Civilised food – with Fuchsia Dunlop

The Full English

The Full English podcast returns after a two-year hiatus with host Lewis Bassett interviewing renowned food writer Fuchsia Dunlop about her new cookbook, Five Tastes. They explore the profound cultural and historical

Key takeaways

• Fuchsia Dunlop began studying Sichuan cuisine in Chengdu in 1994 after a backpacking trip, eventually becoming the first foreign student at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine.
• Chinese culinary philosophy historically distinguished itself from nomadic neighbors by emphasizing cooked food, small cuts, and chopsticks as markers of civilization rather than barbarism.

Main topics

• Chinese vs English/Western culinary traditions
• Historical and cultural definitions of civilized eating

Notable quotes

"The kitchen was a place of violence and butchery in the old days where they would slaughter animals. Yeah, but the gentleman would not have any contact with all this and with the knives and things..."

Conclusion

Listeners gain a nuanced understanding of how Chinese culinary traditions prioritize balance,

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) And we're back! After almost two years, the Full English podcast is back. Where have I been all this time? Well, dear listeners, as usual, I've been behind the stove at the wonderful Llewellyns in South London, but I've also been writing a book. The Full English, The Ways We Eat and Why, is out now with Verso. So if you've enjoyed this show in the past, or if you're listening for the first time and you like what you hear, then go and check it out. You can buy The Full English in all the usual places. or directly at versobooks.com. We're kicking off this new season with a truly exceptional guest. Fuchsia Dunlop is the English person with a Chinese stomach. She is a one-woman gateway to the infinities of Chinese cuisine and its deep traditions of culinary culture. I wanted to interview Fuchsia since her book, An Invitation to a Banquet, was an inspiration for my own work and because, as you're about to hear, Fuchsia is a fascinating authority on the food of China. Her new book, Five Tastes, The Magic of Flavour in a Chinese Kitchen, is out now with Penguin. Oh, and for regular listeners, it's worth noting that this podcast is no longer hosted on Patreon, so make sure to subscribe wherever you happen to be listening, whether that's Spotify, Apple, and so on. And if you want to hear more of what I'm up to, you can follow me, Lewis Bassett, on Substack and Instagram. Now, over to Fuchsia Dunlop. Speaker 2 (1:24) Future, welcome to The Full English. We're in the unusual setting of being at Verso's offices. And so regular listeners will know that Verso published my book, The Full English. And listeners will be hopefully surprised to hear that you can watch this podcast on YouTube at Verso's channel. So welcome to the show. Welcome into Verso. I want to start with a bit of background before we get into your brilliant new cookbook, a bit of background and a bit of a more general conversation about Chinese food and the differences between Chinese food and English food. But first on you, like, I'm wondering, you've you obviously, such an expert in Chinese cuisine. Now, you're known across the world for being so. But like, why China? How did you come to China in the first place? Speaker 3 (2:12) Well, it was a bit of an accident, really. So food came first. I mean, I always loved cooking and wanted to be a chef when I was very small. Speaker 2 (2:19) But Speaker 3 (2:19) I got slightly interested in China through a sub-editing job I had in my early 20s. And I went backpacking there in 1992. And it was really interesting. And I came back and I started Mandarin evening classes in London for no particular purpose, just interested. And then to cut a long story short, I ended up getting a British Council scholarship to go and live in China for one year. And what I really wanted to do was just learn a foreign language, have adventures, you know, travel. But I chose Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, as a place to study because it had... this famous cuisine. I mean, they call it one of China's four great cuisines. And also, I'd been there once and eaten very well. And also, it was just sort of, it wasn't Beijing or Shanghai with more other foreigners. I really wanted to be in the heart of China, and it was really good traveling territory. So I pitched up there in 1994, and very quickly got distracted from my ostensible studies. And I was just eating in all these little restaurants and noodle shops with my friends. And I became friendly with the owners and I started asking if I could go into the kitchen to study. And since I was a teenager, I'd always kept notebooks, which ended up being menus and recipes and things like that, descriptions of food. So I just started, I kind of started writing about Chinese food without. really thinking about it and then a German classmate and I heard about this famous Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine and we just cycled over there one day persuaded them to give us some private classes and then after I finished my year at the university I popped into the school to say hello and my teachers just said look we've got this professional chef's foundation course starting why don't you join in? And they'd never had a foreign student before. And of course, I just said yes immediately. And they gave me a Chinese cleaver, chef's whites. And then I was in this class with 50 young blokes, two women for a few months, learning all the sort of basics of Sichuan cooking and Chinese cooking, you know, the art of cutting and things like that. So that was really the start. And I just... I went back to London at that time. Hard to believe now there were no Sichuan restaurants. There weren't really any Sichuan cookbooks. No one knew what Mapo Tofu was. No one knew what Sichuan pepper was. And I just had this idea to write a Sichuan cookbook. And that's how it all started. But I would, of course, never have imagined that it would become a career. Speaker 2 (4:57) I mean, it's a very unlikely career. You were incredibly ahead of the curve. China maxing's kind of caught up with you now. And I also just like you mentioned those like sketchbooks, which are on your website and they're brilliant to see. And it just makes me realize how curious and fascinated you must have been at that age and still are now. Like, I just wonder where that fascination also comes from. And why food? Because you went there initially to study ethnic groups or? Speaker 3 (5:25) Yeah, but I mean, I always knew, I mean, from the age of 11, I really knew I wanted to do something with food. Speaker 2 (5:30) But Speaker 3 (5:31) I just had quite a, you know, I grew up in the academic environment of Oxford, went to Cambridge, but I was always cooking quite seriously on the side. So the cooking wasn't really a surprise. Speaker 2 (5:41) But Speaker 3 (5:41) yeah, I think, I mean, I didn't have any serious career ambitions. I just, I guess I wanted to, I like that. of traveling and having adventures and doing something with food. And I think, you know, it was a lot easier in the 90s than it is now for young people, you know, to sort of take that sort of gamble. But yes, and I just, China was so fascinating and sort of in the 90s, it was only just beginning to open up to the outside world. And there were very few foreigners there. And for most Chinese people, they just hadn't met foreigners before. So there were all these sort of incredibly interesting encounters. So most of the Chinese people we met had loads of questions. And then China was... There were no Western brands. There was no cheese. It was very separate from the West. So every day was full of surprises. And the food was incredible. And yes, and so it's gone on. And I think it's testament to the incredible variety of Chinese food that after 30 years, I'm still fascinated. And, you know, there have been moments when I've thought, have I had enough of this? You know, all the traveling. It's just... you know do I just want to sort of have a normal life and Speaker 2 (7:01) then Speaker 3 (7:01) something happens which ignites again and I just meet so many wonderful people there as well and Speaker 2 (7:08) it's such a vast country I mean because we keep using the term or you've already used the term Chinese food but how do you define a cuisine is there a cuisine that belongs to a country that's the size of a continent Like, how do you even, is it possible? Like, can we give like an abstract definition of what a national cuisine is? Speaker 3 (7:28) Well, I think sort of to say, initially say no to that question, that I remember when I was at cooking school, one of my young classmates said to me, Fuchsia, I don't like Western food. And I asked him, like, how had he come to this Speaker 2 (7:42) conclusion? Because... Speaker 3 (7:43) There wasn't any Western food in Chengdu in 1995 or whatever. And he said, well, I had KFC once and I didn't like it. So I don't like Western food. And I always tell this story because I think that. People in the West often have made generalizations about Chinese food, which are just as ridiculous. So, yes, it's incredibly diverse. And that diversity is now really showing up in cities all over the world. You know, Sichuan food, of course, very familiar just to name one of them. Speaker 3 (8:16) Yeah, but at the same time, there are sort of certain, I would say, themes and characteristics of Chinese food that... you can say, yes, these are Chinese. So Chinese food is a combination of some aspects that really go back thousands of years and have changed very little, like fermenting soybeans or steaming food or cutting food into little pieces and eating with chopsticks. And those you can say, yeah, these are really make, this is what makes food Chinese. But at the same time, you know, China has been plugged into an international economy 2,000 years ago. There were all these new ingredients coming. through the Silk Road, like, you know, black pepper, which is known still in China as hujiao, which means barbarian pepper because it came from the northwest. So my last book actually called Invitation to a Banquet was a sort of attempt to ask these questions like, what is Chinese food and how can we appreciate it and how should we eat it? But I think it's just... It's useful to come up sometimes with definitions of what Chinese food is as long as you remember that it's also, you know, cuisines don't really have borders and Speaker 1 (9:29) they Speaker 3 (9:30) change all the time and there are cultural sort of exchanges and interactions. So just, you know, you can try to make some definition but with heavy scepticism. Speaker 2 (9:40) Yeah, that makes sense to me. I often think about it in terms of there are practices, ingredients. but also ideas as well. And we'll come on to some of those. Because I think your book, Invitation to a Banquet, obviously we're going to talk about your brilliant new cookbook. But your book, Invitation to a Banquet, was so inspiring for me when I was writing this book about English food. Because you just, you explore it with such depth and such clarity. And it really challenged, by contrast, how I saw the food in this country. Obviously, when you wrote Invitation to a Banquet, you set out, as you just said, to challenge some of the perceptions around Chinese food in the West. I mean, seems like the same needs to be done in China. And I'm sure his perceptions are changing there too. But to what extent do you think perceptions around Chinese food have changed since you published that book? which was now six years ago? Speaker 3 (10:30) Oh, that's three years ago since Invitation to Tobacco. But since I started, which is about 30 years ago, there's been a huge change because I think that when I started writing about Chinese food, really most people in Britain, their idea of Chinese food came out of the British Chinese takeaway. or if not that, certainly a sort of Cantonese cuisine that was brought mainly by immigrants to Hong Kong and was often very adapted and simplified for Western tastes. So in the 90s, you know, a lot of the... the Chinese restaurants in Chinatown, for example, all the good dishes were on Chinese language menus, which were completely impenetrable to someone who didn't go, you know, wasn't Chinese or didn't have a Chinese friend. So and what's happened is that now we