Invitation to a Banquet

Fuchsia Dunlop’s enthusiasm for Chinese food, Chinese culture, Chinese history is quite infectious and it’s hard not to cheer for them, and for her reading this book.

She’s English, but in her 20s plunged herself into Chinese culture and cuisine and has made a career of it. And it’s people like her who are needed to interpret and mediate the enormous, thorny cultural and social challenges presented by China. Her love shines through.

But while my ideological commitment to mutual respect and recognition is undimmed, and while I love shepherd’s pie, fish and chips and toasted cheese sandwiches as much as the next English person, I have to confess that decades of privileged eating in China have turned me into a terrible Chinese food snob. Increasingly, I don’t believe any other cuisine can compare. This is not primarily because of the diversity of Chinese food, its sophisticated techniques, its adventurousness or its sheer deliciousness — although any of these would be powerful arguments. The reason, fundamentally, is this: I cannot think of another cuisine in which discernment, technique, variety and sheer dedication to pleasure are so inseparably knit with the principles of health and balance. Good food, in China, is never just about the immediate physical and intellectual pleasure: it is also about how it makes you feel during dinner, after dinner, the following day and for the rest of your life. (P.73)

I learned so much from this book and it gave life to so many notions and funny feelings I’ve had about Chinese food. She explains so many things don’t make sense, and provides so much context, history, and personal experience to illuminate the cuisine — or really the cuisines of China.

Trying to categorize Chinese regional cuisines makes me dizzy. You can travel and travel around China and taste new foods every single day, which is pretty much what I have been doing for the last thirty years. And after all this time, I still find myself in the same state of wonder and bewilderment. Chinese cuisine is like a fractal pattern that becomes more and more intricate the more closely you examine it, to a seemingly infinite degree. The more I know, the less I feel I know. When it comes to Chinese food, I see myself increasingly as a small insect scaling a great mountain of human ingenuity. This is paradoxical, because in many ways modern China can seem very sameish. All over the country, the same identikit modern buildings, the same brands, the same clothes. …. All over the country, in nondescript little restaurants in concrete buildings, with chipped tiles and scuffed walls, trashy decorations and the odd bit of nice calligraphy in a frame, people are tucking into remarkably delicious and locally distinctive foods. At some profound level, this is how China expresses itself, from ancient times until now, from now until eternity. (p. 331)

I want to send this book to 10 people — foodies, sinophiles, people who just like well-written explications and who enjoy getting into something they didn’t realize was interesting. I recommend it heartily. And I’m planning to dig deeper into Chinese food at every opportunity, now with a stronger foundation of knowledge and renewed empathy for the art and concepts behind it.

At the bottom, she is arguing that, most likely, you really don’t understand much about Chinese food, and, therefor can’t fully enjoy it. And if you find it weird or gross, that’s more likely due to your ignorance than the food.

Tastes are hard to change, once established. Even more so in things like food which live in the body as much as the mind. I have a hard time departing from the familiar for things like breakfast (eggs, dairy, sausage bacon, not much spice, mostly soft, smooth, and fatty).

But Dunlop tells us that, if we really try and open our minds along with our mouths, there’s a world of wonder and delight to experience.

One of my favorite bits of her book is her discussion of how much richer Chinese ideas of food texture are than Western cuisine. There is a whole descriptive language of slippery and crunchy/chewy that English can only approximate. And with recognition of a thing, there comes appreciation. When I’ve traveled in China and eaten Chinese food, I had a Westerners reaction to many dishes — often disgust — at some of the food: slimy, cartilaginous, bland. Dunlop helps give a sense of what ideals and sensations are being pursued — which is impossible to know or understand unless someone explains and defends it. She discusses the importance of mouthfeel to Chinese — not just an elite preoocupation, but important to everyone at every level.

A short, idiosyncratic and non-exhaustive lexicon of Chinese words for mouthfeel

Single Characters

嫩 nen — tender, delicate, youthful (fresh young pea shoots, steamed scallops)

软 ruan — soft (noodles when not al dente, soft-boiled egg)

滑 hua — slippery, smooth, slimy (jellyfish, taro, water shield, mallows, velveted chicken or fish)

痠 suan — Cantonese term for slimy (taro, the inside of okra)

脆 cui — crisp and crunchy, often in a wet way, typically a bit noisy when you bite (chicken gristle, raw cucumber, celery, peanuts). The Cantonese say bok bok chui as an onomatopoeia for the sound of eating dry, crisp fried things like peanuts and potato crisps.

酥 su — dry and friable (crispy duck, tempura foods, anything made with flaky pastry), or almost-fall-apart tender (slow-cooked belly pork)

松 song — loosely textured (a mung bean cake, pork floss, candy floss, an English scone)

烂 lan — boiled, steamed or stewed until almost or completely falling apart (long-cooked brisket, steamed pork in rice meal, boiled floury potatoes)

爽 shuang — briskly cool, snappy and refreshing in the mouth, a trendy modern word, highly subjective (starch jelly, wood ear mushroom salad, Asian pears, watermelon). It is also used for non-food items that are clean, crisp and not sticky, like talcum powder (shuang — body powder). In Cantonese, the experience of chewing foods that are shuang is described with an onomatopoeia:啫啫聲 (sok sok seng).

弹 tan — elastic, springy (a Chaozhou meatball, grilled squid)

韧 ren — tensile, pliable but strong and muscular (goose intestine, pasta cooked al dente)

Q or QQ — chewy and bouncy, from Taiwanese, now used all over China (bubble tea boba, fish balls, alkaline noodles)

糯 nuo — glutinous, sticky and huggy (Ningbo rice cakes, sticky rice)

润 run — moist and juicy (roast chicken thigh, Italian grilled sausages)

胶 jiao — sticky, gluey, gummy (cooked pork skin, pig’s tail)

黏 nian — sticky, gluey (sticky riceballs in soup, abalone)

紧 jin — tight, taut (very fresh meat, poached chicken)

清 qing — clear and refreshing (light broth)

稠 chou — thick (of a liquid) (congee, thick mayonnaise)

稀 xi — thin (of a liquid) (rice gruel, a thin soup)

粉 fen — floury, powdery (boiled water caltrop, roasted chestnuts, sweet cakes made from ground nuts or pulses)

Pairs of Characters

滑嫩 huanen — slippery and tender (water shield, silken tofu, crème caramel)

软嫩 ruannen — soft and tender (Daliang stir-fried milk, scrambled eggs, custard)

鲜嫩 xiannen — fresh and tender (steamed or stir-fried scallops or shelled prawns)

细嫩 xinen — delicately tender and fine-textured (chicken testicle, silken tofu, crème caramel)

油润 yourun — juicy with oil (fish steamed in caul fat, Italian grilled sausages)

滋润 zirun — juicily moist (hand-cut lion’s head meatballs)

酥脆 sucui — shatter-crisp and snappy-crisp (skin of a roast suckling pig, pork crackling)

有劲 youjin — a bit springy and muscular, a little resistant to teeth (Yangzhou fish balls, Cantonese wontons)

嚼劲 jiaojin — chewy, taut, tight (poached chicken skin, pork aorta, Chaozhou meatball)

脆嫩 cuinen — both crisp and tender (fast-fried pig’s kidneys or river shrimp)

劲道 / 筋道 jindao / jingdao — firm, strong, al dente (especially of noodles, northern dialect)

柔软 rouruan — soft (custard, a blended soup)

糯软 ruannuo — soft and glutinous (stewed bear’s paw, sticky riceballs, sea cucumbers cooked in certain ways)

清爽 qingshuang — clear and refreshing in the mouth (sour-and-hot starch jelly, wood ear salad, seaweed salad)

膨松 pengsong — puffy and loosely textured (English crumpet)

A Couple of Common Texture Phrases

入口即化 ru kou ji hua — melts in the mouth (Dongpo pork, ice cream)

肥而不腻 fei er bu ni — richly fat without being greasy (Dongpo pork)

爽口弹牙 shuang kou tan ya — brisk and refreshing in the mouth, as well as al dente (tan ya literally means “bouncing on the teeth”)

Pejorative Terms for Texture

硬 ying — hard, woody (pork skin that hasn’t become friable and crisp, vegetable stalks)

柴 chai — “like firewood” (dried-out turkey breast, an overcooked steak)

绵 mian — cottony, mealy (overcooked kidney, overcooked tripe)

老 lao — “elderly” (anything fibrous or leathery, many foods that have dried out with overcooking)

腻 ni — greasy or cloying (foods deep-fried at too low a temperature, something sickly-sweet)

Imagine whole new dimensions of food experience these words connote — which we can only approximate or hint at. More immediately we can’t appreciate or enjoy the finest, most desirable Chinese food without a more sophisticated and expansive sensory palate.

Some of the most desired Chinese foods of all are wetly crunchy foods of animal origin. At the more modest social level, there is tripe (smooth, honeycombed or frilly like the pages of an old book); the gristle in chicken’s feet or pork trotters; skiddy duck or goose intestines; and slippery jellyfish. At the highest social echelons are most of the grand old delicacies of Chinese cuisine: shark’s fin, sea cucumber, deer tendons, fish maw or swim bladder and bird’s nest, which is made from the dried saliva of tiny swiftlets. Each of these ingredients is fabulously expensive, laborious to prepare, slithery or wetly crunchy after reconstitution from their dried state and, before their final cooking, completely flavourless. Their textures are a major part of their attractions. The same is true of a few slithery and rubbery vegetables that taste of very little, including silver ear fungus and the recently fashionable ice plant, which crunches clamorously in the mouth.(P.176)

Of course, a lot of Western misunderstanding and underestimation of Chinese food is based on our experience of it — through low-end takeout and culturally synthetic cuisine like “chop suey”. These aren’t even bad. And most Americans have never, and will never, go much further. But they don’t begin to capture the depth, the breadth, and the heights of Chinese cuisine.

One thing that’s always bothered me about Chinese food — really Chinese society — is the obsession with eating rare species. This has led to endangered species, horrible cruelty, and perverse supply chains. Dunlop does not fully defend this and has her own reservations. She points to younger generations which are moving away from these “medicinal” foods like rhino horn and bear paw. But she also insists that we not judge too harshly as every society has its version of cruelty, and environmental harm, and obsessive status-seeking. China’s faults, which may be no worse then our own, now suffer from scale as China grows so fast and big.

One of the most interesting things about the book is that it recounts Chinese food evolution through thousands of years of history. Woks, for example, are a relatively modern invention. Chop sticks were only adopted xxxx. But Chinese food’s heritage extends five thousand years backward. It predates domesticated rice. All that history is carried forward, but improved upon, elaborated, synthesized with new ingredients, new technologies, new cooking techniques, foreign influences. There are philosophies around food that are integrated with, or applied to other realms, like politics. The idea that food should have balance and harmony is taken as a metaphor for politics:

The idea of harmony also has its modern political applications. When former Chinese President Hu Jintao said he wanted to build a ‘harmonious’ society, he was using a term that has resonated in China for thousands of years, both in the kitchen and in government. Unfortunately, however, he and his successor have stripped the analogy of its contents — a lesson that harmony is not a matter of calm, bland uniformity but of the blending of complementary opposites, and that bitter words help a ruler to make good decisions. As Yanzi went on to say in his speech about the harmonious geng, ‘If you were to use water to flavour water, who would be able to drink it?’ Effective government, as every ancient Chinese philosopher knew, requires the piquancy of critical voices, just as sour and bitter tastes are required to balance the easy appeal of sweetness in the geng. ‘Harmony’ (hexie) these days can just be a euphemism for censorship, which is why in 2010 the dissident artist Ai Weiwei lampooned the notion by inviting his followers to a feast of river crabs, their name (hexie) a homonym and therefore also a pun on ‘harmony.’ (P.59)

On simplicity and philosophy:

The Chinese value qingdan dishes partly because they see food as medicine and balanced eating as essential to the maintenance of health. But there are also cultural and moral factors involved in esteeming food that is understated. The French philosopher François Jullien has argued eloquently (in In Praise of Blandness) that the idea of qingdan lies at the heart of Chinese culture, not only in cooking but in the arts of music, painting and poetry, because it is understood not as an absence or a deficiency, but as a point of origin. The Chinese, he suggests, have a deeply engrained penchant for the vague, the allusive and the impressionistic, whether in the dissolving landscapes of an ink-and-water painting, the musical note that fades into silence or the flavour that is flavourless. Blandness is not nothing, but a kind of sublimation of the possibilities of everything.(P.235)

On the importance of rice (or grain/noodles):

The old-fashioned Chinese greeting, chi fan lei ma you (have you eaten your grain yet?), is well-known. But the centrality of rice and other grain foods in the idea of life and livelihood is threaded through the language. A restaurant is a place that serves fan (fan guan), to cook is to ‘make fan’ (zuo fan) and a beggar is someone who asks for fan (yao fan). A glutton is a ‘fan-bucket’ (fantong). If you have a job, it’s a ‘ricebowl’ (fan wan); lucrative enough, it might be a ‘golden ricebowl’; if not, it might be a ricebowl of paper or clay. In Maoist times, a stable job in a state-owned factory was an ‘iron ricebowl’ (tie fan wan), which the economic reforms of the 1990s went on to ‘smash’. In some parts of China, the actual ricebowl of a deceased person is ritually broken at their funeral. (P. 36)