British gourmet Fuchsia Dunlop's posts on WeChat or Instagram, serve up a diet of humor. Most of the posts are about her experience with food from around the world. But since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in London last February, cooking has become a way for her to cope with the "endless lockdown". She says she cooks in a very relaxed way, going to the farmers' market at the weekend to buy seasonal products for everyday cooking — a mixture of Jiangnan, Hunan, Guangdong, and Sichuan dishes.
"For me, there are so many wonderful things about Chinese food. The thing that I find is greatest about it is that you can eat food that is both really delicious and incredibly healthy," Dunlop says. "The Chinese are experts at cooking vegetables, so it's very easy for me to eat Chinese food almost every day."
Growing up in a household in Oxford, Dunlop dreamed of becoming a cook when she was little. However, her dream did not start to materialize until she came to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, as a university student in 1994. That was when she began learning local cooking skills at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine.
Always keeping a notebook on hand wherever she went, she wrote down the recipes of the dishes she tasted. Based on her knowledge of Sichuan cuisine, Dunlop published her first book, Sichuan Cookery, in 2001, which was hailed by the Observer Food Monthly as "one of the top 10 cookbooks of all time".
Since then, she has published four books about Sichuan cuisine, and one in 2016 about recipes from Jiangnan, called Land of Fish and Rice.
Now, a Chinese version of Land of Fish and Rice, translated by He Yujia, is available. In the book, Dunlop displays her profound understanding of the food culture that runs deep in the blood of Chinese people.
Having studied Chinese food culture for nearly two decades, she regards the Jiangnan region as the heartland of the nation's gastronomy.
"Although you have really interesting and delicious food all over China, in this region, particularly, people wrote about it and discussed it. Many of the old classic food books came from this region, for example. So, if you talk about gastronomy, and not just about good food, then Jiangnan is a really important region," she says.
Dunlop spent 10 years researching the book.
The decisive moment was in 2008 when she went to Longjing Caotang, or the DragonWell Manor, a restaurant in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, where the whole approach to ingredients, seasoning, cooking and tradition was so moving and impressive that, at that moment, she decided to write a book about the region, she says.
By then, she had published three books about Sichuan and Hunan cuisine, both of which are famous for being stimulatingly spicy. But in Hangzhou and Yangzhou, she encountered food that was calm, peaceful, soothing and delicate.
To better understand the context of the food in Jiangnan, Dunlop started reading Chinese classics like The Dream of the Red Chamber which contained detailed descriptions of dishes eaten by literati and aristocratic families in ancient China.
Jiangnan food is connected with Chinese literature. Lots of dishes have quite literary names or stories behind them," she says.
As a result, when introducing food in the book, besides tracing the history of the dishes, she also tells stories like how Su Dongpo, a great poet during the Song Dynasty (960-1279), invented Dongpo Pork in the 11th century, or quotes his poem that praises delicious sea bass.
After collecting all the recipes, Dunlop tested them at her home in London to make sure they worked for people in the West.
"What I want to do is to try to describe the recipes accurately. If I make a change, I explain it," she says.
In total, there are more than 160 recipes that cover the typical food and dishes that people in Jiangnan eat, either at a banquet or at home every day.
However, because Jiangnan is a large region, it was not easy for her to decide which dishes should be presented in the limited number of pages.
"In the end, it's just a matter of personal choice and judgment," she says, adding that she wanted to include as many as possible of the really essential famous dishes like Dongpo Pork, Westlake vinegar fish, and lion-head meatballs, "the really classic dishes".
"But I also like to include dishes that I've enjoyed, or that have a particular meaning for me, like maybe a simple dish that someone cooked for me that I thought was lovely and that I want to cook at home.
"It's like trying to paint a picture of the region and show its many different sides, from the banquet to the street food," she says.
Dunlop's enthusiasm for Chinese food aroused the attention of Chinese netizens. They were surprised by her deep and professional knowledge of Chinese cuisines which to some extent, exceed that of the ordinary local Chinese.
Online comments also mentioned her book Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper. The memoir records Dunlop's culinary journey in China, an opportunity for foreigners to get to know Chinese food.
