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.
