"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 ). **
“An insightful, entertaining, scrupulously reported exploration of China’s foodways and a swashbuckling memoir…What makes it a distinguished contribution to the literature of gastronomy is its demonstration…that food is not a mere reflection of culture but a potent shaper of cultural identity.” - Dawn Drzal, *New York Times*
“Destined, I think, to become a classic of travel writing.” - Paul Levy, *The Observer*
Description:
"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 ). **
From Publishers Weekly
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.)
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Review
“An insightful, entertaining, scrupulously reported exploration of China’s foodways and a swashbuckling memoir…What makes it a distinguished contribution to the literature of gastronomy is its demonstration…that food is not a mere reflection of culture but a potent shaper of cultural identity.”
- Dawn Drzal, *New York Times*
“Destined, I think, to become a classic of travel writing.”
- Paul Levy, *The Observer*