Special Sauce with Ed Levine Fuchsia Dunlop on Chinese Cuisine
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Dec 1, 2023 Fuchsia Dunlop, an expert on Chinese cuisine, discusses her journey from cooking classes to writing her 7th book. She talks about the challenges of studying and understanding Chinese culture through food. Topics include corruption, environmental degradation in China, debates on representation, and her surprising career success.
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From British Takeout To Chengdu Kitchens
- Fuchsia rarely ate Chinese food as a child and only had British takeout like chow mein and sweet-and-sour pork balls.
- She discovered real Chinese cooking years later when she lived in Chengdu and trained in local kitchens and a cooking institute.
Full-Time Training Changed Her Path
- Fuchsia enrolled as a trainee at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine and trained full-time with mostly male classmates.
- That intensive course transformed her understanding and set her on a decades-long path exploring Chinese food.
China's Long Gastronomic Tradition
- China is deeply gastronomic with millennia of food practice, fermentations, knife technique, and poetic food writing.
- This cultural obsession makes Chinese cuisine endlessly diverse and impossible to exhaust even after 30 years of exploration.