Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food

“She calls it Invitation to a Banquet, and it has this sense of reveling in the pleasures of Chinese food, and also reveling in – and this is what I’m drawn to most about it – the variation within Chinese cuisines, a term that decidedly should at times be used in the plural even if there are situations in which it can be used in the singular as well…Invitation to a Banquet moves across time, across thousands of years, and it moves across the country and goes outside of China. It begins with her talking about her first encounters with something called ‘Chinese food’ while growing up in England. This food was very different from anything that she encountered when she got to China…In Isabel Hilton’s wonderful review of the book in the Financial Times, she said there’s an almost pornographic quality to some of it. Dunlop is so good at evoking the sensual experience of eating food that it becomes almost food writing as a form of erotica.” Read more...

The Best China Books of 2023

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Historian