Fuchsia Dunlop


Fuchsia Dunlop is an English writer and cook who specialises in Chinese cuisine, especially that of Sichuan, and was the first westerner to train as a chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in Chengdu. She is the author of five books, including the autobiographical Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper. According to Julia Moskin in the New York Times, Dunlop "has done more to explain real Chinese cooking to non-Chinese cooks than anyone".

Life and work

Brought up in Oxford, she studied English literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Already an adventurous cook, she became fascinated by China while working as a sub-editor on East Asian media reports for the BBC Monitoring Unit at Caversham. 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 had determined to eat "whatever the Chinese might put in front of me" but her gastronomic experiences were "random and haphazard". A few days in Chengdu introduced her to classic Sichuan food such as mapo doufu and yuxiang qiezi. 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 initially 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, the first westerner ever to do this.
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" but published as Sichuan Cookery in Britain and as Land of Plenty in the United States. It won the Guild of Food Writers Jeremy Round Award for a best first book. A different measure of the book's success is the frequency with which Dunlop is named by other authors as the expert on Sichuan food. She has made many television appearances as local expert, hosted by Anthony Bourdain, Adam Liaw, Kristie Lu Stout and others, and featured in the Chinese documentary series Once Upon a Bite.
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 argues persuasively for Hunan as a separate culinary presence", Anne Mendelson wrote in a review in the New York Times. Continuing an exploration of regional Chinese food, in "Garden of Contentment" Dunlop profiled the Dragon Well Manor, 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. The cookery of this same region, modern Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces, is covered in her third regional cookbook, Land of Fish and Rice. In China, she explains, this cuisine "is known historically for its extraordinary knife work, delicate flavors extreme reverence for ingredients," as encapsulated in the nostalgic phrase chún lú zhī sī "thinking of perch and water shield", two ancient local specialities.
Meanwhile with Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking Dunlop gained her fourth James Beard Award. 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, and for identifying and highlighting local ingredients such as the bridal veil mushroom of Sichuan's "jade web soup", the fermented soy and broad bean sauce of Hunan, Zhejiang's aquatic vegetables like water bamboo and fox nuts, and the "intensely flavored cured ham from Jinhua". "Extra-culinary insights" have also been noted: she captures "fading memories of the many violent 20th-century transformations" of the Chinese provinces. Her autobiographical memoir, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper, 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". 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". But at length, learning to think like a Chinese and to "dispense with her own cultural taboos about eating", as Levy says, she has recognized in her own life the progression "from ‘eating to fill your belly’, through ‘eating plenty of rich food’ to ‘eating skillfully’ ".

Publications

Books