idea that Chinese food is cheap because

Because, again, the takeaway culture. And of course, you know, in China, you have plenty of very inexpensive street food. But it's also a place with a highly sophisticated, transformational, labor-intensive banquet tradition, which in many ways resonates with the most esteemed haute cuisine, modernist cooking of

of the West, of the modern West. So yeah, that's another stereotype. And the other one, and one that I go into quite a lot in the book that I find really fascinating, is that there's this old stereotype about the Chinese eating everything.

So I want to go back on the point about the food and health. You know, as we were growing up, my grandmother would tell us, you know, not to eat too much chili pepper because they cause shang huo, cause... Rising fire. Yes, causing fire. Or certain herbs were good for your eyes. And you mentioned that the earliest Chinese written recipes were actually medical prescriptions.

And for more than 2000 years, food has been seen as a foundation of good health. And also if you look at the Chinese people, they are generally speaking, they are slimmer than the Westerners.

I think in modern China, sadly, a lot of people are now getting into the sort of unhealthy food that people are in the modern West as well. But the traditional Chinese diet, I think, could be a model for everyone in terms of how to eat. And I guess some of those practices are perhaps old wives' tales. For example, if you eat certain parts of animal organs, it'd be good for equivalent of human parts.

When I was young, when I had an important exam, my grandma used to feed me duck spray. So eating animals, male organs can supposedly enhance men's performance in bed.

I guess you've heard such stories. Absolutely, yeah. No, I mean, I think it's a sort of, you know, Chinese medicinal eating. It's a combination of real good sense about what works and what doesn't work with a bit of magic and, you know, folk culture as well. But as a whole system, it seems to me to be very effective at encouraging people to eat healthily to maintain good health.

You mentioned about the obsession in the West, believing that Chinese people love to eat weird food like dogs and bad soup. When the COVID pandemic started, one common belief was that China was to blame because its people ate bad soup. Do you often find yourself defending China or trying to set the record straight?

Well, I do really. I think this idea about the Chinese eating everything has always been seen very negatively in the West. To a certain extent, you can say that there's some truth in it. You know, Chinese are incredibly adventurous and open-minded when it comes to ingredients. So they don't really have many taboos. So it's very open-minded. Can I just...

I do believe there's a point here. I think Chinese cuisine is sort of famine cuisine, not only because Chinese people are adventurous, but also because it developed over centuries against the overwhelming odds of feeding the teeming population. So we had to learn how to make use of every bit of animal body and valuable resources.

But I don't think eating dog and bats are certainly the daily practice. I think what you say, that's certainly true, you know, that there were all these texts, you know, collection of advice on famine food. But the other thing is that at the highest echelons of Chinese society, you also find this adventurousness in eating, like eating boned out duck's feet. The Western stereotype was

the Chinese eat everything because they were very poor and desperate and sort of undiscriminating. But I think in some senses, the opposite is true. The Chinese eat everything because they're very discriminating and interested in the adventure of eating in textural aspects, which of course immediately makes possible to eat many things that would be rejected by Westerners. Things like jellyfish,

or cartilage that don't have any flavor but have intriguing textures so i think um and i think that this adventurousness it has a negative side which is eating things like shark's fins which is no longer sustainable so there is a trade in illegal wildlife delicacies in china but

But I think that the important thing to remember is that this is very much a minority pursuit and that most, you know, these illegal delicacies and even things like shark's fin, which are perfectly legal, that they're very expensive and very few people actually eat them relative to the size of the population. So while I think one should certainly not condone eating these things, and I think we

We all need to have a debate about more sustainable eating. I think it's important to remember, firstly, that it's not just a Chinese problem because Westerners, a lot of the meat and fish we eat is unsustainable. I think just pointing a finger at the Chinese, it's unfair because we're all in this together. So that's one aspect. But the other thing is that I think that the adventurous and creative approach to ingredients is,

is something really positive and inspiring and could be a model actually of sustainability because we all need to think more creative. We cannot go on just eating huge amounts of beef and Chinese cuisine offers a real model. For example, use small amount of meat to flavor vegetable dishes and make them delicious.

but also how to make the most of the food we have, like to use unlikely ingredients, like jellyfish, like pomelo, pith. You know, that's the subject of a chapter of my book. It's culinary technique and imagination to make these things that would be rejected in other cultures into delicious dishes. So I think I try to look at this in a kind of rounded way and in an objective way. Yes, I agree with you. And I also agree that the Western obsession in the kind of...

believing Chinese eat like loved eating weird food there's a negative connotation you mentioned that there's a lot of misunderstanding about Chinese food there's also a lot a lot of misunderstanding about China itself do you find a certain connection between them some paranoia between them well I suppose it's just you know if you have a sort of

lack of understanding and prejudice, that that goes across everything. And, you know, that it's reflected in attitudes both to food and to other aspects of China. And yeah, and it's just about people not having the chance to experience a

a more rounded picture. I mean, like people making judgments about Chinese food just on the basis of their takeaway experience or something maybe a bit broader, but still something that's only the tip of the iceberg. And similarly making judgments about China without sort of recognizing that it's a huge place with many different sides to it. And it's actually quite difficult to generalize. Yeah.

Chinese food is certainly an important part of our culture. Many years ago, I wrote to the food section for a guidebook. I remember talking about how the Toi's philosophy of yin-yang is applied in food culture. For example, when you order food, it should balance

You should balance meaty dishes with vegetable dishes, spicy with one non-spicy. In your book, you also talk about balance, the concept of balance. The same sort of thing as a philosophy in Yang, is that so?

Yes, I think so. It is. And it's about the idea that, for example, if you have very rich and heavy and excitingly flavoured dishes balanced with kind of the opposite, very gentle, soothing, lightly flavoured dishes...

And that this not only provides a more pleasurable experience because the palate doesn't become bored, having these contrasts between heavy and light, dry and wet, you know, light and shade, different colours, different shapes of dishes.

So it becomes very pleasing aesthetically, but it also makes you feel good because we're back again to the concept of health. Good food in China is very much about the sensory pleasure of eating, but it's equally about making you feel good and that balance.

You mentioned briefly that China is a huge country, it is a continent. I mean, I understand that there are eight different types of cuisine, like Cantonese and Shandong. Tell us something about those different styles. It's your favourite, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, there are different ways of looking at it. So there are, you know, as you said, there are the eight great cuisines, which is something that was

thought up in the 1980s. And there's another scheme, which is the four great cuisines, roughly North, South, East and West. Or you can look at the cuisines of different provinces, of which there are, you know, a few dozen. But I think that it's,

None of these schemes really gets into the complexity of Chinese cooking because, for example, Sichuanese cuisine is always seen as being one style of cooking. But even within Sichuan, there are huge regional differences. But conspicuously between Chengdu, which is where I lived, where the cooking is a bit spicy, but also there's a bit of sweetness and it's very melodious and harmonious style of cooking.

and the food of Chongqing historically seen as part of the same food region and there the food is really spicy mala that's where yes and all the hot pots yeah yes and again it's very different and that's even within one province and you can also go to a smaller scale with you know different sub-regions and counties and and towns within Sichuan with their own styles um

So I think that it's quite useful to generalize and to say, you know, think about four different cuisines or something like this. But actually, even within these regions, there's huge diversity and they all blend into each other. And then at the borders of China, you know, in North China, you find things in common with Mongolian cooking.

And in the Southeast, you have a lot in common with the foods of Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Southeast Asia. So it's a very complex picture. Now come to the recommendations and self-care. Let me go first. I take good care of myself. I eat well. I cook for myself and I go to gym four or five times a week, taking fitness classes, swimming and yoga.

I have to do lots of exercise because I eat too much. Do you feel, Cher, do you have a self-care regime? Not exactly a regime. No, I'm clearly much less disciplined than you. So I recently started doing a bit of running. I try to walk a lot. I do a bit of yoga and I also swim. All summer, particularly, I swim. I live near a wonderful outdoor sort of...

swimming place. But yes, a combination of things. But I certainly don't have what sounds like your punishing fitness regime. Not punishing because I'm a writer. I sit at home, so I need to break my day by going out to exercise, take a walk and things like that. Now, book recommendation. I recently read a book called Minor Detail by a Palestinian writer. There are two parts. The first part is

takes place in 1949, one year after the war, which saw some 700,000 Palestinians replaced. A young woman is caught, raped and then murdered. Many years later, another young Palestinian woman becomes obsessed with this historical minor detail and trying to find out what happened. You can guess the ending is not a happy one.

What's your recommendation? Any books and films to recommend? Well, right at the moment, I'm reading a very interesting food book called What's Cooking at the Kremlin by a Polish journalist. I haven't got it in front of me and I can't remember his surname, but it's Witold. I can't remember. Anyway, but it's a sort of travel book looking at food in Russia and the Soviet Union. And it's very interesting and rather cleverly written.

That's it for this week's episode with host Lee Ja Jang and guest Fuchsia Dunlop. Our production team is Saga Ringmar and Kyle Lung. Our editor is myself, Megan Cattell. Intro and outro music is by April Drew. Follow us on Twitter at New Voices and on Instagram at New Voices underscore network. Support our activities via Patreon.

Patrons are invited to play an active role in our community. You can subscribe at www.patreon.com slash new voices. Thank you so much. And until next time.