Fuchsia Charlotte Dunlop [1] is an English writer and cook who specialises in Chinese cuisine, especially Sichuan cuisine. She is the author of seven books, including the autobiographical Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper (2008). According to Julia Moskin in The New York Times , Dunlop "has done more to explain real Chinese cooking to non-Chinese cooks than anyone". [2]
Dunlop was brought up in Oxford, daughter of (Michael) Bede Dunlop and Carolyn Patricia, née Baxter. Her father, a Corpus Christi College, Oxford-educated computer analyst, is son of David Colin Dunlop, Dean of Lincoln from 1949 to 1964 and subsequently an Assistant Bishop of Lincoln. Her mother was a sales executive. [3] [4] She attended Oxford High School, a private day school for girls. [5] She studied English literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge (BA 1991). [1] She worked as a sub-editor on East Asian media reports for the BBC Monitoring Unit at Caversham. [6] [ better source needed ] She took evening classes in Chinese at the University of Westminster, volunteered as a writer and editor on China Now and visited China twice. She reported being determined to eat "whatever the Chinese might put in front of me" [7] but that her gastronomic experiences were "random and haphazard". In 1994 she won a British Council scholarship for a year of postgraduate study in China where she chose to study at Sichuan University. She began as a researcher on Chinese ethnic minorities but eventually stayed on to take a three-month chef’s training course at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine. [8]
Returning to London, Dunlop studied for an Area Studies master's degree at SOAS and began to review Chinese restaurants for the Time Out Eating Guide to London. Continuing to write on Chinese food for newspapers and magazines, she now worked on her first book, rejected by several publishers as "too regional" [9] but published as Sichuan Cookery in Britain (2001) and as Land of Plenty in the United States (2003). It won the Guild of Food Writers Jeremy Round Award for a best first book. [10]
For her next book, Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, she looked eastwards. Hunan province is "revolutionary" as the birthplace of Mao Zedong, but Hunan cuisine, unlike that of its neighbour Sichuan, was scarcely known outside China: "Both are fertile, subtropical areas with rugged, wild terrain and rich cropland fed by major rivers, and they share robust folk cooking, big flavors and blazing hot chilies. Yet [she] argues persuasively for Hunan as a separate culinary presence", Anne Mendelson wrote in a review in The New York Times . [11] [12] Continuing an exploration of regional Chinese food, in "Garden of Contentment" (in The New Yorker , 2008) Dunlop profiled the Dragon Well Manor, [13] a restaurant that is "committed to offering its guests a kind of prelapsarian Chinese cuisine" in Hangzhou, a centre of the ancient region of Jiangnan. [14] The cookery of this same region, modern Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces, is covered in her third regional cookbook, Land of Fish and Rice (2016). In China, she explains, this cuisine "is known historically for its extraordinary knife work, delicate flavors [and] extreme reverence for ingredients," [15] as encapsulated in the nostalgic phrase chún lú zhī sī "thinking of perch and water shield", two ancient local specialities. [9]
Meanwhile with Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking (2012) [16] [17] Dunlop gained her fourth James Beard Award. [8] Her journalism includes frequent articles on cooking and restaurants in China for publications including the Financial Times , Saveur , Observer Food Monthly , 1843 and the now-defunct Lucky Peach and Gourmet . Her cookbooks are praised for explaining "real Chinese cooking" to cooks from elsewhere, [2] and for identifying and highlighting local ingredients such as the bridal veil mushroom of Sichuan's "jade web soup", [8] the fermented soy and broad bean sauce of Hunan, Zhejiang's aquatic vegetables like water bamboo and fox nuts, [9] and the "intensely flavored cured ham from Jinhua". [13] "Extra-culinary insights" have also been noted: she captures "fading memories of the many violent 20th-century transformations" of the Chinese provinces (quotes by Anne Mendelson). [11] Her autobiographical memoir, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper (2008), won the IACP Jane Grigson Award and the Guild of Food Writers Kate Whiteman Award. Paul Levy, in a review in The Observer , noted a "distinctive voice that marks out the very best travel writing". The focus is on her long and deep experience of Chinese cuisine, an early landmark being her visit to Qingping Market in Guangzhou in 1992, encountering "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". [18] There have been moments of doubt, as quoted in a New York Times review, "as if my gastronomic libido is slipping away ... I’ve seen the sewer-like rivers, the suppurating sores of lakes. I’ve ... breathed the toxic air and drunk the dirty water. And I’ve eaten far too much meat from endangered species". [7] But at length, learning to think like a Chinese person and to "dispense with her own cultural taboos about eating", as Levy says, [18] she has recognized in her own life the progression "from ‘eating to fill your belly’ (chi bao), through ‘eating plenty of rich food’ (chi hao) to ‘eating skillfully’ (chi qiao)". [7] [19]
Chinese cuisine comprises cuisines originating from China, as well as from Chinese people from other parts of the world. Because of the Chinese diaspora and historical power of the country, Chinese cuisine has profoundly influenced many other cuisines in Asia and beyond, with modifications made to cater to local palates. Chinese food staples such as rice, soy sauce, noodles, tea, chili oil, and tofu, and utensils such as chopsticks and the wok, can now be found worldwide.
A cuisine is a style of cooking characterized by distinctive ingredients, techniques and dishes, and usually associated with a specific culture or geographic region. Regional food preparation techniques, customs, and ingredients combine to enable dishes unique to a region.
James Andrews Beard was an American chef, cookbook author, teacher and television personality. He pioneered television cooking shows, taught at The James Beard Cooking School in New York City and Seaside, Oregon, and lectured widely. He emphasized American cooking, prepared with fresh, wholesome, American ingredients, to a country just becoming aware of its own culinary heritage. Beard taught and mentored generations of professional chefs and food enthusiasts. He published more than twenty books, and his memory is honored by his foundation's annual James Beard Awards.
Sichuan cuisine or Sichuanese cuisine, alternatively romanized as Szechwan cuisine or Szechuan cuisine, is a style of Chinese cuisine originating from Sichuan province and the neighboring Chongqing municipality. Chongqing was formerly a part of Sichuan until 1997; thus, there is a great deal of cultural overlap between the two administrative divisions. There are many regional, local variations of Sichuanese cuisine within Sichuan and Chongqing.
English cuisine encompasses the cooking styles, traditions and recipes associated with England. It has distinctive attributes of its own, but is also very similar to wider British cuisine, partly historically and partly due to the import of ingredients and ideas from the Americas, China, and India during the time of the British Empire and as a result of post-war immigration.
A cookbook or cookery book is a kitchen reference containing recipes.
Jane Grigson was an English cookery writer. In the latter part of the 20th century she was the author of the food column for The Observer and wrote numerous books about European cuisines and traditional British dishes. Her work proved influential in promoting British food.
Ching-He Huang (Chinese: 黃瀞億; pinyin: Huáng Jìngyì; Wade–Giles: Huang2 Ching4-i4;, often known in English-language merely as Ching, is a Taiwanese-born British food writer and TV chef. She has appeared in a variety of television cooking programmes, and is the author of nine best-selling cookbooks. Ching is recognized as a foodie entrepreneur, having created her own food businesses. She has become known for Chinese cookery internationally through her TV programmes, books, noodle range, tableware range, and involvement in many campaigns and causes.
The Jane Grigson Award is an award issued by the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP). It honours distinguished scholarship and depth of research in cookbooks and is named in honour of the British cookery writer Jane Grigson.
Eileen Yin-Fei Lo was a chef. She authored eleven cookbooks on Chinese cuisine.
Anne Mendelson is an American food journalist and culinary historian. She lives in Hudson County, New Jersey, with her cat, and believes that the medley of ethnic cooking in her neighborhood, combined with memories from her childhood in rural Pennsylvania, provided inspiration for her writing.
Red braised pork belly or hong shao rou is a classic pork dish from China, red-cooked using pork belly and a combination of ginger, garlic, aromatic spices, chilies, sugar, star anise, light and dark soy sauce, and rice wine. The pork belly is cooked until the fat and skin are gelatinous, soft, and melt easily in the mouth, while the sauce is usually thick, sweet and fairly sticky. The dish has a melt-in-the-mouth texture that is formed as a result of a long braising process, during which the liquid reduces and becomes thick. It is generally served with steamed rice and dark green vegetables, often over holidays. The dish is often prepared with hard-boiled chicken eggs or vegetables, which are used to soak up the juices from the recipe.
Recipes from the Garden of Contentment is a work on cooking and gastronomy written by the Qing-dynasty painter and poet Yuan Mei. It is known in English under various titles, including Food Lists of the Garden of Contentment, Menus from the Garden of Contentment, Recipes from Sui Garden and The Way of Eating. It was originally published in 1792, and contains instructions and critiques on Chinese cuisine as well as a large number of recipes of dishes from the period. It was updated by Xia Chuanzheng in the late 19th century, and not translated into English in complete form until 2018.
Twice-cooked pork or double-cooked pork is a Chinese dish in Sichuan cuisine. The pork is simmered, sliced, and then stir-fried -- "returned to the wok." The pork is accompanied with stir-fried vegetables, most commonly garlic sprouts, but often baby leeks, cabbage, bell peppers, onions, or scallions. The sauce may include Shaohsing rice wine, hoisin sauce, soy sauce, sugar, ginger, chili bean paste, and sweet wheat paste.
Yuxiang is a seasoning mixture in Chinese cuisine, and also refers to the resulting sauce in which meat or vegetables are cooked. It is said to have originated in Sichuan cuisine, and has since spread to other regional Chinese cuisines.
Maria Guarnaschelli was an American cookbook editor and publisher. In a career spanning five decades she worked with and groomed popular food authors including Rose Levy Beranbaum, Rick Bayless, Julie Sahni, Fuchsia Dunlop, J. Kenji López-Alt, and Judy Rodgers. Some of the notable cookbooks published by her included Classical Indian Cooking,All New All Purpose Joy of Cooking, The Food Lab, The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, and The Cake Bible. Her works were noted to have contributed to a change in how cookbooks were produced, and also credited with introducing American households and chefs to international cuisines beyond just European cuisines.
Sri Owen is an Indonesian cooking teacher and food writer, based in London for most of her life. She is the author of the first English-language recipe book dedicated to the food of Indonesia, and is recognised as a leading authority on Indonesian cuisine.
Louisa Shafia is an American chef and cookbook author. Her 2009 cookbook Lucid Food focuses on local and sustainable eating. The New Persian Kitchen (2013) features traditional Persian dishes as well as reinterpretations.
Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food is a 2023 book by Fuchsia Dunlop, published by W. W. Norton & Company in the United States and by Particular Books in the United Kingdom.
Sichuan Cookery, published in the United States as Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking, is a 2001 cook book by Fuchsia Dunlop. It was published in the United States by W. W. Norton.
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