There aren't many things that can make me wish I were young again, but Fuschia Dunlop's Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper. A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China came very close. She allowed me to indulge in my now not-secret fantasy of packing up my cares and woes, catching a blackbird flight to another country, and plunging recklessly into another cuisine and culture. Then, as luck would have, I become a renowned authority on said cuisine. Wait a minute! That's not my life; it belongs to Fuschia Dunlop. Never mind. I loved this book, perhaps even more, than I did her two earlier works: Land of Plenty. A Treasury of Sichuanese Cooking and The Revolutionary China Cookbook. Recipes from Hunan Province.
I devoured this book as I would a great meal--savouring each delicious story and experience. Her tale begins with her application for a British Council scholarship to study in China. Ostensibly, her project was to research the Chinese policy toward ethnic minorities. We learn that her real, if yet unknown, purpose was the pursuit of the food culture of Sichuan province.
She quickly discovered that her Chinese wasn't good enough for serious research and what she could find was laden with government propaganda. The truth of her subject was elusive, if not impossible, to discover. She could, however, discover the delights of Sichuanese food and this she did with complete abandon and passion.
"Sichuanese food ... is the spice girl among Chinese cuisines, bold and lipsticked, with a witty tongue and a thousand lively moods. 'Each dish has its own style,' they say, ' and a hundred dishes have a hundred different flavors.,' Sichuanese cooking doesn't require extravagant raw ingredients like, Cantonese or Shandong. ...you can work ... wonders with the most humble ingredients, dazzle the taste buds with a simple repast of pork and aubergines. This is the greatness of Sichuanese cuisine, to make the ordinary extraordinary." (p.24)
Dunlop and a friend decided to take some formal cooking classes and made application to The Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine. They struck a a deal with the school's principal and are enrolled to take twice-weekly private classes. The school would provide a cooking teacher, an interpreter and the raw ingredients. Such a deal!
Dunlop's scholarship came to an end, but she could not force herself to leave Sichuan. When she inquired about further cooking classes, the principal invites her to join the three-month professional chef's training course that had just started. She agreed on the spot and her new career was officially launched.
It's a commonplace that to learn the food of a country is to learn its culture. Dunlop's experience proved the truth of this observation. "As the one outsider in the class, I found myself not only learning the theory and practice of cooking, but also absorbing some Chinese ways of imagining flavour. On damp winter days, I knew I should eat more heating food than usual, so I spooned extra chilli oil onto by breakfast dumplings, and I discovered that sourness was refreshing in the the sultry heat of summer. I learned how to say that someone who felt jealous in love was 'eating vinegar" (chi cu). And of course, i realised that 'eating bitterness' (chi ku) was the only way to describe the sorrows and hardships of existence. To learn the language of cookery in China was, in part, to learn the language of life. And as I went deeper into my culinary studies, I found that I was not only cooking, but also in some ways thinking like a Chinese person." (p. 104)
One of the funnier chapters in the book, "The Rubber Factor", recounts her experience of going native in her love of Chinese food. She has returned to China and her parents have come to visit. She invites them out to a restaurant for a hotpot supper. She describes herself as an "assiduous host and [I] make sure that i give my mother and father lots of interesting things to eat."
"It is only when I notice my father struggling with a rubbery goose intestine that I realise that something is not quite right. He sits opposite me, a polite expression fixed on his face, crunching. Though the restaurant is noisy, I know perfectly well what is going on in his mouth. I can hear it in my mind's ear: the skid and squeak of teeth against rubberiness, the graunch of it, the sheer unpleasantness of it, for him. I realise he must be wondering, as I did half a decade before, what on earth the point of is of eating these tasteless bits of rubbish, these old bicycle inner tubes. He must be wishing his horrible daughter had ordered something actually edible.
"It will be the same with the tripe, the rabbits' ears and the ox throat cartilage. The rabbit kidneys and bony little fish won't be much better. Glancing at my mother, my heart sinks further, because I'm quite sure she isn't enjoying them either, though she too is chewing nobly. Couldn't I at least have ordered some lean beef fillet or slices of chicken for my poor parents? What induced me to inflict such a meal on them? The answer is painfully clear: Goose intestines, and the whole rubbery array of Sichuanese offal delicacies have become utterly normal to me. Or not merely normal, actually. On this occasion, as on many others, I ordered the goose intestines because I positively wanted to eat them, and I remarked earlier to Zhou Yu (something of a goose-intestine expert) how lovely and crisp they were. Oh blimey."(p. 134)
She goes on to explain."Texture is the last frontier for Westerners learning to appreciate Chinese food. Cross it, and you're really inside. But the way there is a wild journey that will bring you face to face with your own worst prejudices, your childhood fears, perhaps even some Freudian paranoias. It will disgust you, disconcert you, and make your compatriots view you, at times, with a scarcely disguised revulsion. Think, for a moment of the words we use to describe some of the textures mot adored by Chinese gourmets: gristly, slithery, slimy, squelchy, crunchy, gloopy. For Westerners they evoke disturbing thoughts of bodily emission, used handkerchiefs, abbattoirs, squashed amphibians, wet feet in wellington boots, or the flinching shock of fingering a slug when you are picking lettuce."(p.135)
I think I am not destined to be a Chinese gourmet.
Dunlop finds that there is a price to be paid for her intense immersion in Chinese culture. "Sometimes these days, when I'm in a totally English environment ... I feel like a foreigner, with my altered perspectives and traveller's tales. And in China, of course, I'm too often still a big-nosed barbarian." It's always a risk opening oneself fully to the stranger. We venture into becoming strange ourselves, never fully at home or completely at ease in either world. In spite of the discomfort, such an experience can be a great gift. Our powers of observation become sharp and our appreciation for the essential loneliness of being human deepens.
Dunlop recounts the culinary life of the last emperor, Pu Yi. Not nearly as glamorous as we might have imagined. We learn about the magical Sichuan pepper and the environmental ravages of industrialization in China.
"It's as if my gastronomic libido is slipping away. In the old days, in Sichuan, my hunger was a free and joyful thing. The food before me was fresh, free-range and wholesome, and I wanted to devour it all. But in the last ten or fifteen years China has changed beyond all recognition. I've seen the sewer-like rivers, the suppurating sores of lakes. I've read the newspaper reports; breathed the toxic air and drunk the dirty water. And I've eaten far too much meat from endangered species. In China I have to throw all my principles to the wind if I am [to] continue in my vow of eating everything. the only way to recover my wanton old appetites is to draw a deliberate blind over all the evidence, to switch off my brain, and to eat without thinking. And I'm not sure I can do it anymore." (p.281)
Her story doesn't end on this melancholy note, but you shall have to discover that for yourself.
Fuschia Dunlop writes beautifully crafted, thoughtful prose that, at times, borders on the poetic.
She has an amazing palate and a lust for life. I commend all of her books to you.
