The journey begins with sweet-and-sour pork balls. A staple of Chinese take-away restaurants in 1970s England, these were school-age Fuchsia Dunlop’s introduction to the cuisine that would change her life. Or, more accurately, one of the cuisines. For in her new book, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food, Dunlop dispels the notion that the cooking of more than a billion people spanning vast regions of geographic diversity can be usefully reduced to just “Chinese food.”
There are more Chinese restaurants in the United States than there are locations of McDonald’s, Burger King, and KFC combined, Dunlop notes in the introduction. Chinese food is ubiquitous and well loved the world over, from family-owned joints to Panda Express. “Yet, from another perspective, Chinese food has also been the victim of its own success,” writes Dunlop. “The resounding popularity of a simplified, adapted, even bastardized form of Cantonese cuisine, first developed in North America and then scattered like confetti all over the world, with its childish predictability and limited range, its bright colors, sweet-sour and salty flavors, deep-fried snacks and stir-fried noodles, has clouded appreciation of the diversity and sophistication of Chinese gastronomic culture.”
Dunlop has been working to change that perception for more than 20 years, starting with her 2003 guide to Sichuan cooking, Land of Plenty (recently updated and reissued as The Food of Sichuan), and later cookbooks focused on Hunan, Jiangnan, and everyday Chinese home fare. In her latest, she leaves recipes and food photography behind for a purely prose exploration of Chinese cuisine. Each chapter is nonetheless anchored to a specific dish chosen to illuminate an aspect of the nation’s gastronomy.
At first, I lamented the lack of recipes, but many of these dishes would be wildly impractical to cook at home. Bear’s paw, an archaic dish chosen to illustrate interest in the rare and exotic, is not something you’re going to find in the butcher’s counter at Whole Foods. You could perhaps obtain enough duck tongues to prepare a meal, but cooking them for yourself somewhat misses the point. The appeal of duck tongue lies less in its particular culinary qualities than in the blunt fact that there is only one per duck. To be served the duck’s tongue or the pig’s ears or the goose’s feet is a sign of status. “The frisson of knowing that you are the chosen ones, dining on the finest and scarcest ingredients the restaurant has to offer, is one of the secret pleasures of the Chinese gourmet,” Dunlop writes.
This inverts the usual Western perception that poverty drives the eager consumption of these odd parts. Offal has been featured in the high echelons of Chinese cooking long before its more recent elevation in Western fine dining restaurants and hip gastropubs. These less meaty pieces also give Chinese cooking a richer array of textural qualities than is commonly appreciated in the West. Dunlop writes evocatively of messily sucking the jelly out from between the spines of red-braised carp tail and of enjoying the slithery snap of fish maw.
“Eating a fish tail or a goose foot is like a playful tussle with a lover,” Dunlop writes. “You want your food to offer a little mischievous resistance, not lie in your arms like a dead fish.” She devotes four pages to a glossary of purely textural terms. It’s as if there is an entire dimension of appreciation for the rubbery and crunchy that we in the West are missing out on.
It would be a mistake to dwell too much on exotica, however. The staples of Chinese diets are more familiar fare: rice, pork, greens, and tofu. Each gets their due here, from luscious pork belly to the ginger- and garlic-laced vegetable stir-fries that make eating one’s greens a delight. A chapter on tofu highlights the centrality of soybeans and their many transformations: soy milk into the tofu itself, soy sauce as ubiquitous seasoning, and fermented soybeans as potent umami flavor bombs. They all come together in ma po tofu, perhaps the greatest case for tofu ever made, irresistible even to the most carnivorous with its lip-tingling Sichuan pepper and spicy chili paste.
Dunlop laments that Chinese restaurants in the West tend to offer an unchanging menu year-round. Appreciation for regional and seasonal produce has a long history in China, at least for the elites. Now there are signs of renewal. After decades of degradation of ingredients caused by 20th-century events — war, Cultural Revolution, environmental damage — Chinese urbanites are showing interest in their own kind of farm-to-table movement. In the United States, diners are learning to appreciate distinctively regional Chinese restaurants, particularly ones specializing in Sichuan cuisine.
Thanks in no small part to Dunlop’s own evangelism, it’s now possible to find ingredients that were unobtainable when I first began cooking from her books. Back then, I could only buy cheap, low-quality Sichuan peppercorns: dull red, seedy, and bland. These pale in comparison to the single harvest varietals available now through online purveyors, vibrant in color and wildly aromatic with notes of citrus peel and flower. The same could be said for naturally fermented soy sauces, aged black vinegars, or Pixian chili pastes.
Good restaurants and ingredients come at a price. Dunlop rightly laments that Westerners proclaim their love of Chinese food but balk at spending on it the way we do for European or Japanese cuisine. Most American readers of Invitation to a Banquet will never travel to China, although Dunlop’s descriptions of her meals there may ignite a desire to do so. Consider this instead an invitation to be a better patron in the U.S.: by trying more adventurous dishes, of course, but also by spending more generously on the cooks, restaurateurs, and purveyors elevating American Chinese food above its role as cheap takeaway fare. One may never lose affection for sweet-and-sour stir-fry, but there is so much more to explore.
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Jacob Grier is the author of several books, including The New Prohibition, The Rediscovery of Tobacco, and Raising the Bar.
