Fuchsia Dunlop
Fuchsia Dunlop was the first Western cook to study Sichuanese cookery at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in Chengdu, where she lived from 1994 to 1996. The author of several acclaimed works about Chinese cooking, including the memoir Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper, she consults for London’s first authentic Sichuan restaurants, Bar Shu and Bar Shan. An East Asia specialist at the BBC World Service, she also writes about Chinese food and current affairs for The Economist, The Guardian Weekly, The Financial Times, The China Review and Radio 4’s The Food Programme
Books by Fuchsia Dunlop
“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...
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Historian
Interviews with Fuchsia Dunlop
The best books on Chinese Food, recommended by Fuchsia Dunlop
The English chef who studied cooking in Sichuan tells us that there is no one Chinese cuisine, how Western perceptions of Chinese food are changing, and why carrots are called “barbarian radishes” in Mandarin
Interviews where books by Fuchsia Dunlop were recommended
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1
Sparks: China's Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future
by Ian Johnson -
2
Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution
by Tania Branigan -
3
Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food
by Fuchsia Dunlop -
4
Made in Taiwan: Recipes and Stories from the Island Nation
by Clarissa Wei -
5
Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet's Memoir of China's Genocide
by Tahir Hamut Izgil and translated by Joshua Freeman
The Best China Books of 2023, recommended by Jeffrey Wasserstrom
The Best China Books of 2023, recommended by Jeffrey Wasserstrom
The rise of China has led to an ever broader range of books about the country becoming available in English. There’s also a greater focus on its diversity, which the country’s Communist leadership likes to downplay. Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of Chinese history at UC Irvine, talks us through his favourite books of 2023, from painful historical episodes to the harsh policies targeting a largely Muslim ethnic group in Xinjiang today—by way of two lighter books that focus on food and cooking.
