Fuchsia Dunlop’s Ode to Chinese Food 

It’s 10 am on a sultry Friday morning at Soulshine, a luxurious retreat in Bali, Indonesia.
Chinese food specialist Fuchsia Dunlop is about to begin a talk on food writing, one of the Masterclasses at the recent Ubud Writers & Readers Festival.
Six of us are seated at outdoor dining tables around a large curved stage where Fuchsia, in black and white, is perched between large bright orange, yellow, green, gold and maroon Balinese woven decorations. The curvilinear design of the resort echoes the rice paddies below where a few rice farmers are ploughing  the terraces. They’ve been at it since dawn.
Along the back wall is written Togetherness in large capital letters, a reference to co-owner American singer songwriter Michael Franti’s recent international music tour.  He’d just returned the previous night from a six month tour of America with Spearhead but was on stage sporting a black bandana next morning to welcome her.

“Part of our mission here is to inspire curiosity and creativity and that’s my favourite thing about the Writers Festival and all the workshops’” he says. 
“I always leave feeling like I have a million ideas in my head and just curiosity.” 
On the wooden table in front of Fuchsia is her latest encyclopedic tome, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food published to great acclaim last year, along with one of her many notebooks, her iPhone and a few of her hand-written recipe cards.

Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food

Since writing the authoritative The Food of Sichuan, first published in 2001, she has gone on to write another six James Beard award-winning books including Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper, Every Grain of Rice and Land of Fish and Rice.
“She’s helped to inspire a new generation,” said Indian writer Amitav Ghosh who interviewed her on-stage a few days earlier. “Her recipes aren’t complicated.  Amateur cooks like me can cook from them.
“She’s done for Sichuan cuisine what Madhur Jaffrey did for Indian cuisine.”
During that interview she speaks of how traditional Chinese home cooking is not just delicious but also sustainable and nutritious.
“So many Westerners associate Chinese food with take-out and think of it as not being good for you. Yet Chinese people talk all the time about its health and medicinal aspects.
“The Chinese recognise, perhaps more than any people, how the taste of familiar foods give us our sense of belonging, tug at our deepest heartstrings, take us home.”
Her motivation, she says, was to fill a gap in the English speaking world and that the more she learns about Chinese food, the more she feels like a beginner.

Fuchsia Dunlop talking to Amatav Ghosh at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival 2024

She opens the Masterclass by asking us to introduce ourselves and to tell her what we’d like to get out of the session.
I’m intimidated by her impressive scholarly oeuvre and appreciate her welcoming gesture. How much, I wonder, might that word Togetherness have influenced her?
We’re a mixed group of copywriters, food photographers, food writers and editors.
She tells us she first went to China in 1994, fell in love with it and ended up training at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine, Chengdu, in a class of mostly male students where she learnt how to master the most essential tool in the Chinese kitchen, the razor-sharp cleaver.
On returning to London, she took up Mandarin language classes and completed a Master of Arts in Cultural Studies.

In this earlier memoir, Fuchsia tells of how she moved to Chengdu in the early 90s, neglected her studies and began to eat and eat …

“So what is food writing?” she asks, looking around intently at each of us.
“It can be anything,” she says. “Technical when writing recipes, descriptive when writing about how it feels to eat or about people, places and identity and even politics.”
She cites the example of Cooking in the Kremlin by Witold Szabłowski.
“Good writing is good writing,” she continues. “It’s important to read a lot, and not just about food. It’s also important to accurately record what people say. Catch the ideas when you can and write them down in a notebook. Take lots of notes and write down everything you observe and notice because it’s hard to remember what a place feels like.”
While mobile phones have made a difference in recalling the look of a dish, she cautions not becoming dependent on them.
“My notebooks are purely private, for my eyes only, and there’s a freedom in that.”

Fuchsia showing us one of her notebooks

She stresses the importance of reading your writing aloud, of “killing your darlings,” being ruthless.
“It’s like ironing. You need to iron out all the wrinkles until it’s like a tight piece of engineering.”
During her English studies at Cambridge University, she read widely and confesses she had problems meeting deadlines as a student because she was hampered by perfectionism. 
“I found it so stressful when I was doing my English Literature degree.”
Her advice is to make a draft, get it down, preferably in longhand, then re-shape it. She’ll often get on a train or visit a gallery when she’s stuck and can’t write,
“A change of scene often unlocks me.”
Her most important research is eating.
“You need to know what a dish tastes like. That’s how I find out about its history and cooking techniques. Getting out of a Western mindset especially regarding the texture of food is also important.”
When writing recipes, describing how a dish should look or smell is more important to her than giving times.
“I make a commitment to ensure my recipes taste authentic and try to strike a balance. Some American recipes are so detailed I find them intimidating.”
Returning to her latest book Invitations, she explains it was written during the pandemic, that she’s been thinking about Chinese cuisine for 30 years and that she wanted to go more deeply into the subject in this book.
Her first book on Sichuan cookery was rejected by six publishers because they said its subject was too narrow.
“There were no Sichuan restaurants in London at that time, yet Sichuan is the size of France.
“Chinese parents can’t believe my parents let me become a food writer because being a doctor or lawyer is far more important to them,” she says. “They read it as a book about following your dreams.”
A welcoming breeze moves the thick humid air around us. We shift in our seats. I can hear the rice farmers in the rice paddies below tilling away in the blazing sun and am reminded of a Chinese saying about how every grain of rice is a drop of sweat from a farmer’s brow.

The rice paddies at Soulshine, Mas, Bali

“Shall we do a little exercise?” she asks us quizzically.
She tosses a few dark brown scaly fruits out of a bag and asks each of us to take one.
“Let’s take a ten minute break while you write about this fruit.”
The word salak instantly pops into my brain, a tropical fruit I haven’t seen or tasted in over a decade. Its thin snake-like skin is easy to peel and reveals a firm creamy coloured interior which breaks into three segments which taste a little sour like a Granny Smith and a little sweet like a lychee.
She asks each of us to read what we’ve written and appreciates the variety and imagination of each piece of writing.

With the group of food editors, writers and food photographers who attended the Masterclass

“How do you get people to get over their prejudices and try something new? How do you grab their attention?” she asks and mentions an article for the Financial Times she wrote about chicken feet, fish maw and duck’s tongue.
“When a Chinese person explains why they find a particular food delightful, they almost always mention texture as part of its appeal. Many Chinese people positively seek out the slithery, slimy, snappy, bouncy, rubbery, skiddy and gristly textures that westerners typically dislike” she writes in that article.
“I like to write about tricky and disconcerting subjects. I  try to make it very vivid and immediate and to make the ending a jumping off point for further thinking”, she tells us.
She points out that in this era of food insecurity, the fact that Chinese eat everything is something to be celebrated.
“They are true epicureans who appreciate mouthfeel which is a whole extra dimension of gastronomy.”
And she wonders why people aren’t looking to China for sustainable vegan foods and mentions specialist Buddhist vegetarian temples where all the dishes are made from plants and transformed into different textures.
“Our vegetarian lunch at the Temple of Divine Light is part of a tradition that dates back at least to the Tang Dynasty, when a devoutly Buddhist official, Cui Anqian, hosted a banquet at which he served remarkably realistic replicas of pork shoulder, leg of lamb and other meats made from plant ingredients,” she writes in Invitation.
Referring to another article in the Financial Times, a profile of an extraordinary 70-something female Shandong chef Wang Xinlan, she talks about how she grappled for a long time with it.
“There were three themes (Shandong food, Wang Xinlan and a travelogue) and I just had so much to say. I wrote and re-wrote it.”
She left me eager to devour all seven of her books and try some of her recipes (though I might sidestep the spicy rabbit heads), and with a million ideas swimming around in my head.
To give you a taste, you’ll find her recipe for Gong Bao Chicken here.