30 DAYS OPEN PURCHASEInvitation to a Banquet is not a cookbook. It is the argument for why Chinese food deserves the same intellectual status as French cuisine, and an account of why it has not been given it.
Fuchsia Dunlop was the first Westerner to train at the culinary school in Chengdu and has since spent thirty years documenting China's regional cuisines. Here she leaves recipes behind entirely and writes cultural history instead.
The book is built around 30 dishes, each one serving as an entry point into something larger. A simple bowl of rice becomes an explanation of how a Chinese meal is structured in the first place, namely the division between fan and cai, where fan is the grain and cai is everything else, and where the proportion between the two says more about the meal than any single ingredient.
The most transformative section is about texture. Chinese has a vocabulary for mouthfeel that no Western language comes close to matching, and dishes are valued for being chewy, slippery, crisp or bouncy in ways that Western diners often perceive as wrong. Dunlop shows that this is not some oddity but an entire aesthetic dimension for which we simply lack the concepts.
She also tackles the prejudices directly. The myth of MSG and Chinese restaurant syndrome, assumptions about hygiene, and the persistent idea that Chinese food ought to be cheap. The last may be the most damaging of all, because it has led one of the world's most sophisticated cuisines to be priced like street food across the West.
The book won the Fortnum & Mason award for Food Book of the Year. It is 480 pages long and meant to be read from beginning to end.
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 480
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780141997216
Language: English
First published: 2023
