Fuchsia Dunlop may be an Englishwoman but her culinary deftness definitely has a very Chinese flavour. Fuchsia Dunlop is the Sichuanese Queen of Cookery. She is a fluent Mandarin speaker and spent years in Chengdu studying Sichuanese cooking at Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine. Her ‘Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province’ is an excellent resource for anybody interested in regional Chinese cookery. The book is mostly recipes from the Hunan region, part social and travelogue. Her unpretentious narrative about the people she meets and the region is refreshing and inspiring. She doesn’t name drop, she doesn’t mention friends in high places – the people she associates with are down-to-earth village people she has met and befriended on her journeys. Her use of ingredients is authentic and never overdone or so oversimplified that the cuisine loses its appeal. Her taste is refined and suited to the Chinese palate. We can expect to find recipes for dishes we won’t normally find in a Sichuanese restaurant – these recipes come straight from her travels and from the families she’s stayed with. Expect to find dishes like sitr-fried bitter melon with chinese chives, lily flower, cloud ear and sliced pork soup, mung bean and rice porridge. Dunlop understands the balance of sweet, sour, savoury and spicy in her recipes – the recipes reflect the sophistication and diversity of the food in the Hunan region. If you’d like a recipe for Chairman Mao’s favourite dish – red-braised pork, it’s even in here. For those new to China and its varied regional cuisines – this is a wonderful introduction to the region; Dunlop demonstrates how to marry different elements of flavour, balancing the characteristic Sichuanese peppercorn chilli-hit with other subtle taste dimensions as well. One gets the feeling that she is sensitive and respectful to the people featured in the book and it shows in her rich narrative and cooking.
Angus and Robinson slashed that book's price to a ridiculous bargain rate, so I got my paws on it when I visited them that day! Great review. I've been cooking a lot from Fuschia Dunlop's cookbook over the past year or so. Hunanese cooking is similar to Sichuanese in the sense that both cuisines favour pungent ingredients and piquant tastes. But Sichuanese has a lot more variety in terms of seasoning, is more sophisticated if we are to judge the depth of its culinary repertoire, and not everything that comes out of Sichuan province is blisteringly hot and spicy. Hunanese cooking tends to be simpler, hearty peasant cooking. They are definitely obsessed with chilli peppers alright, and aren't shy about letting the rest of the world. Dunlop even included a translated poem whic jokes about how even the people of Sichuan and Guizhou couldn't match the Hunanese, who are supposedly afraid of anything that doesn't have chillis in it! Having eaten a lot of blisteringly hot food back home, I have no problems chowing down on the fiery hot Hunanese stuff. But now that my sister's moved in, I have to tone things dwown somewhat....
ReplyDeleteThe origin story of the General Tso's Chicken dish also reminds of Chicken Tikka Masala, another not-so-authentic dish from another cuisine with similarly dubious origins.