Fuchsia Dunlop > Quotes

“Learning another cuisine is like learning a language. In the beginning, you know nothing about its most basic rules of grammar. You experience it as a flood of words, or dishes, without system or structure.”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China

“What we eat is an essential part of who we are and how we define ourselves.”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China

“Think, for a moment, of the words we use to describe some of the textures most adored by Chinese gourmets: gristly, slithery, slimy, squelchy, crunchy, gloopy. For Westerners they evoke disturbing thoughts of bodily emissions, used handkerchiefs, abattoirs, squashed amphibians, wet feet in wellington boots, or the flinching shock of fingering a slug when you are picking lettuce”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A sweet-sour memoir of eating in China

“Sichuan pepper is the original Chinese pepper, used long before the more familiar black or white pepper stole in over the tortuous land routes of the old Silk Road. It is not hot to taste, like the chilli, but makes your lips cool and tingly. In Chinese they call it ma, this sensation; the same word is used for pins-and-needles and anaesthesia. The strange, fizzing effect of Sichuan pepper, paired with the heat of chillies, is one of the hallmarks of modern Sichuanese cookery. The”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China

“In England we agonised over the demolition of every old shack; in Sichuan, they just went ahead and flattened whole cities! You had to admire the brazen confidence of it, the conviction that the future would be better than the past.”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A sweet-sour memoir of eating in China

“it takes several years of quite dedicated Chinese eating, in my experience, to begin to appreciate texture for itself. And that is what you must do if you wish to become a Chinese gourmet, because many of the grandest Chinese delicacies, not to mention many of the most exquisite pleasures of everyday Chinese eating, are essentially about texture.”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A sweet-sour memoir of eating in China

“Sichuanese dialect is like Mandarin put through a mangle. So the Mandarin ‘sh’ becomes ‘s’, vowels are stretched out like warm toffee, there are pirate-like rolling ‘r’ sounds at the end of sentences, and no one can tell the difference between ‘n’ and ‘l’ or ‘f’ and ‘h’ (the province of Hunan, for example, is known in Sichuan, helpfully, as ‘Fulan’).”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China

“Trying to categorize Chinese regional cuisines makes me dizzy. You can travel and travel and travel around China and taste new foods every single day, which is pretty much what I have been doing for the last thirty years. And after all this time, I still find myself in the same state of wonder and bewilderment. Chinese cuisine is like a fractal pattern that becomes more and more intricate the more closely you examine it, to a seemingly infinite degree. The more I know, the less I feel I know. When it comes to Chinese food, I see myself increasingly as a small insect scaling a great mountain of human ingenuity.”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food

“Sesame oil, soy sauce and ginger may already be on your shopping list and mainstream supermarkets are now stocking Chinese brown rice vinegar and cooking wine; just add Sichuanese chilli bean paste and fermented black beans and you will open up whole new dimensions of taste.”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking

“Regular pepper is known as ‘barbarian pepper’ (hu jiao); the carrot is a ‘barbarian radish’ (hu luo bu). The character hu refers to the old Mongol, Tartar and Turkic tribes of the northwest, but it also means ‘recklessly, foolishly, blindly or outrageously’. ‘Hu hua’ (hu talk) describes the ravings of a madman; hu gao means to mess things up; and other hu compounds refer to all kinds of mischievous, fraudulent, wild, careless, irritating and deranged behaviours.”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China

“There were no ready-made sauces, except for the slowly fermented chilli bean paste; we mixed them ourselves from the essential seasonings: sugar, vinegar, soy sauce and sesame paste in various combinations.”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China

“university textbooks I’d encountered in my few weeks of class were deathly dull and totally impractical. Instead of introducing us to useful words like ‘stir-fry’ and ‘braise’, ‘bamboo shoot’ and ‘quail’, they had required us to learn by rote long lists of largely irrelevant Chinese characters:”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China

“The cleaver is not just for cutting. Invert it and its blunt spine can be used to pound meat to a paste for meatballs: a time-consuming method, but the purée it produces is perfectly smooth and voluptuous. The nub of the handle can stand in for a pestle, to crush a few peppercorns in a pot. The flat of the blade, slammed down on the board, can be used to smash unpeeled ginger, so that its juices permeate a soup or marinade.”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China

“In cooking as with love, it's not easy to ensure that both ingredients reach their climaxes of perfection simultaneously.”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food

“it was my last night in northern Fujian and I felt I had to eat snake.”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China

“Appetite for food and sex is human nature, shi se xing ye,' as the philosopher Gaozi said. Or, as the popular saying derived from the Book of Rites puts it: 'Eat, drink, man, woman' (yin shi nan nü). We are all animals, blessed with tongues, stomachs and sexual desires, in need of comfort and affection.”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food

“Are you afraid of chilli heat?’ (Ni pa bu pa la?) is the customary warning for travellers on their way to Sichuan.”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China

“Sometimes my reticence over a particular food was overcome through simple drunkenness. The Chengdu equivalent of the late-night döner kebab in 1994 was fried rabbit-heads, a snack I’d heard about from a Canadian friend. I’d seen the rabbit-heads sitting ominously in glass cabinets, earless and skinless, staring out with beady rabbit eyes and pointy teeth. The idea of eating one was utterly revolting. But one night, after a long dancing session, I fetched up at a street stall bedraggled and hungry. My reason befuddled by alcohol, I ate my first rabbit-head, cleft in half and tossed in a wok with chilli and spring onion. I won’t begin to describe the silky richness of the flesh along the jaw, the melting softness of the eyeball, the luxuriant smoothness of the brain. Suffice it to say that from that day on I ate stir-fried rabbit-heads almost every Saturday night. (Later”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A sweet-sour memoir of eating in China

“The Gentleman Gourmet is dressed in a three-piece suit, he carries a walking cane, and a rapier wit. He speaks in the rah-rah tones of a colonial Englishman, although he is Chinese-born. And he is so early-twentiethcentury elegant that I almost expect to see spats if I cast my eyes to his feet.”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China

“A Chinese chef can look at an initially unattractive item like a jellyfish and ask: what can I do with this? What are its downsides and what are its potential assets? Clearly, it is colourless, almost invisible and, aside from an edge of unattractive fishiness, virtually without flavour. But what does it have going for it? Perhaps its brisk, slippery mouthfeel – something anyone Chinese would enjoy. The question then becomes: how can I compensate for its deficiencies and make the most of its assets? With jellyfish, the answer usually is to clean it thoroughly, dispelling any hint of unpleasant fishiness, preserve its vibrant texture, and prepare it with accompanying ingredients that provide what it lacks: salt and sesame oil or vinegar for flavour, slivered cucumber or spring onions, perhaps, for colour. And lo – something overlooked by every other food culture in the world becomes a delectable salad. The same dispassionate, analytical approach can be applied to anything.”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food

“China was not the totalitarian state of my London friends’ imagination, but neither was it open, and for a newcomer it was impossible to gauge the boundaries. Even the locals found it confusing. The juddering old framework of the state economy was falling apart, along with the political controls of the Maoist era. No one really knew the rules. The whole country, waking up after the nightmare of Maoism, was making it up as it went along.”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China

“在每個社會裡，領先潮流的烹飪重點都不在於口味。和任何藝術一樣，這是一種文化對話，對其所在的環境脈絡有豐富的指涉。如果不了解它所在環境的中心思想與歷史傳統，就無法完整地欣賞這些作品。”
― 扶霞．鄧洛普Fuchsia Dunlop, 魚翅與花椒：英國妹子的中國菜歷險

“A successful dish, as my cooking school teachers always used to say, must hit all the targets of se, xiang, wei, xing – colour, fragrance, flavour and form. It should first delight the eyes with its beauty, then the nose with its scent, the tongue with its tastes and the palate with its material qualities. Kougan – literally 'mouthfeel' – is an essential part of the enjoyment of eating, which is an all-embracing sensory experience.”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food

“learning the tones of Mandarin Chinese is difficult enough to begin with: you must distinguish between the flat first tone (m), the rising second tone (má ), the dipping third tone (m), and the fast-falling fourth tone (mà ), not to mention the unobstrusive neutral tone (ma). If you have no sense of tones when speaking Mandarin, people won’t understand you, and you may find yourself making mistakes like asking for a kiss (qng wn) when all you wanted was an answer to a question (qng wèn). But in Sichuanese even the standard tones are all”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China

“a passionate appreciation of food was respectable, even desirable, in the traditional scholar-gentleman.”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China

“Six days a week at the cooking school were not enough for me. In my free time I sought out restaurants and snack shops I hadn’t visited before, and begged them to let me study in their kitchens.”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A sweet-sour memoir of eating in China