Invitation to a Banquet
The Story of Chinese Food
-
- $21.99
-
- $21.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE FORTNUM AND MASON FOOD BOOK AWARD
'A brilliant, passionate and spellbinding tour de force' Claudia Roden
'Fuchsia Dunlop is one of the world's best writers on Chinese food' Ken Hom CBE
The epic tale of the world's most sophisticated gastronomic culture, told through a banquet of thirty Chinese dishes
Chinese was the earliest truly global cuisine. When the first Chinese labourers began to sojourn and settle abroad, restaurants appeared in their wake. Yet Chinese food has the curious distinction of being both one of the world's best-loved culinary traditions and one of the least understood. For more than a century, the overwhelming dominance of a simplified form of Cantonese cooking ensured that few foreigners experienced anything of its richness and sophistication - but today that is beginning to change.
In this book, the James Beard Award-winning cook and writer Fuchsia Dunlop explores the history, philosophy and techniques of China's rich and ancient culinary culture. Each chapter examines a classic dish, from mapo tofu to Dongpo pork, knife-scraped noodles to braised pomelo pith, to reveal a singular aspect of Chinese gastronomy, whether it's the importance of the soybean, the lure of exotic ingredients or the history of Buddhist vegetarian cuisine. Meeting local food producers, chefs, gourmets and home cooks as she tastes her way across the country, Fuchsia invites readers to join her on an unforgettable journey into Chinese food as it is made, cooked, eaten and considered in its homeland.
Weaving together historical scholarship, mouth-watering descriptions of food and on-the-ground research conducted over the course of three decades, Invitation to a Banquet is a lively, landmark tribute to the pleasures and mysteries of Chinese cuisine.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dunlop (The Food of Sichuan) takes a rich and textured tour through the history of Chinese cuisine, from the mythical tribal leader Suiren's discovery of fire to the spread of Chinese takeout restaurants around the world. Chapters center on steamed rice, the "sacred grain" first domesticated in the Yangtze River valley in Neolithic times, and so central to Chinese culture that chi fan ("to eat cooked grain") also means "to have a meal"; mapo tofu, which was created in the north of Chengdu in the late 19th century for workers carrying toasted rapeseed oil to the city's markets; and "gloriously rich" dongpo pork, which was discovered by an 11th-century servant of the Song dynasty poet Su Dongpo, who misunderstood his master's cooking instructions and accidentally braised the meat with rice wine instead of serving the two separately (Dunlop segues this anecdote into an intriguing discussion of pork as "lowbrow, perhaps even a little vulgar... pork is what you eat at home, greedily and happily"). Adeptly employing food as a window through which to capture the complexity of Chinese culture, Dunlop stirs in lush and endlessly creative descriptions (song sao yu geng, a fish stew that's "neither solid nor completely liquid, is a swirling kaleidoscope of colour, like Venetian glass made edible, the flow of the ingredients held motionless by the starch that thickens the broth"). This is sure to whet readers' appetites.
