Invitation to a Banquet by Fuchsia Dunlop — the surprising truths about Chinese food

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It’s the throwaway lines that offer some of the most arresting moments in Invitation to a Banquet, Fuchsia Dunlop’s love letter to several millennia of Chinese gastronomy. That she once cooked 350 duck tongues for a banquet — in Oxford, of all places; that she had her first taste of fermented camel’s milk at a Kazakh circumcision party in Urumqi; or that Yi Yin, the master chef in the service of Duke Huan, the 7th-century BC ruler of the State of Qi (in present day Shandong), was said to possess a perfect palate, but was also said to have made his son into soup to please the boss.

Another food writer might be suspected of trying too hard, but such is the range and depth of Dunlop’s erudition, and so infectious is her enthusiasm, that she is above suspicion on that score. In the 1990s, she became the first foreigner to study at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine in Chengdu. Since then, she has — through her writing, journalism and food tours — sought to inspire others to adopt her own adventurous approach to one of the world’s great cuisines.

Invitation to a Banquet is not a cookbook, but an account of the central importance that food has had in Chinese culture, politics, religion and way of life, told through a series of chapters that explain key ingredients and techniques. We hear about Anji bamboo shoots with Jinhua ham, about yipin guo or "top-ranking pot" (a superlative soup concocted from fine ingredients that’s, according to Dunlop, "like listening to the start of a symphony"). There is a small essay on the marvels of qu, used to ferment everything from wine to soy sauce. We discover the complex relationship between foreign influences and post-Communist Chinese cuisine, embodied in lousong tang or "Russian soup".

The perfect texture of chicken testicles is ‘exquisitely fine and smooth, delicately soft and tender but with a certain springiness’

As Dunlop — an occasional FT contributor — reveals, it is a story that stretches back millennia. So fundamental was food to the Chinese conception of the state during the Zhou dynasty (c1046-356BC) that the emperor’s diet and his symbolic role in agriculture were prescribed, and the imperial calendar marked with the seasonal rites required to ensure abundant crops. Thousands of years before that, Chinese food culture rested on settled farming that produced first millet, then rice in the south (which perhaps arrived about 9,000 years ago) and wheat in the north (from about 4,000 years ago). In the Chinese heartland there developed a gastronomy unsurpassed in its range and variety, a culinary tradition that made use of every possible food source to maintain a large population on a relatively scarce allocation of land.

Today there are huge regional variations, from the fierce spices of Sichuan to the gentler tastes of Guangdong. But, as Dunlop explains, the ambitions involved in creating a Chinese banquet are similar across the country — the chef aims to create a harmonious blend of flavours and textures across the meal, often balancing these concerns with more esoteric properties that tie the traditions of food and medicine together. If you are unwell in China, she reminds us, you will be advised to consume appropriate foods to bring the body back into balance.

Dunlop has developed a vocabulary equal to the daunting challenge of conveying the huge range of values, ambitions and experiences embedded in Chinese gastronomy — beginning, of course, with taste, smell and visual delight, but extending into mouthfeel descriptions that border on the pornographic. Chinese food video soundtracks, she writes, are full of "wet, squelchy, smacky, sucky noises" while the perfect texture of chicken testicles is "exquisitely fine and smooth, delicately soft and tender but with a certain springiness".

There is a dark side, as Dunlop explains, to all this sucking and squelching — the Chinese conviction that everything is edible. The rarer something is, the more desirable; there is a concomitant superstition that by eating, say, bear’s paw or tiger foetus, the diner acquires some of the animal’s properties. It is a conviction that leads China’s wealthy diners to defy conservation bans.

The swim bladder of the totoaba is especially prized in Chinese cuisine for its texture. Illegal gill net fishing in the Gulf of California has devastated totoaba stocks and driven the ocean’s smallest cetacean, the vaquita, which depends on totoaba for food stocks, to the brink of extinction. In 2017 a Chinese vessel was seized in the Galápagos marine reserve with 6,000 dead sharks aboard; and on the West Coast of Scotland it is not unusual to encounter van loads of dubiously fished razor clams being packed at night for their flight to Hong Kong. The book also acknowledges that much has disappeared in China during the past four decades of urbanisation and industrialisation.

Dunlop’s enthusiasm for Chinese cuisine can result in unflattering contrasts. English cooking can certainly be dull, but in this account there is a little more to it than a lump of meat flanked by overcooked vegetables. A fairer comparison is with Europe as a whole, which boasts a respectable range of culinary traditions and entire categories — cheesemaking for example — that are virtually absent from the Chinese tradition. This reviewer might also quibble with her claim that institutional food in China is superior to that of the UK: the student canteen in the 1970s at Shanghai’s Fudan University, where I studied, ranked among the world’s most dismal gastronomic experiences. But these are minor objections.

Dunlop is right to complain that Chinese gastronomy is poorly understood and undervalued. Partly this is because many migrants who opened restaurants elsewhere in the world were not themselves trained chefs, and adapted their offering to the uneducated tastes of their clientele. Even today, ignorance and prejudice create an expectation that Chinese food in the west should be cheap. It’s an expectation that Fuchsia Dunlop’s compelling blend of scholarship and passion puts firmly in its place.

Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food by Fuchsia Dunlop Particular Books £25, 480 pages

Isabel Hilton is the founder of the China Dialogue Trust

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