Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China
4.3
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Paperback
USD
16.16
$16.16
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780393357745 |
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| Publisher: | Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2019 |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Sales rank: | 310,719 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China
4.3 out of 5
based on
0 ratings.
6 reviews.
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Fabulous foodie reading.This is a memoir of Fuschia Dunlop's life in China. She starts as a curious English girl on a study program, fascinated by some of the food she encounters in Chengdu. She talks her way in to training as a Sichuan chef, and goes on to revisit the country many times and write a couple of cookbooks. And also horrify her parents with how native she's gone in her food tastes...There's some social history and some recipes, and it's not all cheerfully sanitised. She's aware of her privilege, though not always sure what to do with it.She can occasionally get a little irritating in her convert zeal to the marvels of sichuan cooking. Yes, my dear, western cuisine *does* in fact have words for those things you say it doesn't. Most of them in french, of course.Well worth a read.
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When Fuchsia Dunlop moved to China in the early 1990s, it was still a rarely visited backwater overflowing with traditional culture and lacking in technology. She quickly abandoned her plan to study Chinese minority cultures in favor of studying Chinese cooking. A few months later, she was enrolled as the first and only foreign student in Sichuan's prestigious cooking school. This is a truly excellent food and travel memoir. Rather than gawking at the strange (to Western taste) things the Chinese eat, Fuchsia learns to appreciate the textures of goose intestines and sauteed caterpillar. This makes for some occasionally disgusting reading, but for the most part, I admired the author's unusual ability to fully join another culture. The food is vividly, beautifully described in away that inspires me to open my own culinary horizons. And, although food is the focus, Fuchsia doesn't neglect the cultural, historical and ethical situations that come along with it. I particularly appreciated the last chapters, in which she wrestles with a Communist banquet thrown at the expense of struggling peasants and the environmental impact of the appetites of China's newly wealthy. This is a satisfying book on many levels, and I think almost every reader would enjoy it.
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An excellent overview of regional food in China. I've used Ms. Dunlop's Land of Plenty so often that the book opens itself to my favorite recipes. Land of Plenty hints at Ms. Dunlop herself and provides many excellent recipes (after all it's a cookbook), where Shark's Fin has only a few recipes (one or two per chapter) with much information about China's regional food and Ms. Dunlop's adventures eating there.
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I have often wondered why there is such a frustrating dearth of books describing, in detail and in English, the philosophies and protocols of Chinese cuisine. Why hasn't the Chinese equivalent of a Larousse Gastronomique been written or translated into the foreign barbarian tongue? With her first two tomes, i Sichuan Food /i and i The Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook /i , bararienne English food writer Fuchsia Dunlop helped to address this astonishing lack. Her witty, passionate, in-depth explanations blew fresh wok hei into the Chinese cookbook world. Her third work, a chronicle of seasons spent living in China, takes the converse tack to Kwong and Yan. It is not about Dunlop's description of a country that belongs to her, but rather about her discovery that she somehow belongs to that country. Her clear, crisp-edged prose - she is a seasoned part-timer for the BBC - does for China what Alistair Cooke's did for America. We watch Fu Xia (as she is known there) learning how to speak culinary Mandarin, gut live fish and balance 23 cardinal flvaour blends at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in Chengdu we follow her around Hunan trying somehow to gather recipes as Sars panic hits town. We wince as she tiptoes around rural politicos while searching for the best Sichuan peppercorns, and shudders as she notices the scummy Sichuan lake water from which came the delicious hairy crabs she's just eaten. She writes of China's familiar culinary faces - the omnivorousness, the penchant for extreme textures, the disturbing food scares, the strangeness of imperial palace customs - with an outsider's eyes, an insider's palate, and a lover's affection. The best food book I've read so far this year.
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