The world’s most sophisticated gastronomic culture, brilliantly presented through a banquet of thirty Chinese dishes. Chinese was the earliest truly global cuisine. When the first Chinese laborers began to settle abroad, restaurants appeared in their wake. Yet Chinese has the curious distinction of being both one of the world’s best-loved culinary traditions and one of the least understood. For more than a century, the overwhelming dominance of a simplified form of Cantonese cooking ensured that few foreigners experienced anything of its richness and sophistication—but today that is beginning to change. In Invitation to a Banquet, award-winning cook and writer Fuchsia Dunlop explores the history, philosophy, and techniques of Chinese culinary culture. In each chapter, she examines a classic dish, from mapo tofu to Dongpo pork, knife-scraped noodles to braised pomelo pith, to reveal a distinctive aspect of Chinese gastronomy, whether it’s the importance of the soybean, the lure of exotic ingredients, or the history of Buddhist vegetarian cuisine. Meeting food producers, chefs, gourmets, and home cooks as she tastes her way across the country, Fuchsia invites readers to join her on an unforgettable journey into Chinese food as it is cooked, eaten, and considered in its homeland. Weaving together history, mouthwatering descriptions of food, and on-the-ground research conducted over the course of three decades, Invitation to a Banquet is a lively, landmark tribute to the pleasures and mysteries of Chinese cuisine.

Winner of the Fortnum & Mason Cookery Book Award 2020 Shortlisted for the Guild of Food Writers Award 2020 Shortlisted for the James Beard Award 2020 'Cookbook of the year' Allan Jenkins, OFM 'No one explains the intricacies of Sichuan food like Fuchsia Dunlop. This book remains my bible for the subject' Jay Rayner A fully revised and updated edition of Fuchsia Dunlop's landmark book on Sichuan cookery. Almost twenty years after the publication of Sichuan Cookery, voted by the OFM as one of the greatest cookbooks of all time, Fuchsia Dunlop revisits the region where her own culinary journey began, adding more than 50 new recipes to the original repertoire and accompanying them with her incomparable knowledge of the dazzling tastes, textures and sensations of Sichuanese cookery. At home, guided by Fuchsia's clear instructions, and using just a few key Sichuanese storecupboard ingredients, you will be able to recreate Sichuanese classics such as Mapo tofu, Twice-cooked pork and Gong Bao chicken, or try your hand at a traditional spread of cold dishes comprising Bang bang chicken, Numbing-and-hot dried beef, Spiced cucumber salad and Green beans in ginger sauce. With spellbinding writing on the culinary and cultural history of Sichuan and accompanied by gorgeous travel and food photography, The Food of Sichuan is a captivating insight into one of the world's greatest cuisines. 'This book offers an unmissable opportunity to utilise the wok and cleaver, brave the fiery Mapo tofu and expand your technique with pot-stickers and steamed buns' Yotam Ottolenghi

'Fuchsia Dunlop, our great writer and expert on Chinese gastronomy, has fallen in love with this region and its cuisine – and her book makes us fall in love too' Claudia Roden 'Fuchsia Dunlop's erudite writing infuses each page and her delicious recipes will inspire any serious cook to take up their wok' Ken Hom The Lower Yangtze region or Jiangnan, with its modern capital Shanghai, has been known since ancient times as a 'Land of Fish and Rice'. For centuries, local cooks have been using the plentiful produce of its lakes, rivers, fields and mountains, combined with delicious seasonings and flavours such as rice vinegar, rich soy sauce, spring onion and ginger, to create a cuisine that is renowned in China for its delicacy and beauty. Drawing on years of study and exploration, Fuchsia Dunlop explains basic cooking techniques, typical cooking methods and the principal ingredients of the Jiangnan larder. Her recipes are a mixture of simple rustic cooking and rich delicacies – some are famous, some unsung. You'll be inspired to try classic dishes such as Beggar's chicken and sumptuous Dongpo pork. Most of the recipes contain readily available ingredients and with Fuchsia's clear guidance, you will soon see how simple it is to create some of the most beautiful and delicious dishes you'll ever taste. With evocative writing and mouth-watering photography, this is an important new work about one of China's most fascinating culinary regions.

Fuchsia Dunlop trained as a chef at China's leading cooking school and is internationally renowned for her delicious recipes and brilliant writing about Chinese food. Every Grain of Rice is inspired by the healthy and vibrant home cooking of southern China, in which meat and fish are enjoyed in moderation, but vegetables play the starring role. Try your hand at blanched choy sum with sizzling oil, Hangzhou broad beans with ham, pock-marked old woman's beancurd or steamed chicken with shiitake mushrooms, or, if you've ever in need of a quick fix, Fuchsia's emergency late-night noodles. Many of the recipes require few ingredients and are startlingly easy to make. The book includes a comprehensive introduction to the key seasonings and techniques of the Chinese kitchen, as well as the 'magic ingredients' that can transform modest vegetarian ingredients into wonderful delicacies. With stunning photography and clear instructions, this is an essential volume for beginners and connoisseurs alike.

Finalist for the 2022 IACP Award in Literary or Historical Food Writing KCRW Best Culinary books of 2021 WBUR Here & Now Favorite Cookbooks of 2021 Part memoir of life in Taiwan, part love story—a beautifully told account of China’s brilliant cuisines…with recipes. At the Chinese Table describes in vivid detail how, during the 1970s and ’80s, celebrated cookbook writer and illustrator Carolyn Phillips crosses China’s endless cultural and linguistic chasms and falls in love. During her second year in Taipei, she meets scholar and epicurean J. H. Huang, who nourishes her intellectually over luscious meals from every part of China. And then, before she knows it, Carolyn finds herself the unwelcome candidate for eldest daughter-in-law in a traditional Chinese family. This warm, refreshingly candid memoir is a coming-of-age story set against a background of the Chinese diaspora and a family whose ancestry is intricately intertwined with that of their native land. Carolyn’s reticent father-in-law—a World War II fighter pilot and hero—eventually embraces her presence by showing her how to re-create centuries-old Hakka dishes from family recipes. In the meantime, she brushes up on the classic cuisines of the North in an attempt to win over J. H.’s imperious mother, whose father had been a warlord’s lieutenant. Fortunately for J. H. and Carolyn, the tense early days of their relationship blossom into another kind of cultural and historical education as Carolyn masters both the language and many of China’s extraordinary cuisines. With illustrations and twenty-two recipes, At the Chinese Table is a culinary adventure like no other that captures the diversity of China’s cuisines, from the pen of a world-class scholar and gourmet.

In 1784, passengers on the ship Empress of China became the first Americans to land in China, and the first to eat Chinese food. Today there are over 40,000 Chinese restaurants across the United States--by far the most plentiful among all our ethnic eateries. Now, in Chop Suey Andrew Coe provides the authoritative history of the American infatuation with Chinese food, telling its fascinating story for the first time. It's a tale that moves from curiosity to disgust and then desire. From China, Coe's story travels to the American West, where Chinese immigrants drawn by the 1848 Gold Rush struggled against racism and culinary prejudice but still established restaurants and farms and imported an array of Asian ingredients. He traces the Chinese migration to the East Coast, highlighting that crucial moment when New York "Bohemians" discovered Chinese cuisine--and for better or worse, chop suey. Along the way, Coe shows how the peasant food of an obscure part of China came to dominate Chinese-American restaurants; unravels the truth of chop suey's origins; reveals why American Jews fell in love with egg rolls and chow mein; shows how President Nixon's 1972 trip to China opened our palates to a new range of cuisine; and explains why we still can't get dishes like those served in Beijing or Shanghai. The book also explores how American tastes have been shaped by our relationship with the outside world, and how we've relentlessly changed foreign foods to adapt to them our own deep-down conservative culinary preferences. Andrew Coe's Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States is a fascinating tour of America's centuries-long appetite for Chinese food. Always illuminating, often exploding long-held culinary myths, this book opens a new window into defining what is American cuisine.

"Not just a smart memoir about cross-cultural eating but one of the most engaging books of any kind I've read in years." —Celia Barbour, O, The Oprah Magazine After fifteen years spent exploring China and its food, Fuchsia Dunlop finds herself in an English kitchen, deciding whether to eat a caterpillar she has accidentally cooked in some home-grown vegetables. How can something she has eaten readily in China seem grotesque in England? The question lingers over this “autobiographical food-and-travel classic” (Publishers Weekly).