Fuchsia Dunlop. 2023. Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food New York:: Norton, ISBN: 978-0-393-86713-8 466 pp.
Richard Zimmer (Sonoma State University)
Best dish to start the review: To paraphrase Dunlop, red-braised paddle is a Hangzhou specialty. The tail is “…braised in stock with Shaoxing wine, dark soy sauce and sugar until its most intimate secretions have melted into the liquid, yielding a sauce as dark as mahogany and rich as double cream” (170). How should you then eat it? “…in the company of someone you know well, because it’s a brazenly messy business” (170). When you are finished, “…our hands, lips, and cheeks are streaky with sauce, glossy with dark molten jelly” (171). She quotes the ancient sage Gaoz: “’appetite for food is human nature…’” (173).
That is the Chinese approach to food, and it is Dunlop’s wonderful way to tell the story—from the beginnings of the Chinese gustatory experience to its incredible complexity today. And as she tells this story, she draws on previous historical writings, Chinese philosophy and culture, her English culinary upbringing as a contrast, her direct experiences in learning Sichuan cooking, and her continuing travels in China. She samples everything—food, wisdom, enjoyment, and she presents it in typical Chinese fashion: a multicourse dinner of a variety of dishes of information and enjoyment. She positively “warns” the eater of Chinese food not to generalize at all about it since it is so diverse and forever changing (321 et seq). She, Lee and Lee (1976 , and Lin (1975), are willing, however, to see four largely regional styles of cuisine.
Like Levi-Strauss, Dunlop says that the Chinese believe that people became “civilized” when they first cooked food. Therefore, a meal has to have starch. Initially starches were grains and millet grown in the North. That did not include rice. Eventually, and for a long-time, rice replaced other grains (and now other grains are making a comeback). The starch, to the Chinese, is the mainstay of the meal. Everything else is an accompaniment, which is the opposite of Western tastes. Dunlop contrasts this focus with the meat centerpieces of her early English meals. China explicitly has a different philosophy about food (33 et seq.).
This philosophy extends to seeing food in terms of pleasure, harmony, and health. For the novice reader, food can be medicine. It can sooth and calm a person. Its seemingly contradictory tastes can help a person regain health and balance—at the same time allowing the eater to enjoy the complexity of the cuisine. ( 61 et seq.). To add to a person’s pleasure, the Chinese prize specific places of origin for everything, similar to terroir in the West. (78 et seq.). And it should have excellent mouthfeel as well, including offal. Eating offal, often seen as a sign of poverty in the West, is prized in China (177-8). Furthermore, Dunlop notes, the very offal so prized in China is safely available because of refrigeration and factory farming (178).
The Chinese also enjoy rare delicacies, as much as they can afford, such as bear’s paw. According to Dunlop, it was not particularly tasty, but it was smelly. The frisson was psychological—the sense of “eating adventurously was understood as a joyful way of inhabiting and experiencing the world” (186). The thrill of the exotic and rare extended to a competition for status and display, even if the food was not tasty: “[a]t a transactional banquet, what matters is the cost and status of the food” (192). This is as true in the present and of the past: the choice of food is a symbol of power.
Dunlop raises two related concerns about these delicacies. The first is environmental. Are the Chinese practices for the exotic contributing to species extinction? The second is racist. Are the Chinese being singled out for their consumption of exotics? The answer to both is that yes, the Chinese are contributing to species extinction—bear’s paws and shark fins, for example. And, yes, the Chinese are being singled out. Dunlop lists Western culinary fascinations with exotics, such as Scottish salmon and quail eggs (195). This is an important and crucial concern, especially in light of the controversy surrounding the possible origins of Covid-19 in a wildlife stall in a Wuhan food market (194).
Dunlop lays out the Chinese approach to a meal: “The key principles of ordering a Chinese meal are balance on the one hand and variety on the other, with the strenuous avoidance of repetition” (232). Unlike Western dinners, there is no formal order to the dishes, except what is implied above. Soup is often the liquid. There are no desserts. Appropriate sweet and spicy combinations are included, of course. And there is a different notion of art and balance: “Plain dishes are like the empty space that frames and highlights a work of art” (237).
She also serves up the ideal approach to understanding part of a meal’s preparation—the chef, the chef’s knife, and the chef’s knifework. The Chinese moved away from serving large chunks of meat several millennia ago (except for the later Manchu period). They focused on cutting meat and vegetables into specific shapes and thicknesses. The idea was to create the best flavor and aesthetic. The Japanese followed suit, especially with their preference for raw fish (sashimi and sushi). Skill became an end, a philosophy, and, in one mention, a possibility for political office (242). Dunlop witnesses what goes into great knife-work, a wonderful first-person account for researchers (246-7). Art, taste, philosophy are of one piece.
Then, she provides the reader, including the interested academic, a vivid picture of the role the steaming of food plays in Chinese cooking (252 et seq.). Steaming predates cutting up pieces of food into small pieces. It saves fuel, preserves nutrients, and is aesthetic as well. Dunlop contrasts European baking of grains with Chinese steaming. She offers first-person accounts of her visits to restaurants and her training school in Sichuan.
Yet stir fry is the essence of Chinese cooking. Dunlop tells the tale of it, from humble beginnings to its use in different kinds of food preparation. It is not simple, and it requires practice not to undercook or overcook. Dunlop tells the reader, for example, how to cook perfect shrimp: make sure it is not dry (264). She recounts visits to chefs and kitchens in China and elsewhere and adds to the mixture religion, philosophy, magic, and mystery: “It is fitting that the word houhou [pan-frying] has its origins in the alchemical arts of Chinese Daoists in their pursuit of immortality, and that the historical Yi Yin himself may have been not just a chef but also a shaman” (269). But there are dangers in the future. Artificial Intelligence and robotization replacing the arduous task of learning proper preparation and cooking for hotpot (269 et seq.). Moreover, Dunlop weaves a story about the complexity of the many ways stir fry is done with the complexities of the Chinese language itself (276-8).
Noodles begin another chapter of first-person accounts and visits. Westerners are most familiar with chow mein noodles. But these are from the South, from Canton, and the North is where noodles reign and diversify (286). Northerners make noodles while Southerners buy them. Dunlop recounts the history of Chinese pasta, with dough arriving from the Silk Road, and stirs in first-person accounts of restaurants she visits. Shanxi women do the softer noodles, for example, while men do the more ornate forms (288).
Dunlop then “reviews” restaurants that serve dim sum and bao (dumplings). Inspired from Chinese contact with peoples of the Silk Road and the frontier, these delicacies vary in terms of fillings, coatings, and names in Chinese. Westerners are most familiar with the Cantonese version (304). These morsels, Dunlop contends, warm the palate everywhere in China and now in the larger world. Then she stirs in a history of how the Chinese rarely eat desserts (traditionally, not, except as snacks, such as rice balls. Northern China, for example, offers Peking Glazed Apples and “Peking Dust” or sweetened chestnuts ( Lee and Lee 1976: 128-29). Other authors, like Israa Saeed[i] see more dessert options from the past. And Moon cakes celebrate the mid-Autumn festival.[ii] Tastes do change, as in Hong Kong, with people eating puddings and, on the Mainland, with people consuming patisseries.(320-1). All this arose from Western and overseas influence, such as Malaysia and England.
Many Chinese are and have been vegetarians. Scarcity of resources to grow different kinds of livestock, philosophy that contributes to a cultural belief in lack of ostentation, and religious philosophies that forbid the eating of meat have been contributors to this practice. The cuisine has adapted, with meat-like substitutes (333-334). And a meatless future is expanding for many, with the rise of the vegetarian food chain, Wujie [no boundaries], which began in Taiwan, suggesting cross-cultural influences (346).
For Dunlop, the future is written in the patterns of past cuisine. The Chinese have alternated between simplicity, sometimes out of necessity, complexity, often tied to the choices of rich elites, and movements by many of these elites back to ‘simplicity’ (357 et seq.). This return to natural foods is being carried on by some of the most famous chefs in the country today. Foreign influences continue to enter China, especially in locales previously international, like Shanghai (356-6). The core of Chinese food is connection, social connection (373). And she recommends that we look beyond chop suey for a glorious Chinese future in food (381).
This book is recommended for anthropologists, sociologists, food historians, and the average reader. It can be read by college students. Its presentation of history is mixed with Dunlop’s first-person accounts of her visits to chefs, restaurants, and regions. It contains a wonderful index of history and resources making it convenient to use.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1976
Calvin B.T. Lee and Audrey Evans Lee. The Gourmet Chinese Regional Cookbook. Castle: Secaucus, New Jersey.
1975 Florence Lin. Florence Lin’s Chinese Regional Cookbook. Hawthorn. NY.
[i] Israa Saeed https://amazingfoodanddrink.com/traditional-chinese-desserts/ (Accessed June 27, 2024)
[ii] https://redhousespice.com/cantonese-mooncake/ (Accessed June 27, 2024)