30 DAYS OPEN PURCHASEFuchsia Dunlop trained as a chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in Chengdu in the 1990s and was the first Westerner to do so. She has since become the leading English-language authority on Chinese food, and this is her first entirely new cookbook in ten years.
In the West, Chinese cooking is almost always taught through dishes to be replicated. This book does the opposite, beginning with the five tastes on which Chinese gastronomy rests: sour, bitter, sweet, salty and what is usually translated as pungent, meaning the heat and bite of ginger, garlic, chilli and Sichuan pepper. It is an older and different way of thinking about flavour from the Japanese concept of umami that has become so firmly established in the West.
There are around 120 recipes, but the point lies in the combinations behind them. Once you understand how the five tastes are balanced against one another, you can improvise rather than simply follow, and that is when Chinese home cooking becomes genuinely useful in an ordinary kitchen.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 368
Language: English
First published: 2026
