Review by New York Times Review
"READER, I ate him." The hapless object of Fuchsia Dunlop's confession is a small green caterpillar she discovered in her vegetable steamer one afternoon in Oxford. She nearly tossed him out the kitchen door before remembering that only weeks before in Sichuan, she had munched her way through a menu of timber grubs, bee pupae and sand-crawling caterpillars. Even the English variety looked like food to her after more than 15 years of traveling to and living in China. "You are half Chinese," Dunlop's friends there sometimes tell her. "As I look at them out of my round Caucasian eyes," she admits, "I have to acknowledge that, inside me, there is someone who is no longer entirely English." When the Cambridge-educated Dunlop first visited Hong Kong in 1992, she decided to eat "whatever the Chinese might put in front of me." It was a fateful decision, since the Chinese word for animal is dong wu, "moving thing," and the Chinese, as she remarks throughout the book, eat just about everything that moves. Furthermore, "there is no conceptual divide between 'meat' and 'inedible rubbery bits' when butchering an animal carcass." As a result, "Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper" sometimes reads like a bill of lading for dismembered occupants of Noah's Ark: rabbits' heads and turtles' feet, duck tongues and ox throat cartilage, goose intestines and pigs' brains. These ingredients, considered unremarkable by the Chinese, are treated that way by Dunlop. It is to her credit that the reader mostly comes to feel the same way. Dunlop's love affair with China began in earnest when she moved to Chengdu in 1994, becoming the first foreigner to enroll in the professional chefs' training course at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine. Already a Mandarin speaker, she perfected her Sichuanese dialect and eventually wrote "Land of Plenty," an award-winning cookbook about the region. Encouraged by her success with Sichuan, she took a leave of absence from her job as an East Asia specialist at BBC radio to study in nearby Hunan and wrote "Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes From Hunan Province." As surprising as it seems to her now, she had begun to think from such a Chinese perspective that she was unprepared for Western criticism of the book's pervasive use of the image of Mao Zedong, who was born and raised in the province. Despite her misgivings about being "a professional omnivore," Dunlop continued her travels - to Beijing in the northeast, Kashgar in the far west, Fujian in the southeast - but after finding that the legendary hairy crabs she ate outside Shanghai had been pulled, just moments earlier, from putrid water, she came to a disconcerting realization: "It's as if my gastronomic libido is slipping away. ... In the last 10 or 15 years China has changed beyond all recognition. I've seen the sewer-like rivers, the suppurating sores of lakes. I've ... breathed the toxic air and drunk the dirty water. And I've eaten far too much meat from endangered species." Dunlop's moral dyspepsia nearly ended her Chinese food-writing career, but she eventually recovered in gracious, southern Yangzhou. On the question of appetite, she defers to Chinese friends who have spoken of "a historical progression from 'eating to fill your belly' (chi bao), through 'eating plenty of rich food', (chi hao) to 'eating skillfully' (chi qiao)." "Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper" is both an insightful, entertaining, scrupulously reported exploration of China's foodways and a swashbuckling memoir studded with recipes (not converted, alas, from metric measurements). But what makes it a distinguished contribution to the literature of gastronomy is its demonstration, through one person's intense experience, that food is not a mere reflection of culture but a potent shaper of cultural identity. Dawn Drzal writes about food, travel and fiction for The Times and other publications.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Food writer Dunlop is better known in the U.K., where her comprehensive volumes on Sichuanese and Hunanese cuisine carved out her niche and eventually became contemporary classics. Turning to personal narrative through the backstory and consequences of her fascination with China, she produces an autobiographical food-and-travel classic of a narrowly focused but rarefied order. Dunlop's initial 1992 trip to Sichuan proved so enthralling that she later obtained a year's residential study scholarship in the provincial capital, Chengdu. There, her enrollment in the local Institute of Higher Cuisine, a professional chef's program, created a cultural exchange program of a specialized kind. The research for and success of her resulting cookbooks permitted Dunlop to return to China in a more experienced role as chef and writer; that led to this reflective memoir, which probes into the author's search for kitchens in the Forbidden City as well as the people and places of remote West China. One key to this supple and affectionate book is its time frame: by arriving in China in the middle of vast economic upheavals, Dunlop explored and experienced the country and its culture as it was transforming into a postcommunist communism. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Gourmet and Saveur magazine writer Dunlop (Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook) first traveled to China in 1992, unprepared for the "gastronomical assaults" that ensued. From then on, because it would be rude to leave food untouched on her plate, she vowed to eat whatever food she was offered--whether it was mixed vegetables or frog casserole and stir-fried snake--though to do so was often risky. With provocative chapter titles such as "Only Barbarians Eat Salad," "The Hungry Dead," and "Chanel and Chickens' Feet," this book does not disappoint. Readers are taken on a culinary journey throughout the various regions and provinces of China and are treated to recipes at the end of each chapter. Back home in England, Dunlop finds herself hesitant to eat a caterpillar that made its way into her steamed vegetables. Dare she cross that cultural boundary of eating an insect in the Western world? Dunlop's latest is a fascinating look at Chinese food and customs. Recommended for all libraries.--Nicole Mitchell, Univ. of Alabama Lib., Birmingham (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
