The Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook

Fuchsia Dunlop
Ebury Press 2006, Hardcover, 304 pages, £27.50

China can’t possibly have just the one form of cooking that we see in the Chinese restaurants and take-aways that we see on high streets around Britain. More than a billion people just could not get by on those twenty or so dishes, and here are some clues to how some of the rest of them get on at dinner time.

The take-aways give us pekingese and cantonese dishes, full of meat stock, ginger, spring onions, oyster and soy sauce. Flavours are mild.

Hunan, it seems, likes a livelier time. Chilli is bang in the middle of the ingredients list, along with a lot of garlic and preserved food including salted eggs and chillis and pickled greens. Meat often means belly pork or tasty slow-cooked duck.

There’s not much sweetness except for occasional snack foods. Meals might consist of rice with a meat or fish dish with vegetables or salad then, instead of cheese or pudding, some kind of soup. Soup is a big deal.

There are tonic soups, soothing soups, herby and spicy soups, thick soups and thin soups. There are special clay pots to cook them in that sit around the edges of burning braziers and urban hunanese restaurants play up the homeliness of their soups to tempt city-dwellers with their bucolic fantasies. Soup, it seems, takes the place of pies or yorkshire pudding in the hunanese psyche.

There are introductions to each chapter to give you a idea of the place of the various ingredients in the overall cuisine and short passages for each recipe, either a little vignette of how Fuschia Dunlop came across the dish, the character of the chef who developed it or, surprisingly often, how much it was loved by Mao Tse-Tung. Mao was from Hunan Province and is still a common figure there, partly as part of the tourist trade and partly because he’s their most famous son.

Atmosphere is great but would all be spoiled if the recipes didn’t work, but they’re impeccable. I’ve made some really good food and the friend who gave me the book has made many more. The boring technical background to this book has clearly been well done.

I’ve never been to China and never eaten anything that advertised itself as authentically hunanese. I now feel not only that I have some idea of what the region is like and what the food might be like, but also a little more about the diversity of China. I also feel that I’ve spent some very enjoyable time being drawn into some well thought-out, well tested and well written recipes.

No related posts.