Fuchsia Dunlop is a cook and food writer specialising in Chinese cuisine. She was the first Westerner to train as a chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, and has spent much of the last two decades exploring China and its food.
In her latest book, Invitation to a Banquet, Fuchsia explores the history, philosophy and techniques of China's rich and ancient culinary culture. Each chapter examines a classic dish, from mapo tofu to Dongpo pork, knife-scraped noodles to braised pomelo pith, to reveal a singular aspect of Chinese gastronomy, whether it's the importance of the soybean, the lure of exotic ingredients or the history of Buddhist vegetarian cuisine. Her Instagram is here.
In this podcast episode, Fuchsia joins host Ben to dive deep into the history, culture and techniques behind Chinese cuisine. From the ancient origins of steaming to the finer points of knife skills and texture, Fuchsia provides fascinating insights into what makes Chinese food so unique. We talk about our origin food dishes:
“there's one dish that is very dear to me that sort of expresses partly why I fell in love with Sichuanese food. And that's fish fragrant aubergine or eggplant. I think when I went to live in Sichuan in 1994, what was so impressive was that the local food was unlike anything I'd had in England. It was all very fresh and healthy and all these seasonal vegetables and amazing flavors. That's the thing about Sichuanese cuisine that it's all about the art of mixing flavors. So this particular dish for me just represents the sort of-- I mean, it's made with pickled red chilies, ginger, garlic, spring onion, and a bit of sweet and sour. Then you have the sumptuous kind of golden butter-ness of the aubergines. So it's a really homely dish with cheap ingredients and it's sensational. Sichuan everyone thinks [numbing and hot], lots of chilli and Sichuan pepper. But actually, it has this kind of melodious heat with a hint of sweetness and it's just conjuring up this complex flavor from a few limited palette of seasonings. I think that's one of the things that I fell in love with Sichuanese food”
Fuchsia debunks common myths and misperceptions about Chinese food in the West, from the idea that it's unhealthy to the notion that exotic ingredients are eaten only out of poverty. She traces how historical circumstances led Chinese cuisine to be seen as cheap and lowbrow in the West compared to French or Japanese food.
Delving into the cultural exchange around food, Fuchsia offers a nuanced take on debates over cultural appropriation and argues that an openness to different cultures can be "life enhancing." She shares colorful anecdotes from her research and travel in China that bring dishes like Pomelo Pith and Shanghainese "Western food" to life.
We chat about:
Steaming and its importance as a cooking technique.
The importance of bland food, and how my mother needs to eat rice regularly
How to understand mouthfeel and the joy of texture in Chinese cuisine
Knife skills and the skills of the wok
Fuchsia’s writing process
On mouthfeel and texture:
“if you want to be able to experience it all and to eat on a kind of equal basis of appreciation with Chinese friends, then you really need to open your mind and palate to texture because it's so important. But the interesting thing is-- because I've written about this and talked about it a lot because I find it fascinating. It's also really funny because so many of the words we use in English to describe these textures sound really disgusting.”
Listen in the player above or on your favourite podcast player.
PODCAST INFO
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo
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Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh
Transcript (only lightly edited)
Ben: Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Fuchsia Dunlop. Fuchsia has a new book out, Invitation to a Banquet. Fuchsia is one of the most extraordinary writers on Chinese cuisine and culture I know. You'll understand more about Chinese culture from her book than I think almost any other book on China. Welcome.
Fuchsia (00:00:18):
Hi. Very good to be here.
Ben (00:00:21):
So what would be your origin food story or recipe, the dish that explains a part of the story of your life? I'll tell you mine first so you can have a little think. So for me, it's probably chicken rice, or it's sometimes called Hainanese chicken rice. The dish was probably adapted from a poached chicken dish in Hainan, a kind of wenchang chicken because in Hainan at the time, they didn't have what we think of as chicken rice. And the immigrant diaspora from a hundred over years ago went to Southeast Asia, Malaysia, Singapore, where my parents come from. My father is from Malaysia, my mom is from Singapore, and they met in London. Now, this is the dish we now cook as chicken rice and it has traveled. We still use poached chicken, although we can do it with steamed chickens as well.
My mother, particularly when we started eating the dish really likes to use a corn-fed chicken, so it's a different kind of chicken adapted to how we are today. It appeals to us because there's kind of no food wasted, you have the nose to tell aspects. You have a wonderful broth as well as the rice and the chicken. We'd eat with growing up probably almost once a week on a kind of Sunday as often a substitute for the traditional Sunday roast. So that was kind of our way of being in London and having a connection to where we're from. So what would your origin food dish be?
Fuchsia (00:01:51):
Well, can it be a Chinese origin dish?
Ben (00:01:53):
Yeah.
Fuchsia (00:01:55):
I've been interested in food since I was born practically and I've been very keen on cooking since I was a child. But there's one dish that is very dear to me that sort of expresses partly why I fell in love with Sichuanese food. And that's fish fragrant aubergine or eggplant. I think when I went to live in Sichuan in 1994, what was so impressive was that the local food was unlike anything I'd had in England. It was all very fresh and healthy and all these seasonal vegetables and amazing flavors. That's the thing about Sichuanese cuisine that it's all about the art of mixing flavors. So this particular dish for me just represents the sort of-- I mean, it's made with pickled red chilies, ginger, garlic, spring onion, and a bit of sweet and sour. Then you have the sumptuous kind of golden butter-ness of the aubergines. So it's a really homely dish with cheap ingredients and it's sensational. Sichuan everyone thinks [numbing and hot], lots of chili and Sichuan pepper. But actually, it has this kind of melodious heat with a hint of sweetness and it's just conjuring up this complex flavor from a few limited palette of seasonings. I think that's one of the things that I fell in love with Sichuanese food
Ben (00:03:19):
That reflects on a couple of things in your book and actually a lot of your work. So one is the kind of vegetable heavy nature of actually a lot of Chinese cuisine because there's a lot of people who think of the banquets and maybe the roast meats which came from Cantonese cooking over here, but actually a lot of it is vegetable heavy. The other thing I guess is that you tend not to eat a single dish in isolation. You'll always have a comparison dish like some sort of rice or noodles or something like that. So when you eat your dish, what would you pair it with? Are you generally vegetable heavy in terms of how you're thinking about food?
Fuchsia (00:04:01):
Well, yes, that dish you would always have with something else and rice. So because it's a vegetable, you'd probably have something with protein in it. So maybe some tofu or some chicken; maybe something like you could have dry fried chicken could be quite nice, a different sort of texture and a different sort of heat, and plain steamed rice. But yeah, that's another thing. There are many slightly weird and crazy western stereotypes about Chinese food. The most baffling of all is this idea that Chinese food is unhealthy. Of course this derived from the fact that for most westerners for a very long time, Chinese food was kind of take away food. It was tremendously popular, but mainly fried, deep fried, stir fried; not very many vegetables or soups.
Actually, as I'm sure you know very well, there is no other culture probably that puts as much emphasis on the link between diet and health; the inseparable link between diet and health as the Chinese. This has been going on for 2000 years and more. So yes, one thing that I'm always terribly keen to emphasize in my writing is that Chinese food is not only delicious, but it's really feel good food. If you know how to cook simple home dishes and how to assemble a menu, it's both satisfying to the senses and really balanced, and that's what it's all about. So yes, like everyone these days, I'm very aware of the terrible environmental disaster that we are facing and the need to eat much less meat and dairy foods and try to put the emphasis on vegetables. I think that Chinese cuisine is just a treasure house of inspirations for anybody who's looking to reduce the amount of meat in their diet. And certainly with me, I can't really live without vegetables. I crave the simple blanched or stir fried leafy greens that are part of almost every Chinese meal. I actually feel quite uncomfortable if a day or two goes by without having lots of vegetables.
Ben (00:06:28):
Well, my mom feels really uncomfortable if she goes a few days without eating rice. And actually, that's quite true of a lot of my family back in Asia. Also the link of health and diet, my mom has slowly persuaded me over the years or over this link. She would always say, "You've got to eat such and such a food. You are too hot, you are too cold." And I'm like, "Having grown in the western side tradition, that's kind of rubbish." And now particularly when I have a cold or something like that, my mom's congee rice porridge, soupy rice type of dishes-- It's like, "Oh, that is exactly what I crave and I feel better." The other element, I guess, when I explain to a lot my friends who grew up here riffing on a couple of your earlier things is, soupy rice is often very bland. It doesn't have to be, you can have toppings. But this blandness as a contrast is really important. So like having rice at the end of the meals as well as your vegetables. That's something they don't quite get.
Then the other thing is often-- I guess the translation is mouthfeel; a kind of texture. So my mom and I like knuckles and bones and we have all of these kind of gloopy bits and often some dishes, the joy isn't in the flavor. It might be kind of very bland to certain palates, but the joy is kind of in the mouthfeel and that combination I still find is something that isn't so well understood. Did it take you a while to appreciate that? I guess a lot of the recipes when you look at them in the original talk about mouthfeel or the kind of mouthfeel that you should be expecting in a recipe.
Fuchsia (00:08:03):
Yeah, it certainly took me a long time because I think like most westerners, I grew up with a relatively limited range of textures in my food. So crisp and soft and crunchy. But not slithery and bouncy and with a high grapple factor, as my father always says; the sort of very intricate parts like chicken's feet and so on. So I was brought up to be very polite and to eat everything that I was given. So when I went to China, I did that. I would eat out with Chinese friends and there would be goose intestines for the hot pot or tripe and so on. For a long time, probably few years, I would eat these things politely but without really any pleasure. And I would just kind of think, "What's the point?"
Then I don't know what happened. I guess it was just through exposure and through eating with lots of enthusiastic Chinese people. But I have come to really appreciate this extra dimension of gastronomy and I love it. I just found that I was ordering slithery things myself and now I think the texture and the-- I mean, I think Chinese palates really appreciate complexity of texture. So things that are very soft, but then a little bit crunchy, or a very soft lion's head meatball with crispy water chestnut in it, or a goose intestine which is so smooth and slippery and then it's a bit resistant to the bite in the end. So I now really enjoy these kind of playful, flirtatious, unexpected contrasting textures. I do think that for foreigners, if you want to really appreciate Chinese food, this incredible cuisine, you don't have to appreciate texture because there are so many other delicious dishes that don't require it.
But if you want to be able to experience it all and to eat on a kind of equal basis of appreciation with Chinese friends, then you really need to open your mind and palate to texture because it's so important. But the interesting thing is-- because I've written about this and talked about it a lot because I find it fascinating. It's also really funny because so many of the words we use in English to describe these textures sound really disgusting. So it's kind of a fun, slightly unexpected, uncomfortable subject. But I found that I've had quite a lot of messages from readers who have said that after reading the chapter in the previous book about Shark's Fin and Sichuan and Pepper, about texture and mouthfeel that something kind of clicked. For the first time, they actually kind of realized that you could eat certain ingredients mainly for the pleasure of texture, like jellyfish. I mean, it has no flavor.
So once you've kind of opened your mind merely to the possibility, then you can start to sort of play with it. I've done some events, I've done some talks where I've taken along a whole load of pig's ear strips or dog's tongues and talked about texture, then got everyone to taste them. It's just a really interesting experience for most westerners because it is just trying to eat these things with a different mindset; to put away all your prejudices and the deeply ingrained idea that there's no point in eating them because there's no meat. And just try to explore the texture in a sensory way, and people find it really fun.
Ben (00:11:49):
Yeah. It struck me there was a couple of things there on reading your previous work and this one, and one was the history of it. So even within British food, I guess it was a nose to tell eating, but you would've eaten these textural foods more often, although more highly flavored. I wonder whether it's something to do with the stories you are told around it; the kind of almost cultural value that you are also eating at it, or like you say, your mind is open to it. I remember reading-- I never tasted it-- but Heston Blumenthal, who's a famous British chef who does kind of some molecular gastro meat type recipes as well. He kind of did a deconstructed fish and chips where he sprayed the smell of salt because there's an adage within British food that it always tastes better at the seaside.
I think a lot of that is to do with the experience and the stories that you had and things that you're growing up. And I wonder with texture whether it's the same. So when you're open to the story and you've heard the really long tradition about why we would be interested in texture and you are attuned to it, it kind of opens up another form of appreciation for it which if you don't have that story or the way that sits in that. One of the great things I found in reading your book is just the long history of so many of the stories about where the techniques come from, where the recipes come from. And some of them are sort of newer stories, they don't always stretch back 2000 years. They might stretch back earlier. I was wondering how conscious you are about when you eat something about its history and its food and how much that is part of the pleasure that people get.
Fuchsia (00:13:29):
I think it is part of the pleasure. Specifically, so many Chinese dishes have little stories about them and legends, about emperors and scholars and servants and how the dish was invented. Some of them are clearly just made up for fun, they're not really historical. But they still are part of the character of a dish. More importantly, yes, I think it is. Like Mrs. Song's fish soup, fish stew-- Song’s [ ] — which is the one of the dishes that I write about in the book. That is a dish that goes back to the 12th or 13th century to the Song Dynasty. There's written mention of it in historic records and it's rather a fantastic feeling that there's this kind of continuity.
But I think more than anything, for me it is just sort of recognizing that this is a very great gastronomic culture in which food has been thought about and written about and considered in all kinds of ways for more than 2000 years. I mean, in early Chinese literature, you get these mouthwatering descriptions of food. This goes on through history and food was something that was worthy of consideration and literature. Also, of course it was the basis of health and ritual. I think once you understand that about China, then it completely blows out of the water this kind of another silly western stereotype that in some ways it's a poverty cuisine. There's this traditional Western assumption that the reason you would eat a dog's tongue is because you are desperately poor.
But things like you dog's feet are banquet delicacies. Yes, poor Chinese peasants would eat things in times of famine and they would eat wild plants, and like all farmers everywhere, they would try and make the most of an animal they killed. But rich and powerful people wanted to eat interesting, exotic, unexpected delicacies for fun. There's this amazing description of a banquet in the 18th century, which I've mentioned several times in Zhangzhou, and one of the dishes served was a bear's paw surrounded by the tongues of crucian carp. This is a really extravagant dish.
Ben (00:16:11):
I think that's one of the things I got through the book. And I wonder whether the mouthfeel texture element as part of that is this thread of I guess, rarity or also the skill of something that you have to cook. So you look at this and go, "Oh, what can we do with this to make it really great to eat, even if it seems like a slightly strange ingredient?" There's one story which was in your book which a friend had recounted to you, which actually I remember because it was a recounted to me when I was a child. So I think it's probably one of those made up stories. But it was the idea of wanting to eat fish cheeks and fish head. So it was presented to me and they were like, "Wow, we are going to give you the best part of the fish and we’ll serve it as you are an honoured guest because you come back to visit us."
They told me the story about how in the olden days-- I don't know when this was-- you'd have highway robbers of some sort. And if they were to kidnap you, they would actually serve you a fish. If you went for the head or the cheek and you disregarded everything else, you were probably a keeper and it was worth ransoming you. If you went for the fins and around that, you might've been more middle class; you might've been worth keeping or not depending on that. If you went just for the body, there's like well, actually you would just return to the street; have a nice fish and that's it. There was something about the rarity of the cheek, but also it had this lovely sort of soft silky texture as well as being somewhat rare.
So there's kind of this intersection about rarity and exotic, which perhaps I think has been taken a little bit too far. But at least within history it seemed to be intertwined with those stories. Then as a five or six year old being told of these stories gives it a sort of glow, and later on when we're out there it's like, "Oh yeah, you want the whole of this prawn head." Give the little body to one of your western friends, they won't appreciate it. My mom has an actual phrase of-- I think it literally translates as, "They do not know how to eat. So you might as well do that.” I wonder how you feel about that intertwine with the exotic or the techniques that you use and where that is today.
Fuchsia (00:18:28):
What do you mean?
Ben (00:18:29):
Well, I guess that it's part of the appreciation of some of these kind of rare things. It's the stories that we've been told and that within perhaps within Western cuisine, we don't have quite the same emphasis on this sort of rarity or the stories about how this food has come about.
Fuchsia (00:18:49):
Yeah. So I would say that China is a culture that expands the possibilities of the pleasure of eating in all directions. So part of that is through using a whole very complex raft of culinary techniques to transform ingredients into many different textures, colors, this sort of thing. It's also in diversity of ingredients. That's one of the things about China; that it has a huge range of terroirs of geography with different produce. So you have this extraordinary biodiversity, an immense choice of ingredients from tropical rainforests in the South, Siberian forests and deserts in the north. There are so many different things you can eat. And coupled with this intellectual appreciation of the thrill of eating and of the element of surprise and of using food to honor people.
So if you are having a special Chinese dinner, you want to have dishes that will make people go, "Wow," which will excite them and thrill them. This might be some very hyper seasonal ingredient. Maybe it's the new bamboo shoots of the season which are just perfect. Maybe it's some kind of fish that is only around for a couple of months a year, but also exotica, unusual things. So that might be, as you just mentioned, like the cheek of a fish. I mentioned in the book this incredible dish made with multitudes of fish cheeks which I was presented with once. To a certain extent, this is present in western gastronomy. So we have rare and precious things like caviar which was always something very expensive and exotic. Smoked salmon used to be until it was cheap sort of farm stuff.
I think particularly in the West, you have that sort of association actually with wines. So like a rare vintage wine has that kind of cachet. But in China, food has that place. And I think also in China, there's a long history going back to the Song Dynasty, at least of dishes that pretend to be something they're not. So there's a famous Sichuanese banquet dish jidouhua, which is chicken tofu. So you get presented at a banquet with what looks like a cheap street snack, like just silk and tofu in the way that it's made in. But actually, it's a laboriously made kind of curd made from pureed chicken's breast, which is a luxurious ingredient in a fine banquet stalk made from chicken and ham. So it's like a sort of edible joke; a witticism. So that's also part of the thrill.
Then of course, you have the negative aspect which is eating endangered animals. So things like shark's fins and bear's paws, which in the past, fair enough. There weren't that many people who could eat them and they were very rare. But now with this global crisis of biodiversity, we shouldn't go on eating things like this. Some of them are illegal now. There's a Chinese wildlife law which is supposed to ban poaching wild animals, but some of them are perfectly legal like shark’s fins. Unfortunately, China is a real center of wildlife trafficking of rare animal parts for tables and for medicine, for prescriptions.
I'm always very keen to emphasize firstly that this is a very elite minority thing. The vast majority of Chinese people never eat illegal exotica and probably don't eat shark's fin; most of them never in their whole lives. So it's kind of minority thing. Also, I think it's really important to get in proportion. We have many problems with what we eat. Like many European chefs serve eel, which is critically endangered Japanese bluefin tuna. I think that the Chinese have received more opprobrium for eating shark’s fins than these other categories. I think that we should all be facing up to our crimes against the environment. Not to mention actually, the beef industry and its connection with deforestation in the Amazon and terrible pollution and overfishing all over the world. So I think that it's a human problem and not just a Chinese problem. But having said that, I think that this kind of conscious desire to eat rare and illegal things for kicks is the unattractive side of Chinese gastronomy. And I hope that people will-- I've written in the book there are so many other things to eat in China which are exciting, exotic for other reasons. You really don't have to eat these things anymore.
Ben (00:24:06):
Yeah, I agree. I think exotic food is now definitely overrated, and I certainly don't eat anything like shark's fin anymore. But also actually, I don't eat foie gras. Like you say, I try and avoid eel. I'm not sort of dogmatic about it in the sense that if it's served to me already, it's like, "Well, if it's going to go in the bin, then that's even more of a waste.” But certainly, it's a sort of ordering of it. I wanted to pick up on your comment because there's a lot of it in the book on cooking techniques. One of the ones which I'm always astounded that a lot of my western friends have basically never done is steaming.
This was in university, and I remember passing by with a friend at a market and there was some really beautiful fish. They said, "Oh, I wouldn't know what to do with that." I say, "Oh, that's fine. We'll take it back and we'll steam it. Just couple of chopsticks as a kind of trivet and a plate with some water and we'll be away." They were astounded. It takes about 10 minutes and the whole thing was done, yet most of my friends have essentially never steamed a fish. They might've steamed some vegetables maybe in a microwave, but none of the steaming techniques. I find it's also a very easy technique as well as a quick technique for a lot of foods. I hadn't understood the history of it until reading the book. So I was interested in maybe how you came across steaming and what you think about steaming as a technique today and its history in Chinese cuisine, and what westerners should think about what's the first foods that maybe they should attempt to steam?
Fuchsia (00:25:38):
Yeah. Well, I suppose I find it really fascinating. I remember when I went to the Banpo Museum near Xi'an, which is a Neolithic settlement museum, and this was years ago. I was astounded to find-- among the artifacts in the museum was a pottery steamer from the Neolithic age. So actually, steaming is the most ancient of the really distinctively Chinese cooking methods. Everyone thinks of stir frying in a wok, but that came much later. So the Chinese, like everyone, as soon as they invented pottery, they were boiling, but they were also steaming. No one else was doing this to the extent or at all of the Chinese. One example that someone pointed out to me is Moroccan steam couscous, but that's basically just couscous. In China, you can steam everything.
You can steam a fish, a soup, your staple grains, your noodles. In Shanxi, they steam their oat noodles. You can steam anything really. It's a hugely versatile method. It feels very fresh and healthy. With some things like a fish as you mentioned, a perfect way. You cook it until it's just done and its flesh is still so juicy and kind of lively. You can also steam things for many hours. Like in Sichuan, they have these wonderful dishes where you marinate meat and spices and chili bean paste, and you coat them in crumbs of rice and you steam them, and it has this wonderful sort of comforting texture. I think one thing that's very interesting in China is that nobody really has ovens.
So in China, you went from the very archaic cooking methods with open fires and standing pots in open fires and hanging them over fires to enclosing the fire in a sort of kitchen range with their mouths in the side or the back for putting the fuel in. And then larger openings in the top where you would put your wok and your steamer. There was no oven. I was really surprised when I started researching Chinese food. No one had an oven in their house. Nowadays, western baking is a bit trendy with urbanites and people have some fitted kitchens and stuff. But basically, the oven is not part of a traditional Chinese kitchen. You don't even have an oven in most restaurants. Until recently, you roasted and baked things, you went to specialists. So you might go to a particular bakery or the people making roast ducks and barbecue meat, they would have ovens. If you wanted to eat roasted things, you bought them in from these kind of specialists.
So I think in many ways, steaming takes the place of the oven in Chinese culture. It's a very economical method. So traditionally, you could do something like you could boil a stew and then steam your grain on the top. So you'd be using only one lot of fuel. It was like a kind of one pot meal, but a two story pot. So I think it's a cooking method that's-- I mean, in the West, when people do steam food, it tends to be as a sort of very consciously, healthy minimalist option. It's not really about gastronomy. But in China, it's also about creating amazing flavors. The interesting thing is also that it's so basic. Of course you can have a nice tower of bamboo steamers, but you don't need a steamer. You can just put a little trivet in your wok and then put a plate on it and put a lid on it, and you have a steamer. Or you can even lay a couple of wooden chopsticks across the base of the wok and balance a plate on that. So you can sort of steam with anything. I suppose back to texture again, that westerners don't terribly like the texture-- Like if you steam a fish, the skin is sort of soft and slippery.
Ben (00:30:03):
Which I love.
Fuchsia (00:30:05):
Yeah, exactly. If you steam a chicken as well, the skin is sort of floppy. Westerners I found don't particularly like this texture at first. People like things to be crisp up. But I can't think of any better way really to cook a fish.
Ben (00:30:22):
And does it have an origin story within Chinese culture as some, "God came down and gave steam in the same way that sort of fire has it." It's a little bit more complicated, is it?
Fuchsia (00:30:33):
I think it was the Yellow Emperor. I did write in the book. I think the Yellow Emperor certainly taught people how to cook cereals and I think he taught them both how to make jook congee and to steam the grains as well. Then there's a very famous poem in the Book of Songs; this really archaic collection of folk songs. I can't remember the name of the pen, but it describes Lord Millet because millet was the original kind of sacred grain before rice. People in the North where Chinese culture sort of coalesced were eating millet. There's this description of how Lord Millet taught people how to grow the grain and to steam it.
Ben (00:31:19):
And actually, mentioning of the soup brings to mind-- So when my father would always go out, when we would eat, he would always order a soup at a Chinese meal. I kind of never really appreciated why. It would just happen and sometimes it was just a very light broth type thing. Even with kind of almost one plate meals, you have something to wash down the meal. But it wasn't really actually until reading your work did I have a full appreciation of that, nor it's history, nor that actually sheer variety-- I mean, I guess you get this with all Chinese cuisines that when you look into it, the sheer variety is kind of mind boggling. But yeah, I'd be interested in how you think about soups today. Are they as important as they've ever been in Chinese cuisine, and what is it maybe that here in the west we haven't appreciated about the soup part of the meal?
Fuchsia (00:32:10):
Yeah. Well, in China, there are two kinds of soup, really; two broad categories; gong and tongue. The gong is like a stew soup. So it's where you have a pot full of liquid and you have lots of food usually cut into slivers floating around in it. This is a very interesting dish because it's really the original Chinese dish to go with your rice, and it was a sacred dish. It was offered in sacrifice to the gods. This gong, this soupy stew was used as a metaphor for the art of government. So ancient writers and philosophers talked about creating harmonious flavors in the gong using seasonings. And what they were really talking about was the art of government and balancing different interests. So this gong soup just has this incredible significance and it goes back to the sort of dawn of Chinese civilization.
Then the tongue is usually a lighter broth in which bits of food float. In these kind of soups, often the actual ingredients are less important than the liquid. I think a particular example is the Cantonese soups. So the Cantonese are brilliant at making these tonic soups with meat or poultry and different herbs and vegetables tailored often to the season. With these soups, you basically just eat the broth. You strain it off and it's all full of the chi, the life force, the nourishment of the ingredients. You might eat the ingredients, but they're quite exhausted, they're not tasty. The point is the liquid. I think that soup is an absolutely integral part of almost every Chinese meal. The equivalent of our English phrase, "Meat and two veg" as a sort of example of what a meal is. In China, [Chinese] which means four dishes and a soup. To a Chinese palate, you need a soup because it refreshes the palate. It's just part of the comfort of the meal. So a meal without soup is a bit dry, it's a bit incomplete.
So different parts of China, the soup maybe had first like Cantonese often have it first. In Sichuan, you have it last. Sometimes you can just have it on the side of the meal. But Chinese people really need soup in a way that westerners don't. So it's quite interesting. If you go to a dumpling restaurant in Beijing, so you can have your boiled jiaozi dumplings with your dip of soy sauce, chilies, whatever. But they usually have a big samovar full of meon pong, which is like the noodle cooking water because most people want to have a sort of broth with their meal. This is something that Westerners completely don't get.
I think it's probably because firstly, soups are not essential to a Western meal. The soups that we favor tend to be thicker blended soups, so they're more full-bodied. Many Cantonese restaurants in London-- not so much now-- they used to always have these wonderful wei tang, the soup of the day; these tonic soups I was talking about. Westerners would never order them. They would always order the crab and sweet corn soup. I wonder whether people think westerners think, "They're just not good value. It's just like water, it's just liquid. What's the point? It's somehow not satisfying." But it's a different sort of satisfaction. It's the satisfaction of comfort and of rinsing the palate and so on. And certainly since my own palate became kind of sinusized, I really love soup and I often make soup. If I'm making dandan noodles for example, I often have a bowl full of the noodle broth because the dandan is very spicy and very dry. Then you have this little broth with it and it's just comforting.
Ben (00:36:28):
Yeah, I completely agree. In fact, you had a passage in the book where you make kind of such a soup for your Chinese friends and they really appreciate it. I remember once going through a lot of effort to making a kind of soup like that for some of my western friends, and they really didn't get it. They thought the rest of the meal is-- And actually, I spent more time on the soup and actually probably more money than anything else. I had once I think, an Italian consummate type thing which was the closest that I'd had it where the soup was the star, but it was certainly not the same way. I wonder with that in restaurants here in London, we have a slightly similar issue with vegetables.
So you might have a really beautiful Chinese broccoli, a kailan or a thing. It's almost expensive, or it is as expensive as the meat dish because it's treated, it's cooked as well-- if not better, and it's considered sort of equal importance. Yet I know a lot of my friends are kind of like, "Why is that one so much more expensive? Let's just order another roast meat dish. Why not?" I said, "Well, that's not going to give you what you would just want to eat. Just meat and maybe a bit of your rice." So there's kind of that interesting thing, and I think it's perhaps similar with the soup. You don't feel you get value or maybe your mind is not attuned to the same way of it.
I think about the vegetables as a segue also. I hadn't fully understood until I read your book, some of the, I guess what I'd call the culture wars involved with this. I'm thinking about knife skills and the small slither food that you often get in Chinese cooking. I hadn't appreciated that. I could see how back in the day there was a sort of propaganda about, "You're not getting value for money. You don't understand what you're eating. This is just small food and they're trying to cheat you,” in that kind of propaganda war without realizing, "Well, if you're going to eat with chopsticks, the beauty of knife skills, how they evenly cooked." I remember sort of thinking, "Oh, I'm just going to really speed through. My knife skills are only average." It was like, "Oh, this is really much harder to cook and much less satisfactory. I now know why they all do it within that." So I was just interested in that what you feel about that kind of cultural part of it and the understanding maybe wrapping in the knife skills and that misunderstanding and how much of it, I guess was an almost not quite purposeful cultural war, but some of that. I guess some of that we have a legacy of that today. There's some things we have that are referred to sort of the cheap food where we had with MSG, vegetables and all of that. It seems to be maybe an ongoing kind of cultural exchange type of thing going on.
Fuchsia (00:39:15):
Yeah. Well, I think just to pick up on your point about vegetables. I think if you order vegetables in an English restaurant for example, they're usually these tiny apologetic little dishes on the side. But as you said, like a Chinese dish of vegetables, it's a proper dish. It's quite a lot of it and it's part of the balance of a meal. I think that's one thing I'm always keen to talk about. Again, this thing about Chinese food being about health and balance. That a Chinese meal is not really complete if you only have this sort of sexy, tasty, exciting dishes. You always need the neutral, the pale, the understated to balance them and to make a nice meal and to make you feel good afterwards because that's the point of eating as well as pleasure. It's sad really that people don't appreciate this dimension.
But again, I think it's about information and education because once you understand the purpose of it, then it becomes very important. The thing about food being cut in small pieces. So the Chinese largely have the habit of cutting food into small pieces for about 2000 years since the Han Dynasty. For that reason, all the cutting is in the kitchen. So the kitchen was a place where you had violence and knives and slaughter and chopping. And at table, it was very civilized. You didn't have clashing metal, you had your nice delicate chopsticks, and you would eat food that was already cut for consumption, or it was soft enough to be picked up with chopsticks. The habit of eating food cut into small pieces and the habit of eating with chopsticks have grown up together. Obviously, they're completely connected because you can't really eat a lamb with chopsticks very easily. I mean, it's better to have it cut up in small pieces.
When I was doing research for this book-- So I was reading some of the early accounts by Europeans of their first encounters with Chinese food, and a lot of them would say things like, "All the food was cut into very small pieces and I had no idea what I was eating." And they didn't because you see a sliver of something, "What is it? Is it chicken? Is it pork? What is it?" So it just struck me that, as you say, it kind of fed into all kinds of western suspicions about Chinese food because there was this idea that the Chinese, who as we know are very adventurous eaters and eat lots of exciting ingredients, that they were eating all this terrifying exotica and that if you went for a meal in San Francisco's Chinatown, maybe they would serve you rat or snake and you wouldn't know it because they would chop it up.
So there was this kind of on one hand, a great affection for Chinese food and all these chop suey and those early dishes. But also this kind of suspicion of the Chinese as being very other, very different eating habits. And I think the fact that the food was not recognizable like an English roast chicken played into people’s anxieties about it. Of course, nobody would give you a snake if you were paying for chicken because snake is much more expensive. I think also just in terms of character, that in the West, having great hunks of meat and roast turkeys and all bits of beef is seen as very macho and manly. So it's the bloke cooking on a barbecue or the male head of the household carving up a large chunk of meat at the table.
So by contrast, maybe Chinese food looks a bit kind of effeminate when it's all very delicate and cut up. But from a Chinese point of view, actually, it's rather different because eating great hunks of meat was things that the uncivilized barbarians beyond the Great Wall did. To be Chinese was to eat food that had been transformed by cooking, by knife skills into something that was very civilized and elegant. So the hulk hulking great roast actually seems a bit kind of archaic to Chinese eyes. So it's not that either is right or wrong, but I think it's really interesting to just consider how perceptions are different and how these enabled and encouraged prejudice.
Ben (00:43:49):
You have that phrase in your book [ ] which I guess roughly translates as simple and monotonous.
Fuchsia (00:43:56):
Oh yeah. So many Chinese people will dismiss the cooking of the entire Western world as [Chinese], very monotonous, very simple. It's like almost a catchphrase. So many Chinese people will just say, "Oh, you just eat hamburgers and sandwiches, don't you?" It's obviously hilarious for me because I know that also lots of westerners think that Chinese people just eat chicken's feet, whatever it is.
Ben (00:44:22):
You talk about the sort of blending of ingredients and all of this. One of the most extraordinary stories you recount-- and I hadn't realized this was a thing-- was around Pomelo Pith. Did you know about this from a while back? How did that story raise, and what's so great about Pomelo pith? You kind of think, "Okay, well that's an ingredient which goes straight in the bin," but actually not.
Fuchsia (00:44:45):
Yeah. So pomelo-- I know lots of British people don't seem to even know what it is, but it's like a huge kind of citrus fruit with a slightly bitter taste. So the Cantonese-- I think only the Cantonese they use the pith, the white cottony pretty tasteless pith of this fruit, which is very thick to make a dish. The first time I had it was with a Cantonese friend of mine, Rose, who I actually wrote a whole chapter about in my previous book. She took me to a restaurant. We had this completely delicious dish and it was these kind of domes of something lovely and soft and mashy and a gorgeous sort of really opulent gravy scattered with shrimp eggs. It was so delicious. It turned out it was pomelo pith. It's a real Cantonese thing. [Chinese], that's Mandarin pronunciation by the way. So what they do is they peel or burn off the thin, shiny outer layer of the fruit. They breed special pomelos which don't have much actual fruit. Then the pith is tasteless, it's a bit bitter. So they soak it for several days, they change the water. It's a long process. Then they cook it in a fabulous broth made with meat and seafood for hours. And eventually, you get this very tasty and satisfying dish.
What is so fascinating for me about this is how the Chinese are so creative with cooking. It's this very analytical approach. I wrote about this in the book that I think that in most cultures, people will ask themselves the question, "Is this edible? Is this food edible? Is this sort of thing edible?" And for the Chinese, I think the question is slightly different. It's like, "How can I make this edible? What is this plant or this animal part? What does it have going for it and what's wrong with it? Can we bring out these qualities and modify or suppress the deficiencies?" This is what they do.
So you have all these ingredients like pomelo pith, which is so unpromising. Everyone else just puts it in the bin. Yet, with a bit of imagination and technique, you have a fantastic dish. I find this so inspiring and I think everyone should look to the Chinese for creativity partly because it's fun and it's dazzling and it's delicious. But also it's so resourceful, and at a time when we are feeling all these environmental constraints and we have to eat more creatively. Some chefs in the west are trying to think of ways to eat insects and so on. The Chinese are way ahead. There are so many ingredients. But not just that, just this creative approach to making delicious things out of anything.
Ben (00:48:09):
Yeah. One of the principles or ideas I got from reading your book is that you kind of approach all ingredients like that so you can have something which more or less seems perfect; so don't do that much with it to bring out its essence. So you have something like pomelo pith, which you're going to have to do a lot with and with that idea that we're going to get the most of what we have. Actually, all of those sets of techniques come through from something where you likely get the sort of soul or the essence of the food because that's where it is, to something where you have to cook it, source it, technique over and over to really get the most of it. I found that the way you described that and put in your writing was really wonderful.
Then I picked up, which I'd heard earlier as well, the famed Catalan Spanish chef, Ferran Adria, which is probably considered one of the best Western chefs over the last few decades. His comments about how he thought that actually Mao was one of the most influential figures in food history because of how he sent so many chefs or so many people to work in the fields and how that changed Chinese cuisine, at least in the more modern era. So I was kind of interested in how you thought that perhaps Mao was an influence and maybe how Chinese cuisine in the last 50, 10 or 20 years has sort of developed post that era.
Fuchsia (00:49:35):
The thing is that the Chinese were pioneers of so many things that are now extremely interesting or crazies in the West. So things like the obsession with terroir, with the origin of ingredients, with seasons-- 2000 years in China, making imitation meat foods out of plants goes back to the 10th century in China, at least. Your restaurants go back six centuries before Paris. There was a sort of sophisticated restaurant scene in Hangzhou in the Jiangnan region. So China is this absolute treasure house of gastronomical thinking, ideas about health, cooking techniques. It's tragically neglected in the west. This is, I think largely for historical reasons because China was pretty much turning itself upside down. It was closed, so a lot of the 20th century there was this big period when China was turning in on itself and wars and revolutions and invasions and Cultural Revolution, and emerging at the end of it being a sort of quite secluded nation, quite poor, et cetera.
So for that reason, I think it's just people-- as Ferran Adria said so memorably. It's just that the outside world has just not really been aware of what China has to offer. And it's still the case that Chinese-- I mean, I think it's changing, frankly. But it's still the case that Chinese food by and large is immensely popular all over the world, but it's mostly seen as quite cheap and lowbrow and not terribly healthy. I think most people or a lot of people would understand why you would perhaps sometimes spend a lot of money on Japanese food or Spanish food or French food, but they don't really see Chinese cuisine as being a sort of big, hitting serious cuisine, which is completely mad. I think this is just historical reasons. It is actually partly what motivates me to write because considering how interesting the subject is, it's not been very much reflected in western food writing. There are some very good books, but there's not many compared with the scale of the country and the cuisine.
Ben (00:52:14):
Yes. I was reading I think something you'd written earlier about how hard it was to get your first book published because there wasn't that much interest from standard publishers. It's like, "Oh, why would we want a book on that?" Which kind of reflects it. I had a question in from a listener which could have riff on that, which is again, around all of this cultural appreciation, cultural appropriation dialogue which is happening in the media. One of my comments is particularly around food, there has always been this exchange. So the chili pepper started off in the Americas and food has always traveled, is this way of cultural dialogue. It's a little bit why my origin dish is where it is. My mom's dish travels wherever my mom is, so it's always my mom's cooking wherever she is. That's the sort of a unique thing I think around food.
It's also interesting it's kind of reflected a little bit in how laws have been developed in the sense that, rightly or wrongly you can have copyright for stories and films and you have patents for ideas and technology. But recipes have actually always been considered something which is kind of like a public good. We exchange it because it's always changing because as often you can't really say, "Well, where is that whole source thing from where a recipe comes about?" A little bit like chicken rice. It kind of developed across a lot of people at a lot of time because of that. So within that and where some of this dialogue has gone, do you have any thoughts about how we can best understand cultural exchange particularly around food and some of the dialogue around appreciation versus appropriation?
Fuchsia (00:53:58):
Well, the first thing to say is that basically all food is fusion food. Human beings have been exchanging ingredients and techniques and ideas for ages.
Ben (00:54:12):
Thousands of years.
Fuchsia (00:54:12):
In China, the food of North China, so many ingredients. To mention just a couple like sheep meat and wheat and flour milling technology, which is basically the basis of Northern Chinese food, and big garlic all came in along the Silk Road from the western lands in ancient times. In more modern times, the chili-- you can't imagine Sichuanese food without the chili. So it's all fusion. And I think that exchange and adaptation is a kind of human inevitability. But the whole debate about cultural appropriation is very much about-- I think most people don't really think that you shouldn't make a dish from another culture. It's about treating other cultures with respect, and it's about having fair representation in the media, in the restaurant industry.
So this is why it has struck such a raw nerve, this unfairness. Like, "Why do you only have white people writing about everything in the media?" There were all these controversies in New York about-- There was one restaurant that was opened by someone who was not Chinese, doing a Chinese restaurant and saying that it was going to be healthy Chinese food, and implying that ordinary Chinese food was not very healthy. So I mean, that was just offensive to Chinese people, understandably. So I think that the issues raised by the whole furore about cultural appropriation are very legitimate, and I think that societies are going some way to address this. You're definitely seeing greater diversity in the cookbooks published and in the food writing world, for example.
But I think for most people the solution to this is not that you should only stay in your own lane. Of course, it doesn't really make any sense anyway because just for example, with Chinese food, it's like you could say, "Well, you have to be Chinese to write about Chinese food." But then is it okay if you are a Cantonese British writing about Sichuan food? Then how would you write a book about the whole of Chinese food because you can't do it. I think also the whole notion of who owns culture and what is authentic, once you start examining it under a microscope, it's really complicated. So I think it's about honest discussion of fairness and respect really.
Ben (00:56:57):
One of my favorite chapters was actually the one where-- I think we've commented on it. But when I go back to Asia, a lot of Asians are quite dismissive about the whole of western food as it is, vice versa. But the Shanghainese restaurant which does its own versions of things like Russian soup and that I hadn't appreciated that was such a long history of it, which actually makes complete sense when you think about it. Is that a restaurant you go back to much in Shanghai? Would you like to tell a little bit of its story?
Fuchsia (00:57:28):
…It was originally a German restaurant, and da which means big. Big cuisine was the word at the time late 19th, early 20th century for Western food. So it's called the DeDa Western food restaurant. It's in Shanghai and I can't remember exactly when it was founded. But I think it was just before 1900 or something. It was founded by a German at a time when Shanghai was full of foreigners and it was these foreign concessions and so on; very international. The really interesting thing about it is that it kind of survived the Cultural Revolution. And very early on, it was taken over by a Chinese businessman.
If you go there now, of course all the staffs are Chinese and you have Chinese chefs in the kitchen who specialize in Western food. It serves this really interestingly curated Chinese menu of Western food. So the signature dishes are like you mentioned, the louson tongue which sounds like Russian soup. It's the local version of borscht which is made with cabbage and potato and beef and not beetroot, which they don't really have there. Then they also do things like a kind of local version of a schnitzel, but made with pork not veal, and served with la jangyo which means hot soy sauce, but which is a local version of Worcester sauce. Then there's a sort of crab dish which is a crab in a cheesy creamy sauce in the crab shell, but it's made with a freshwater Chinese crab.
Anyway, I went there just out of curiosity and I thought it was going to be serving horrendously bastardized so-called western food. Actually, it was really charming. It was full of Shanghainese families. It's a real institution. It goes back more than a hundred years and it's part of Shanghai needs culture, these old dishes. The whole menu, you'd never find that menu in a real restaurant in the west because this is western food on Chinese terms curated by Chinese people really. But the food is nicely cooked, it's fresh. So I went there expecting just to be curiosity and it was rather charming, so I have been back. It was funny because I've talked to customers there and they see it as part of their heritage.
Ben (01:00:20):
They see it as really authentic?
Fuchsia (01:00:22):
Yes. And it's not the only one. There's another one called the Red House in the former French concession, which does things like french onion soup with a bit of toast with melted cheese on top. Instead of snails in garlic butter, they have local clams in garlic butter, but served in that sort of pan. For me, it's just really interesting as an example of how cultural appropriation works both ways.
Ben (01:00:48):
Great. Well, last few questions. One is, if you were to open a restaurant in London, you had a magic wand, what sort of restaurant it would be? I thought about this and I think if I could magic it, I would do those Buddhist temple restaurants. So I was taken to one or two when I was growing up which do these amazing essentially tofu dishes, but they're all so-called fake meats or whatever. I remember being presented one which was just like, "Well, this is a roast duck." And I thought, "This is just not going to be good, but I'm just going to eat it because I've been taken there." It was amazing. So it’s something which is sort of skilled and quite fun and I think would go down well in the London scene. It’s not understood that this whole fake food thing has been going on for a couple of thousand years in a really high class way, or maybe somehow seasonal British Chinese or that. But what restaurant would you transplant if you could with a magic wand?
Fuchsia (01:01:50):
Well, it would be something along the lines of the Dragon Well Manor in Hangzhou, which I wrote about in the book. But basically I would need a magic wand because what I would need is a sort of Chinese farm in London with a bamboo grove and ponds where I could grow water bamboo and water chestnuts and have fresh water, fish and shrimp and rice fields. I'm getting carried away here. But the point of it would be to do really fine Chinese food made with the best ingredients because this is another of these weird things; that people don't associate Chinese food-- people in the west-- with fine ingredients. It's again, this thing about it being cheap. It's really unusual to find Chinese restaurants serving free range meat or organic vegetables or forage foods or all the things that are quite normal in Western restaurants. It's such a misperception because as we've sort of already touched on this, the Chinese gourmets have been obsessed with the quality of their ingredients forever, really. Good Chinese cooking starts with good ingredients. So my restaurant would be really showcasing this; that Chinese food is the best food made with the best ingredients and not only cooking skills, but it makes you feel wonderful and it's in tune with the seasons and the cosmos and everything like that.
Ben (01:03:15):
Great. So now if your game, we'll do a short section of underrated, overrated, or you can sort of pass and we can neutral. So I'd do like one word or phrase or idea, and you can give a quick comment about whether you think it might be underrated or overrated. So the first one, I guess an easy one is milk.
Fuchsia (01:03:36):
Well, overrated. Personally, I just don't like milk. I absolutely love cheese and butter and everything like that. The reason I'm saying that is because it's not the be all and end all. Of course, you draw your attention to the wonderful world of soy milk and tofu which is a far more sustainable alternative.
Ben (01:03:58):
I should have specified cow's milk over soy milk, but yes. Cake?
Fuchsia (01:04:05):
Kind of hard to answer.
I mean, I don't know how cake really is rated to be honest. I would say that cake is very delightful, but it's not the be all and end all. But I don't know that anyone would say that it was.
Ben (01:04:22):
Well, I guess one comment would be most of Chinese cuisine probably doesn't have a big cake tradition, although my mom would partly disagree because of all of the quays and the things you get in Malaysian, Singaporean food. But obviously in Western cuisine it's very much like. So maybe correctly weighted. How about alcohol? But maybe we could go wine?
Fuchsia (01:04:48):
Wine, well, I would say overrated just because I'm far more interested in food than alcohol. I don't drink. I love the tasting and exploring different wines and whiskeys and things, but I just don't drink very much. So I can quite happily go for a long time without alcohol. Definitely food is more important.
Ben (01:05:05):
Yeah, I've been drinking less and less and I think I really don't like-- you actually talk about it in the food that a lot of Chinese celebrations have all of this huge drinking culture bit of it. Then by about round three, you can't remember any of the food anyway, which seems a real shame with a lot of that. Then sea cucumber overrated, underrated?
Fuchsia (01:05:29):
Well, in the West, underrated. I love it. It's one of these weird exotic texture foods as far as westerners are concerned. It doesn't have any taste, but it has this voluptuous sort of wobbly texture and it's a bit sort of sticky and soft and a bit crisp, and it's quite wonderful.
Ben (01:05:51):
Great. Then last one in the series, durian?
Fuchsia (01:05:56):
In the West, underrated. I just find it completely thrilling. I really adore stinky, smelly cheeses in the state of advanced dishevelment and durian is a bit like that really. It's sort of a smell that really gets onto your skin and is a little bit disturbing and a bit delicious at the same time.
Ben (01:06:16):
Yeah, I love it. I've loved it from early and that's one of the things it's like, "Oh, are you're going to like it? Are you not going to like it?" I even like the smell. I remember I was laughed at because as a child I described it as a perfume, which most people don't think. But there was that just complex aromas which came from it which I really enjoyed. So last couple of questions. This is, I guess most focused on your writing and your research. I was interested to know what your sort of writing process or even writing day is because it's obviously to my mind, deeply researched. Obviously you've had lived experience going to places, talking to chefs, doing the cooking, and being trained. Yet, at least to my mind, your prose is very stylish, it's also very clear. Food writing's quite hard to come across; the sort of joy or deliciousness and texture of all of that. It comes across on the level of the sentence-- your sentences are really super great. So I was kind of interested in how you kind of write. Do you think a lot about structure or form or does it happen? Do you come across sort of you take a lot of notes and it all gels together. Is there anything you'd like to share about your writing process?
Fuchsia (01:07:33):
Well, I think it's a little chaotic to be frank. But the one thing that I really do religiously is I take a lot of notes. All my Chinese friends get used to this eccentricity and find it quite funny. But I write everything down because this is material, and in my books there are often passages, particularly descriptions. So if you write a description of a place when you are in it, like what it smells like, what it sounds like and what it tastes like, then it's going to have an immediacy that is quite hard to recapture. So the more I write down in the field, in the moment, the more I thank myself later. Although obviously it's all very rough cut. But quite a lot of phrases and thoughts and even paragraphs will end up in the finished books from this kind of field work.
And then I suppose that with writing, it's not a terribly conscious thing. But I think I have a real sense of what it sounds like and when it works and when it doesn't work. It's a question of repeating sentences again and again until they sound right. Sometimes it's very easy and it really flows and sometimes it's a nightmare and it's, "I want to give up." Then with the structure as well, I found this a real challenge because having done several cookbooks-- Cookbooks structurally are relatively easy because I think that a fairly conventional structure works well. So you have chapters on different sorts of food and you have head notes. The only long bit of writing is the introduction really. But this kind of book it's like, "It can be anything. So how on earth are you going to structure this huge flood of ideas and thoughts?" It's a bit scary at first because you've agreed to write this book and you don't really know how it's going to work out.
But again, it's just a question of applying yourself and sometimes taking a break and doing something else. I don't understand how it works. It's like an instinct for sort of knowing when something feels right, when it's getting boring, when the argument is incoherent. Then also, I'm lucky to have a good editor. So with this book, the one chapter that I had such a lot to say, which is the one about eating exotica and endangered species. I really wanted to get the tone right which is to kind of be very frank and honest and fair and balanced in the way I wrote it. My editor thought it was a bit chaotic at first. So I went away and had to put a lot more work into redoing it. But I wouldn't say there's some rational elements, but a lot of it is just sort of-- It's like just recognizing when and when the proportion is right
Ben (01:10:34):
Just practice. I'm guessing you write your notes by hand because you probably do some characters as well as English in your notes or you have that turned to like tapping on a phone or an iPad or things?
Fuchsia (01:10:46):
No, very much paper, because as you say, I have to write notes in both English and Chinese. I can't be specific about things unless I write them in Chinese, like the names of ingredients and dishes and people's names and all that sort of stuff. And also sometimes they do drawings and diagrams.
Ben (01:11:05):
And I guess there's a dialect they might have to say, "Well, and these are the characters." And it's like a whole new technique specific to that regional things. So they've got almost their own language around it.
Fuchsia (01:11:14):
Yeah. And also other people write in my books too. So sometimes someone will explain something-- I remember once a man in a tea shop in Chengdu wrote a whole page about different street snacks in Chengdu. Also, the great thing about a notebook is that it has no value. It's like if I had everything on an iPad, it's something someone might nick. But a scruffy notepad covered in oil is not very appealing.
Ben (01:11:41):
Got a huge amount of intangible value. The structure of your book I think really flows as well because you've got the chapters, but you've got the kind of meta-chapters above. But you're saying that actually that structure probably came sort of midway through the process. You didn't think, "Oh, I can do sort of history. We can start with fire and grain and we go and we have a section of techniques, and we end on meta-philosophy of food ideas." It's sort of like, "Oh, we had these essays” and then through that process you can see this would be a pleasing structure for it to work.
Fuchsia (01:12:14):
Yeah. So I did have some conception that the-- I can't remember when, but I think quite early on. Probably when I did the proposal I did have the idea that it was going to be about a dish, and with each dish, a theme. But then I think sometimes some chapters clearly had to be standalone chapters, others sometimes divided off into two chapters or made into one. It sort of evolved as I went along and the final structure just happened at the end really. It was a whole process of rearranging and there were one or two that could have gone in different places, but it just has to have a sort of harmony to it. It just has to fit and not feel labored. It has to just feel inevitable.
Ben (01:13:02):
And is there a kind of missing essay or chapter which you thought, "Oh, this would be quite good, but doesn't quite fit?" Are there lots of things which didn't make the cut for some future work?
Fuchsia (01:13:11):
Actually, I think I got everything I wanted in this one. Of course I'm going to write many more books. But this one ended up feeling just about the right sort of, "I did manage to put in what I wanted to say."
Ben (01:13:30):
Excellent. And when you write, are you a morning person, evening person? Does it matter? Are you short bursts one to three hours, or can you write the whole day? Or is it kind of chaotic in the sense that it kind of just depends?
Fuchsia (01:13:44):
I just don't know. So in general, I'm on better form in the morning. But I also find it really hard getting down to work. The whole thing about writing, and I think many writers find this, is that it's elusive. It's not something that you completely control. So you can put the time in, but sometimes you will write well and easily and sometimes you can just see what's wrong with the structure of a chapter. Sometimes you can't. You can spend hours just banging your head against a brick wall. I think one just has to accept that it's something a bit mysterious. You have to put the time in. I think with my earlier books-- with almost all of them, I had major crises when I just wanted to give up and I thought, "I can't do this." With my previous, with my memoir, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper, I got so despairing about it that I nearly deleted the whole thing and all the backups and handed back the advance because I thought I couldn't do it. But by now, I know that when I have these moments of despair that somehow you just find a way through the woods and it's just by having it in your mind. Sometimes taking a break, doing something different. In my experience, it's just a work in process. But it is a bit scary because you have this expectation you're going to finish a book and then sometimes you don't know how you're going to do it.
Ben (01:15:15):
Yeah, exactly. Playwrights have a couple of techniques which we talk about which are cousin to those. So one is whenever you've written the first draft or whatever draft, one rule is you just delete the first 10 pages because it takes you a while to get in and just don't worry about it. You can always come back to it, but just don't worry. Just delete them and then get onto your next draft. Some people do throw away whole drafts and then write another draft, but then refer to it. But it's this whole idea that you are going to have a panic, it isn't going to work. But actually it's okay because whatever you do, you started getting things and it will be there and it will be better. That's a kind of other thing.
There's one which went is that there's a sort of adage within some playwrights that it is kind of somewhat painful to write depending on how you write and where you come from. So there is this bit of like actually you do lock yourself away and you get it out and you don't worry too much because you need to get yourself into business where you force yourself to write where it comes out. Not everyone's like that, obviously, within that. But there is that some things because there is this fear and because you get these difficult patches that you have to push through, but it will be okay. That's what we tell ourselves.
Fuchsia (01:16:27):
Yes. I'm much happier when I'm around people and doing things in a team. I don't really like this whole thing about being alone at a desk writing, but then you have to do it. So then when you have a big deadline and you have to just lock yourself away, it's pretty ghastly.
Ben (01:16:47):
Yeah. Well, actually that's why some more latest theater work has been more collaborative partly because writing alone is not for everyone. Great. So final kind of question; two part question. What are your current projects and things that you're working on? I know there's going to be a book tour starting soon. Second half of the year you have your food tours which I think are ongoing. But are there any other projects? Then the sort of segue from that is, do you have any advice for people? I guess this can be broad advice about how to live your life. It could be advice about eating Chinese food or being a writer. So current projects and any life advice or eating advice you'd like to share?
Fuchsia (01:17:30):
Well, current projects. So this book, I'll be doing things around this book for a while. But then I will have to start the next one. I just have several concurrent-- I mean, the next one will be a cookbook. But I tend to have lots of things on the go and they will bear fruit at different times. I'm collecting material for other books that may not come to light of day very quickly.
Ben (01:17:53):
Are you going to tackle all of the great major Chinese cuisines and then as many as the regional ones as you can get through? So there's at least 117 plus books that you could write?
Fuchsia (01:18:04):
Well, this is a lifelong project because it's endlessly interesting and there are all these different angles. And also because I enjoy actually the narrative writing as well. This has reminded me there's so much I'd like to say with that. So I'm definitely not doing some kind of routine box ticking exercise. I want to really have a connection to a place or a subject and feel really involved and make friends there and have a kind of personal involvement before I write a book. I don't want to just rush in and do something token.
Life advice, I would never really think I'm a good person to give life advice. But I suppose the thing that I find so rewarding is just when you open yourself up to another culture and you really step outside your own point of view, it's tremendously illuminating and life enhancing because of course, I have not only been learning about Chinese food and culture all these years. I have also been learning that there are other ways of looking at my own culture. There's not just one way of looking at the world. There's not one point of view that's valid. I think this is incredibly important to sort of see that many things are relative-- not everything. So I think that, that is a very interesting consequence of-- So I would encourage people to be open to new experiences and to rethinking their own assumptions about everything too.
Ben (01:20:00):
Okay. Well, with that, thank you very much. The book, Invitation to a Banquet should be out in the UK at the very end of August, and then in the US, a few weeks later.
Fuchsia (01:20:12):
In November, actually.
Ben (01:20:12):
Okay, a little while later. You can catch Fuchsia maybe on some book tour in the second of the year, into next year. So look out for that. I highly recommend the book.
Fuchsia (01:20:25):
Thank you. Lovely talking to you.
Ben (01:20:27):
Thank you very much.