KEY POINTS:
A memoir about a bid to master Chinese cooking is also an example of travel writing at its finest. With superlative cookery books on the spicy cuisines of Sichuan and Hunan to her credit, Fuchsia Dunlop has earned the right to pronounce definitively on Chinese food. But her authority was hard won, as we learn from this robustly wrought memoir, destined, I think, to become a classic of travel writing and enough of a guide to the attitudes of ordinary Chinese that it ought to be read by anyone attending the Olympics this year.
Though she was born into a cosmopolitan Oxford family and educated at the "academic hothouse" of Oxford High and Cambridge, it still seemed odd that Dunlop - whose career started in the BBC, sub-editing news reports from the Asia-Pacific region - should veer off into the specialised world of Chinese food. Her first real exposure to what is one of the world's greatest food cultures occured 1992, when she went to Hong Kong and Guangzhou. In the latter's Qingping market she encountered the cages of "badgers, cats and tapirs" that are testimony to the willingness of the southern Chinese to regard most forms of life as potential food.
The next year found her in Taipei, beginning her mastery of the language (she now speaks and understands several dialects). Stopping off in Sichuan on her journey home, Dunlop had her first taste of the local food, with its lip-numbing peppercorns, chilli bean paste, "pig's kidneys cut into frilly, dainty morsels and stir-fried, fast, with celery and pickled chillies" and "buttery, fried 'fish-fragrant' aubergines" - perhaps realising her twin gifts for remembering flavours and having the ability to describe them deftly, elegantly and accurately.
A few months later, she was back in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, because, being "on the fringes of Han Chinese China, near the borderlands inhabited by Tibetans, Yi, Qiang" and other peoples, it was a suitable place to research Chinese policy on ethnic minorities. Here, Dunlop had to put up with duplicated HIV tests and warnings about subversive activities, before finally admitting to herself that she wasn't cut out for her "dry academic job" and that maybe she ought to pursue her fantasy of becoming a professional cook. She became the first - and only - Westerner to be a full-time student at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine and, finding there was more hostility to her sex than to her foreign origins, began the slow business of learning to think like a Chinese.
This is the real burden of her memoir, not that its author would put it so crassly. But at cooking college, she had to overcome her own, very un-Chinese, distaste for using MSG in every dish, master the nuances of the mouth-feel of, for example, slippery and rubbery-textured foods (dried sea cucumbers that resemble "fossilised turds") and learn how "to create dazzling fu hei wei [complex flavours]". A well-orchestrated Sichuanese meal "will awaken your taste buds through the judicious use of chilli oil, stimulate your tongue and lips with tingly Sichuan pepper, caress your palate with a spicy sweetness, electrify you with dry fried chillies, soothe you with sweet and sour, calm your spirits with a tonic soup".
Above all, she had to dispense with her own cultural taboos about eating. Chinese omnivorousness is the real deal - insects, vipers, bear paws, chicken feet. Her adventures with live caterpillars are not recorded to make her readers squirm, but to help us understand the radically different Chinese view of nutrition.
From Sichuan, Dunlop travels to Chairman Mao's fiery-food province of Hunan, where she experiences the paranoia and panic induced by the arrival of the Sars virus, which combines scarily with the vestiges of Mao-worship.
In the Silk Road town of Kashgar in Xinjiang province, she feels the perilous clash of competing Turkish and Eurasian Islamic influences with Buddhism, Confucianism and China's version of capitalism. In Yangzhou she begins to feel jaded, until rescued by a splendid dinner, described in that distinctive voice that marks out the very best travel writing and makes many pages of Dunlop worthy of comparison with Norman Lewis and Patrick Leigh Fermor.
SHARK'S FIN & SICHUAN PEPPER: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China
By Fuchsia Dunlop (Ebury Press $37.99)
- OBSERVER
