Fuchsia Dunlop

Fuchsia Dunlop is an English writer and cook who specialises in Chinese cuisine, especially Sichuan cuisine. She is the author of five books, including the autobiographical ''Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper'' (2008). According to Julia Moskin in ''The New York Times'', Dunlop "has done more to explain real Chinese cooking to non-Chinese cooks than anyone".

Early life and education

Brought up in Oxford, she studied English literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge. She worked as a sub-editor on East Asian media reports for the BBC Monitoring Unit at Caversham.This woman changed the way we think about Chinese food
in ''Daily Life'' (6 March 2013) 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 reported being determined to eat "whatever the Chinese might put in front of me" but that her gastronomic experiences were "random and haphazard". 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 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.Yang Yang,
Matter of Taste
in ''China Daily'' (30 November 2018), reprinted as
British writer explores texture of Chinese food
in ''Daily Telegraph: China Watch'' (12 December 2018)

Career

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 (2001) and as ''Land of Plenty'' in the United States (2003). It won the Guild of Food Writers Jeremy Round Award for a best first book.

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 heargues persuasively for Hunan as a separate culinary presence", Anne Mendelson wrote in a review in ''The New York Times''.Anne Mendelson,
Eat Drink Make Revolution: The Cuisine of Hunan Province
in ''New York Times'' (14 March 2007) Continuing an exploration of regional Chinese food, in "Garden of Contentment" (in ''The New Yorker'', 2008) Dunlop profiled the Dragon Well Manor,Fuchsia Dunlop,
Letter from China: Garden of Contentment
in ''The New Yorker'' vol. 84 no. 38 (16 November 2008) pp. 54–61 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.Leo Carey,
The Exchange: Fuchsia Dunlop
in ''The New Yorker'' vol. 84 no. 38 (20 November 2008) The cookery of this same region, modern Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces, is covered in her third regional cookbook, ''Land of Fish and Rice'' (2016). In China, she explains, this cuisine "is known historically for its extraordinary knife work, delicate flavors ndextreme reverence for ingredients,"Tyler Cowen,
Fuchsia Dunlop on Chinese Food, Culture, and Travel
(2016) as encapsulated in the nostalgic phrase ''chún lú zhī sī'' "thinking of perch and water shield", two ancient local specialities.Rachel Cooke,
China’s best-kept food secret, revealed by Fuchsia Dunlop
in ''The Guardian'' (17 July 2016)

Meanwhile with ''Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking'' (2012) 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 (quotes by Anne Mendelson). Her autobiographical memoir, ''Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper'' (2008), 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". Paul Levy,
Anyone for caterpillars?
in ''The Observer'' (24 February 2008) 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 person 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’ (''chi bao''), through ‘eating plenty of rich food’ (''chi hao'') to ‘eating skillfully’ (''chi qiao'')".My Life on a Plate
in ''The Independent'' (15 March 2008)

Publications

Books

*2001: ''Sichuan Cookery''
** US edition, 2003: ''Land of Plenty: a treasury of authentic Sichuan cooking''
*2007: ''Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: recipes from Hunan Province''
*2008: ''Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: a sweet-sour memoir of eating in China''
*2012: ''Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking''
*2016: ''Land of Fish and Rice: Recipes from the Culinary Heart of China''
*2019: ''The Food of Sichuan''

Selected articles

*2001 :
'On the first day they gave me a chef's hat and my own cleaver...'
in ''The Observer'' (10 June 2001)
*2008 :
Unsavoury characters
in ''Financial Times'' (16 August 2008) (on the political pressure to give English names to Chinese dishes)
*2008 :
Letter from China: Garden of Contentment
in ''The New Yorker'' vol. 84 no. 38 (24 November 2008) pp. 54–61
*2013 :
London Town
in ''Lucky Peach'' (30 April 2013) (on London's Chinatown)
*2014 :
Dick Soup
in ''Lucky Peach'' (14 April 2014
another source
*2018 :
Fuchsia Dunlop on the fiery charms of Sichuan hotpot
in ''Financial Times'' (9 November 2018)

References

External links

Fuchsia Dunlop's website
*
Fuchsia Dunlop on Chinese Food, Culture, and Travel
in the series ''Conversations with Tyler'' (als
on YouTube

*
The delights of cooking Chinese food: A conversation with chef and author Fuchsia Dunlop
at ''Sinica Podcast''


at Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine

{{DEFAULTSORT:Dunlop, Fuchsia
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
The New Yorker people
English chefs
Sichuan cuisine
Hunan cuisine
Women cookbook writers
James Beard Foundation Award winners
Women chefs
21st-century British non-fiction writers
21st-century English women writers
British cookbook writers
Alumni of Magdalene College, Cambridge
Sichuan University alumni
British gastronomes