Fuchsia Dunlop on Chinese Food, Culture, and Travel | Conversations with Tyler

Hello. Welcome to this installment of Conversations with Tyler, sponsored by the Mercatus Center. We're here at Panda Gourmet Restaurant, my favorite restaurant in Washington, D.C., and we're eating with a group. The star of the group is Fuchsia Dunlop, who in my opinion is the foremost exponent of Chinese cookery and the writer of the best Chinese cookbooks ever in the English language. We have a very famous and well-known group of questioners, including Ezra Klein, editor-in-chief of Vox, Mark Miller, who is just a, a food person extraordinaire, Megan McArdle of Bloomberg and one of the world's leading cookery experts, and Eva from Shandong Province, China. If I think of how to present fuchsia, there are two passages that spring immediately to mind. One is from her 1999 notebook entry, and I quote, "In the last 3 days, I have eaten snails, frogs, snakes, sparrow gizzard, duck tongues, fish heads, duck hearts, tripe, also half a duck, most of a carp, duck's blood, at least 5 eggs, smoked bacon, and stewed aromatic beef." So, of course, we had Fuchsia do the ordering for our lunch, as you might expect. One of my readers wrote to me, they summed up who she is, and again I quote, "What a fantastic and exciting guest. I agree wholeheartedly that Fuchsia Dunlop is an absolute iconoclast and that her achievements in examining and teaching Chinese cookery cannot possibly be overstated. I can say with all sincerity that my life has been absolutely enriched by her work. Her books are simply perfect models for others to follow." Fuchsia, welcome. Everyone else, welcome as well. Now, I'll just start in on the questions while our guests eat, and they will later on become the questioners themselves. Let me start with this idea of a food tour. So, food tours are more and more popular today. People will go to Mexico, to France, Italy, even Thailand. But the China food tour is not always so popular with Americans or Westerners. If you were to try to sell someone on a version of, say, a 12-day China food tour, what would your case for that sound like?

Well, China has the world's preeminent cuisine, absolutely unparalleled in its diversity and its sophistication. You can find practically everything you could possibly desire in terms of food in China, from exquisite banquet cookery, exciting street food, bold spicy flavors, you know, honest farmhouse cooking, delicate soups, just everything, apart perhaps from cheese, although they do actually have a couple of kinds of cheese in Yunnan Province. And, um, Yeah, and also because, you know, China is such a food-oriented culture, and it has been since the beginnings of history, that if you want to understand China almost more than anywhere else, like, food is a really good window into the culture, into the way people live, into history, everything.

Okay, so 12 days. Give us a quick itinerary. Where should you go?

Well, you could look at the sort of greatest hits, say the four great cuisines you'd perhaps want to cover. So you might go to Beijing to taste some sort of imperial food, Shandong cooking, the wonderful wheat foods of the north. So pastas, dumplings, breads. This is the wheat-eating part of China.

Three cities, name them.

Three cities.

12 days, I'm not going to give you 14. What are they?

Three cities. Um, mm. Beijing, Chengdu, and Hangzhou.

Okay, now let's think through this idea of a food tour a little more analytically. So let's say you've talked me into this food tour, which actually you've done indirectly through your books, and you've sent me to Shanghai. Your latest book, Land of Fish and Rice, in fact focuses on Shanghai and the surrounding region, which is quite diverse. But here I am, Tyler Cowen, I'm in Shanghai, I don't know Chinese, and let's say I don't have Chinese friends, and I'm simply lost. How do I figure out where to actually eat in Shanghai? What do I do? What's the heuristic?

Well, you could look for recommendations of authentic restaurants, articles by people perhaps who live in Shanghai or who understand the food.

Say I'm just on the street, I'm walking, I don't have my iPad, I'm away from Wi-Fi. There's Shanghai, there's me confronting the alien. How do I think about finding what's good?

Um, use your nose, use your eyes. Um, if you're interested in street food, you'll find lots of little sort of stalls and shops where they're cooking in full view. Um, use your judgment and see what looks exciting. Um, I guess it's very difficult in a cosmopolitan city like Shanghai, um, to perhaps know exactly what is local Shanghainese. What is from other parts of China, because it's sort of always been a melting pot of different Chinese regional cuisines. So, um, and also if you want to taste the more sort of refined cooking, then just going around the streets is not really going to help. So I think you do need to do a little bit of research and perhaps have a few dishes, you know, have the names on your phone in Chinese. That would help.

And 3 dishes one absolutely has to try, or what?

In Shanghai?

In Shanghai. The city, not the region.

I think you should have Hong Shao Rou, red braised pork. Real home cooking, delicious combination of soy sauce, rice wine, and sugar, and one of the favorite dishes. I would recommend something, perhaps some Shanghainese wontons in soup stuffed with shepherd's purse, which is a wild variety of the brassicas, and pork, just to show show you the lighter, gentler side of Shanghai cooking. And then perhaps, what would I have in Shanghai? And then perhaps if we're talking Shanghai, you might want to have one of these dishes that says something about Shanghai as being a mixing pot of different cultures. And there's a very nice crab meat and potato and tomato soup served in some of my favorite Shanghai restaurants. Which seems a little bit of a fusion with some European influences, the way they use potato and tomato in that soup with local seafood.

So, as you know, the Michelin Guide recently has covered Shanghai, given some restaurants 3, 2, 1 star. There's cheap places you can go. Conceptually, do they understand the food of Shanghai? And to the extent they don't, what are they missing?

I think if you look at the restaurants they've selected, there's a bit of a Cantonese bias. And they do have some Cantonese restaurants, they do have some Shanghainese restaurants, but one thing that's very conspicuous, there are some notable, some of the best Shanghainese local restaurants which are missing from that list, in my opinion. And the reason is, I think, the methodology of Western food inspectors, which is they tend to go as individuals or small groups. And of course, in many Chinese restaurants where you eat family style, to make the most of the restaurant, you have to eat as we're doing now, with a large group and a table full of dishes. And these restaurants that I was surprised not to see on the list, you have to book a private room with a group. And if you do, you'll be able to taste some of the most wonderful renditions of Shanghainese food and food from the broader region, with a sort of contemporary spirit, but a real reverence for traditional technique. But you can't do that really if you just go with one or two people.

So let me ask you a bit about this Cantonese bias. I've even heard Chinese people say, well, the food of Shanghai, it's maybe a little too sweet, or some parts of it are too simple. And there's a bit of a bias from some, not all, against the food of Shanghai, and that the food of Canton is more glorious, has more vegetables, uses refined seafood in a more complex way, is delicate, harder to pull off. And therefore a higher point of Chinese cuisine. Do you agree? Yes, no, or what is that missing if you don't agree?

I think Cantonese is a superb and fantastic cuisine, but I think its particular status in China is the product of historical circumstances. The Cantonese south of China, Hong Kong, the special economic zones, were the first places to get rich after the reform and opening up, particularly. And so Cantonese became the prestige cuisine. When I was a student in Chengdu in the 1990s, if you wanted to go out for an expensive expensive fancy meal, you went to a Cantonese restaurant and ate expensive seafood. So I think it still has that kind of cachet and aura of sophistication. And with Shanghainese food, I mean, Shanghai is in Chinese gastronomic terms a kind of modern upstart city, and it's better known perhaps for its street food and home cooking. But it is the sort of, you know, the best-known part of an ancient region which really has what you can argue is the Chinese classical cuisine. The food of the Jiangnan Lower Yangtze region. And this region is known historically for its extraordinary knife work, delicate flavours, extreme reverence for ingredients, you know, eating the right foods from the right places in the right seasons. And all the kind of values that we associate perhaps with Cantonese food and also with sort of modern, you know, Chez Panisse, the sort of modern foodie movement. They're all there historically in China, and perhaps for historical reasons, you know, it's been underappreciated in, you know, in the last century or so.

I think you would agree Shanghai is one of the wealthier, more modern parts of China. As you see China developing, you see traditional markets to some extent in some parts of China fading away. Supply chains become longer, large companies play a bigger role, the refrigerator plays a new role in the food supply chain, so so things can sit around for longer. Do you wonder that a lot of Chinese food will become bad in the way that American food has become bad? And if that happens, will it come to Shanghai first? Or are you more optimistic than that?

I think you can see all these things happening, and it is very sad. So for example, restaurants that I knew— I mean, this is in Chengdu— restaurants where they made all their dumplings from scratch, like maybe 15, 20 different kinds every day, now will buy some of them in ready-prepared. Supermarkets stock sort of easy seasoning packets to make mapo tofu, you know, this kind of thing. So, and then in the cities there's a huge loss of cooking skills. Young professionals often rely on their parents to cook for the children at home, and they, the middle generation, are not learning traditional cookery. They're not learning how to pickle and cure. So there's all this being lost. And people, you know, they lead more hectic lives and they are increasingly eating ready-prepared food. So I think you can see that China is going down the same sad path as the rest of us in some ways. But the thing that gives me hope is that, you know, in China food is understood so deeply as the foundation of kind of health and happiness, and it has been a culture that is so are so obsessed with food, and they have this wonderful resource that I hope people will sort of— I mean, some people are now getting to the point of kind of looking at Chinese food as a kind of cultural artifact and something valuable to be preserved, you know.

Let me now see if you can talk me out of one of my biases. When I eat food in China, there's nothing I've ever been served that I found disgusting, ever, which is saying something. But at the same time, it's rare that I will prefer to eat organs or offal or the various stranger items you might be served. If I look around the world, those items seem to be what economists would call an inferior good. That is, in virtually all societies, when incomes go up, at some point people stop eating those things. My background is Irish. In Ireland in the early 20th century, it was very common to eat a lot of organs and offal. Today, it's hardly to be found. It's revived somewhat, but as part of a regular diet, it's dwindled. So are offal and organs actually just inferior goods, and when people earn higher incomes, they don't want it anymore and they're worse? Or are they parts of the Chinese culinary picture as good as anything else, and they will persist even with rising income?

I think it's complicated. So in sort of peasant farming societies, you have the kind of nose-to-tail eating. You kill the pig and you eat every part of it for economic reasons as much as anything. But also in China, the thing that really sets it apart is this, you know, preoccupation with the delights of gastronomy and the pursuit of the exotic. In particular, the appreciation of texture. And a lot of awful foods have very interesting textures, like these fire-exploded kidney flowers. They have that kind of slightly brisk crispness with tenderness of, you know, a kidney that has been cut in this beautiful ornate sort of crisscross pattern and then stir-fried very fast. It's a textural pleasure. And there are other things like in Sichuan people love eating goose intestines, which any Westerner would throw away. If you're a Western person, it's pointless. They're tasteless. Why would you eat a goose intestine? But from a Chinese textural point of view, they're slippery, crisp, snappy. They have a delightful kogan, or mouthfeel. And the other thing is that some bits of what Westerners would consider to be old, awful, and rubbish have a very different sort of— it's a very different concept in China. For example, a duck's tongue, right? From a Western point of view, it's a small fiddly thing that's all bone and cartilage. And like, what's the point? As my father would say, it has a— high grapple factor for very little reward. Yeah, but in China, one of the ways of looking at this is that, you know, you've got a whole duck, the meat is very commonplace, each duck has one tongue, it has very particular textures. It's, you know, if you've got the duck tongue, you've got the prize, you've got the best bit, you know, the small precious morsel. And in the past, you know, before refrigeration, if you could afford to have a whole plateful of duck tongue the number of ducks it represented, or a plateful of boned goose feet. You know, a goose was a huge luxury, but if you have 12 goose feet from 6 geese on your plate, you have got the command of, you know, all these ingredients. So I think that there's the sort of, you know, the appreciation of these delicacies exists not only the sort of poor farmers, but at the highest tables as well.

So let's say I want to learn how to enjoy sea cucumber, which believe it or not, I am not currently able to do. But I'm not against the idea. I would like to learn this. What's your actual advice for me other than try it? I've tried it. I still don't enjoy it. I don't hate it. What do I do next?

What you have to do is firstly go to a good place so you feel good, you know, it's nice surroundings. And then you have to put it into your mouth and set aside all your mental prejudices. And just try to experience it in a sensory way. Try to feel it, try to feel that slightly slithery gelatinous quality, that little crispness in the bite. It's like what I like to think of as sort of edible oxymoron, you know, this kind of softness and crispness. Chinese love these kind of contradictions, sensory contradictions. And what you have to do is just try to experience it and think about it and also think, you know, in China where people really understand gastronomy, they really appreciate these things. And also think to yourself, if I can get my head around this, if I can start appreciating these textural foods, the pleasures of texture, then a door will open onto this other, you know, whole aspect of Chinese gastronomy, which is exciting, you know. It'll broaden, you know, broaden your pleasure in Chinese food.

Now let me ask you about cookbooks. You've written a memoir, which is one of my favorite books, but mostly you've written cookbooks. You have a cookbook on Sichuan food, Hunan food, an all-purpose Chinese cookbook, the new Shanghai region book. What strikes me about those cookbooks is how conceptually you frame everything you present. So coming at it as a social scientist, to me what you write makes perfect sense in a way that Mark Miller's cookbooks do, but a lot of cookbooks don't. They seem too particularistic to me. Now, if you were to tell us cookbooks in China written by Chinese in Chinese What are they like compared to Western cookbooks? I mean, at a conceptual level, at an organizational level, what's the main difference?

I think there's less of a practice of using a cookbook to explore a region, or there has been until recently. So this thing of weaving together stories and cultural information with recipes, it's beginning to happen last few years, particularly since the Bite of China, this smash-hit food TV series, which has sort of captured people's imaginations and led to a kind of boom in food publishing. But until recently, Chinese cookbooks were more functional, I think, less rigorous in recipe testing, so kind of difficult to follow if you didn't already have some idea about what you were trying to do. And sort of advice like saying, "A suitable amount of this seasoning," you know. But, yeah, I think those are the main differences.

Okay, now let's switch to Sichuan Province, which is one of my two favorites, along with Yunnan Province. Why is it that so much of the good Chinese food that comes to the West, to Barshu in London, which you have worked for, for this restaurant here, so many of the successes in exporting Chinese food are Sichuan successes? Why is that? What is it about that cuisine?

Well, firstly, it's thrillingly exciting and dramatic. You know, all that red colour, festive, exciting flavours. But I think more importantly, because Sichuanese food, beyond the spicy stereotype, is about the artful mixing of flavours. So, it's about fu he wei, complex layered flavours. So, in Sichuan, you know, Sichuanese people would sum up the cuisine as saying, "Yi cai yi ge, bai cai bai wei," which means each dish has its own style. A hundred dishes has a hundred different flavours. So, the kind of heart and soul of Sichuanese cooking lies in flavour combinations. So, for example, this is an example of a mala dish, numbing and hot, dried chillies and Sichuan pepper. You can take that flavour combination and that's the essence of the dish. So, it doesn't really matter if the ingredient is, as it is here, chicken or frog or fish. You're sort of preserving the spirit of that dish. And I think that— and also because Sichuanese cooking is so much about flavour, if you have a few base seasonings like the Sichuan chilli bean paste, doubanjiang, chilli Sichuan pepper, you can take them abroad and you can make a very effective and pretty authentic version of Sichuanese food with your sort of basic canon of seasonings. And some cuisines are more difficult like that, you know, if you have very specific local ingredients. You know, and also because, you know, Sichuanese with the bold and exciting flavors, I think that you can, you can do a reasonable approximation of Sichuanese cooking without the most consummate cooking skills, and it will still be fun and exciting. And something like Cantonese, for example, is more difficult to do well.

Now I'd like to have you teach us all a lesson about Sichuan peppercorns. Before I came here, I brought from my home my inferior Virginia suburban peppercorns bought at a local Chinese market, and you brought from Sichuan Province your own version of Sichuan peppercorns.

The good stuff.

The good stuff. And if you could try the two for us, and you're all welcomed at the table to try along.

Well, I would like— can you pass that around and everyone have a sniff?

These are the inferior, what you call inferior peppercorns.

And then keep the lid on between and take the lid off and put your nose in that box and have a good sniff. And don't taste it until instructed. Yes.

Yours are better.

Well, the first thing is, as soon as you open that pot, you get this overwhelming, gorgeous, slightly citrusy fragrance, which is very distinctive, right? So that tells you it's very fresh and lovely Sichuan pepper. Then if you take one of the ones I brought and put it in your mouth, and what I suggest is Chew it very juicily at the front of your mouth about 3 times and then take it out because it's delayed reaction.

Amazing. Yeah? Yes.

So your tongue is beginning to sing and dance and tingle.

Yeah? Yes.

So that's, that is what they call in Chinese, ma. It means sort of tingling sensation, the same word for pins and needles and anesthesia. So if the Sichuan pepper is not that great, you don't get the tingle. So you get some aroma, but this is simply overwhelming. And that's why I said just put one in your mouth and take it out after a few seconds, because if you put a handful in and you keep chewing it, it will be overwhelming.

Now, in terms of the history of my Sichuan peppercorns and the history of yours, these at least pretend they're from China, correct? Is it that they're from the wrong place, or they've been sitting around too long, or you know the best source? What's the underlying difference between— behind the difference?

Well, in Sichuan they would say that the best Sichuan pepper comes from a particular region, Hanyuan, in the west of Sichuan. So there's a real, as you know, I said, a concern with provenance of things. Also, so I think there are different varieties which will be more fruity and less fruity. And the other thing is, and I don't know, I think most of the Sichuan pepper that is exported has been exported and handled by Cantonese people. And in parts of China apart from Sichuan, Sichuan pepper is used differently. So it's used in spice combinations. It's used to take away the fishiness of meat and poultry ingredients. That's a Chinese culinary concept. But it's not used for this tingling ma sensation. So unless you're Sichuanese, you're not going to be seeking out the really zingy Sichuan pepper. I think that's the problem really, that you would need Sichuanese exporters taking command and making sure we all get the tingly Sichuan pepper.

Now let me ask you a deep philosophical question here. Just for some background, someone once asked you, "What are your favorite parts of Chinese food?" And you gave a long answer, too long for me to repeat, and a lot of it I can't pronounce anyway. But you listed 7 or 8 different regions that all seem quite different. And these Sichuan peppercorns and mala is not in general done in Shanghai, as you well know. What is the underlying unity that makes all of these Chinese food because you instinctively believe in that concept. But what is that unity, given the fantastic diversity?

Well, there are some things you can pull out. The use of chopsticks and its implications for the form of food, which is that you have food that's generally cut into small pieces, or it's tender enough to pull apart with chopsticks. And that's one thing that Western observers through the centuries have remarked on about Chinese food, is having these— I mean, for the early Western for Western observers it was rather disturbing. So you'd have a dish with everything cut fine, you didn't know what it was, you know, maybe it was something really outlandish. So the art of cutting and the cutting of food into small pieces, the eating of shared dishes with a staple grain, rice in the south, wheat in the north, that's the kind of structure of a meal. You can also pull out some very important seasonings, soy sauce, and other fermented soy pastes, you know, the use of vinegar and soy sauce in combination, ginger, scallion, and garlic in various combinations. So you can look at seasonings, also cooking methods, and I know stir-frying is the most famous, relatively recent historically, but steaming also is a really important core Chinese cooking method. So yeah, I'm looking at a combination of techniques, but I think you always have to, you know, when you talk about Chinese cuisine, you always have to take it with a pinch of salt and remember, as I always do, that Chinese people talk about something called shìtān, Western food, and make outrageous generalisations about it too. And, you know, of course, from a Chinese point of view, it makes sense to talk about Western food as being different from Chinese, but from a Western point of view, you see all the distinctions.

So in one of your books, you tell a story of taking some number of very renowned Sichuan chefs and you bring them in the United States to a restaurant called French Laundry, one of the best and most famous American restaurants, cooking at a very high level. How did they react to that?

Well, total culture shock. You see, I was delighted. I was so excited. So I'd taken these wonderful chefs, all of them extremely accomplished practitioners of Sichuanese cuisine, And here I was going to— I got a table at the best restaurant, held to be the best restaurant in North America, for some of the finest the West had to offer. And there were all kinds of things that they found very difficult. The first was that we started eating, our reservation was at 9:30. Chinese people like to eat at 6:00 or 6:30, so they were already in a bit of a bad mood by the time we started.

As I would be.

Then it was a 4-hour tasting menu. Chinese meals, even very good ones, tend to be rather fast. Fast by this standard. So for them, it was a long, tedious, late-night thing to sit and have dish after dish of complicated food. They weren't used to eating dairy products, so anything creamy, not particularly nice. They were really disturbed, and one of them actually refused to eat the most beautiful lamb because it was a little pink and bloody in the middle. And of course, in China, traditionally, only barbarians eat raw meat. And you just don't eat raw meat. They thought the olives tasted like Chinese medicine. And they also found that, you know, in China, a meal should always leave you feeling very sort of refreshed and relaxed. And that's why you finish in many regions with a light, refreshing palate cleansing soup or with fresh fruit. And at the French Laundry, we ended like at many classic Western tasting menus with a whole sequence of very heavy sweet dishes, which was not very comfortable for them.

Also known as dessert.

As dessert. But the most interesting thing was Yu Bo, one of the chefs, who's now very famous, one of the best chefs I've ever met in China, the most accomplished. He was sitting in front of this beautiful plate of food, and he said, "Fuchsia, this is all very interesting, but I really cannot say whether it's good or bad." Now let's go from the sublime to the ridiculous.

I'm not sure how much time you've spent in the United States. Probably a lot of it is in places like New York, Los Angeles, where you can find quite good, but not perfect, Chinese food. This place here, Panda Gourmet, is very good. Two-thirds of the items on the table are excellent. The others are all at least good. The cold noodles, my favorite. But say you're in Middle America somewhere, and there's a restaurant that calls itself Chinese, but it's cooking only for Americans. Most or all of what's there would be unrecognizable to actual Chinese people. Ava has told me a story along these lines. You're to go into that restaurant and try to get the best meal possible. What do you do? What should we do? We're stuck. You're not in New York.

Do you speak Chinese?

No.

Then you are a bit stuck. You need to communicate that you do not want to eat General Tso's chicken and beef with broccoli and those dishes, that you really want to eat the food that they're going to have for dinner tonight themselves. So, but you should bear in mind that, for example, in China, when I take people eating in China, I order in fluent Mandarin, you know, well-informed ordering of a meal, and I'm often told, "Oh no, no, no, no, you mustn't order that. Your guests won't eat it." And I have to really insist quite quite forcefully that, yes, we do want to eat the tripe, or whatever it is. So, you do face this barrier, and it's not that people, that they don't want to give you things, you know, they're trying to keep them, but it's just that they're worried that you might not like them. And many Chinese waiters and restaurateurs that I know in London have had the experience of Westerners ordering food and then complaining that there are bones in it, or that it's fatty meat, all of which are good things in China. And then complaining and making a scene. And so I think people just— it's easier. They often have language issues, so they want to give you something they know you'll like.

Now, tips for shopping for Chinese ingredients in the West. Let's say this is either London or the United States. So if I ask myself, what are the core ingredients I would pick? I'd pick 4 things: ginger in storable form, a Sichuan sauce, green onions, and Sichuan peppercorns. Just my personal preference, but those are my four. You're allowed four things as advice, not for yourself because you're cooking at a much higher level, but to recommend to people such as ourselves for cooking, eating, enjoying Chinese food. What are your four or five picks that you can get in the West?

Um, I would get Chinese brown rice vinegar, probably Jinjiang vinegar, a really good soy sauce, which means traditionally fermented. And that would be a light soy sauce if it's a question of light or dark. I would get a toasted sesame oil, pure toasted sesame oil. And I would get some Sichuanese fermented chili and fava bean paste, doubanjiang. And I'm assuming that ginger, garlic, and scallions they would have anyway.

I was assuming soy sauce one had anyway. But yeah, those would be our two lists.

Yeah, and maybe Sichuan pepper as well.

Yeah. And with those items and a number of others, one can cook most of what's in your cookbooks, correct?

Yeah, you just need to make one trip to Chinatown, stock up on a few basics, and then you're really away.

Now, in all of the conversations with Tyler Cowen, in the middle we have a section known as Underrated Versus Overrated. So I name something and you tell me whether you think it's underrated or overrated, and you're free to pass in any case if you so feel like it. Bee larvae to eat?

Underrated.

Why?

Because they are delicate and delicious. They have a lovely crisp, light texture and a sort of very subtle savory flavor. And also it's just a lovely sort of idea, eating insects. Eating— it's almost like fairy tale food.

Can you farm it yourself or not so easily?

I haven't tried.

I haven't tried. Milk, underrated or overrated?

Overrated. That's the one thing I don't like. I love cheese and butter, but I don't, don't ever drink milk.

You just don't think it tastes good?

I haven't tasted it for years.

This is— I know there's a long list here, but the most underrated Chinese regional cuisine, if you had to pick? Not the best, the most underrated.

The cuisine of the region that I've written about, Jiangnan. Which is like the— you can argue it's the classical Chinese cuisine, but people in the West really don't know anything about it.

And tell us just a little more how it's not only Shanghai. Expand on that just a bit.

Yeah, well, Shanghai is a kind of modern upstart city, but this region has been prosperous and culturally vitally important for hundreds and hundreds of years. So you've got great cultural centers like Hangzhou, Shaoshan, which, you know, which have been written about by poets, Emperors fell in love with them over the centuries. So it's been, you know, a centre of Chinese culture and also gastronomic culture. And it just has incredible, thoughtful cooking, writing about food, beautiful ingredients. And that's both fresh ingredients and sort of cured things like Shaoxing wine, Jinhua ham, one of the great hams of the world.

Here's a question one of my readers wrote in to me. He or she asked, "What about the luxury ingredients in Chinese cuisine?" Meaning shark's fin, bird's nest, cordyceps, the kind of fungus. The person's view was they're all overrated. That when you try them, at least with the Western palate, they don't seem that amazing. I've had that reaction to shark's fin myself. Maybe I've never had it at the right place. But what I've enjoyed most in Chinese food has never been the luxury ingredients. Been, say, home cooking in Sichuan Province or Yunnan or maybe Shanghai. The luxury ingredients in Chinese cuisine, underrated or overrated?

Overrated.

So you agree with that reader?

Yes. I mean, I think from a Western point of view, of course they're overrated because something like shark's fin is tasteless anyway. So you have to appreciate texture. You also have to appreciate the history and cultural context to enjoy these things. But as the great 18th century gourmet and food writer Yuan Mei wrote, there are many common foods which, if cooked properly, like tofu, are far more satisfying than a really expensive bowl of sea cucumber. So yeah.

The singer Leonard Cohen, underrated or overrated?

Underrated.

Tell us.

Oh, he's my favorite singer.

Okay.

Extraordinary master of songwriting.

What's your favorite Tom Lehrer song?

Um, the Masochism Tango.

Okay, we were talking about books before the session started and what you'd read recently, and you mentioned a book by Ben Judah called This Is London, which you at least implied was underrated. What's special about that book?

Well, it's a sort of contemporary version of George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris in London. So this young British journalist decided to look at the lives of immigrants, recent immigrants to London, and he did things like sleep sleeping rough with Romanian vagrants at Hyde Park Corner. He pretended to be an, I think, Eastern European builder and, you know, shared beds in dos houses with people working there. He talked to extremely rich Arabs who come to London for the summer, and he just produces this vivid, unflinching, sometimes moving, sometimes shocking portrait of the city that, you know, I live in and that many Londoners kind of don't really know exists. So it's just an absolutely shatteringly interesting read.

Here's a question one of your readers wrote to me by email. Maybe it's a bit intangible, but I've had the same wonder. Given how much you love China, love Chinese food, work on projects that require your immersion in the food culture of China, just being away from China for as long as you sometimes are, how do you manage that intellectually, emotionally, otherwise? That sense of otherness. I mean, do you have that antsy-ness when you're in London or Topeka, Kansas, and it's like, my goodness, I need to be in China now? Or how is that?

Well, I would say that the two sides of my life are much more closely related. So I do go to China very frequently now. I cook a lot of Chinese at home. My Chinese friends sometimes say that my London home is more Chinese than theirs because it's so full of things from China. And also, you know, when I first came back from studying in China, I never heard Mandarin in Britain. It was too expensive to call friends in China. This was just before email. Now I'm constantly chatting with chefs on social media. I can ask them questions about a dish that I'm making. My Chinese friends sometimes come here. Chinatown in London and Chinatowns generally have more and more Chinese food and Chinese restaurants. So I would say there's, there's much greater sort of integration of China in the West and my Chinese personal Chinese life in my Western Chinese life, which I also like very much.

Now you've written favorably about the 18th century Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber. Most Americans haven't read that. Tell us why it's important.

Because it's like a whole world of, sort of, into Chinese culture of the Qing Dynasty. It's the story of two grand families and their rising and falling fortunes over a number of years, and it's got amazing characters. It's like a sort of soap opera of Chinese characters. You will learn about Chinese rituals, about Chinese food, about cultural preoccupations. So, and it's just totally captivating. I mean, it's about— it's the English translation I read it in, the Penguin version, is about— it's 5 volumes, it's about this big, and it just took over my life for 5 months because I just wanted to see what happened to these people.

The plot is hard to follow. There's many characters, the names are not familiar to a Western audience. What's the way to make it easy enough to read it so that one actually can read it?

Firstly, read the Penguin translation, which is the title The Story of the Stone by David Hawkins and John Minton, which is absolutely inspired and lively, and it just, I mean, it really does bring it to life. You do need a little bit of patience with the Chinese names, but in this book he does actually, both men, because they did some volumes each, they translate some of the names. Like there's a serving girl who is called Aroma, So that's the translation, whereas some of them are known, like Lin Dayu, by the Chinese name, which is a bit harder to remember. But it's just, I think if you, you might find it heavy going at first if you're not really into China, but once you've got into it, I think it's so human and moving and gripping and just culturally fascinating that you'll want to finish it.

So as you probably know, in Japan, there are some of the finest French and Italian restaurants in the world, and Mark could attest to that. What's the best Western cuisine you can find inside of China?

I'm not the best person to ask because I'm always eating Chinese food in China, really.

How about the best other Asian cuisine inside of China? Do you have any sense of that?

Um, no, not really. I mean, I'm really— I really, really do quite seriously try mainly to eat local.

Yeah.

When I'm in in China.

So, just to go back to where we started before we move to the questions. This idea of the food tour, you were given 12 days to organize the food tour to begin with. But now let's say a person has 3 weeks or 4 weeks and they want to do even more in China. They get to learn some basics. What's the further advice you would give them for how to make this, you know, experience of a lifetime? How do you do a food tour in China? When you have a little more time and resources?

The first thing I would say is go to a market, see what produce people are using. And the markets are getting harder to find in the big cities, but seek one out. And the chances are you'll see not only the sort of very interesting produce, but you'll also find snack stalls around the market, which will also be interesting. Another piece of advice is to, you know, go to very popular flourishing restaurants with lots of people in them, obviously, and look at what other people are eating. Because if you, you You know, Chinese menus are often not translated. Even if they are translated, the translation is often very poor. And some menus now have pictures, but I think it's a really good thing to go and look at what other people are eating and then ask. And Chinese people are generally very understanding, you know, and will usually be quite welcoming about this sort of thing. And try to order a variety of dishes. So, one great mistake you can make is just order, you know, all dishes which are deep-fried or red braised. You always want to have some lighter dishes that might seem less exciting, like simple stir-fried vegetables or a refreshing broth. But that's part of the whole experience of the meal.

We now move to the question and answer segment of this meal. And thank you very much for all of those points. Ezra, would you care to start?

I'd love to start. What is the cuisine outside of Asia? That in its architecture and its structure is most similar to Chinese cuisine?

Outside Asia?

Outside Asia.

Well, I would say that if you're talking about farmhouse cooking and the cooking actually particularly of this region, I see a lot of affinities with Italian cooking. So, for example, one of the principles of the cooking of the Jiangnan region, xianxian heyi, unity of fresh and salted, the use of small amounts of sort of cured pork and intensely flavoured ingredients to bring life to vegetables and more gently flavoured ingredients. So, and also with Italian cooking, you get some very interesting pastas, you know, with Chinese as well. So that's one, but I mean, I wouldn't say that Italian cooking is anything like a match for Chinese in the complexity and diversity. I mean, Italy's a tiny country by comparison. But there are some parallels that I see there.

I want to ask a question. I have your books, and yet I find I'm kind of afraid to cook from them. Because I grew up— my mom's a caterer, and I grew up cooking a lot of really good American and French and so forth food. But when you skip cuisines that far, you feel like you go in, and even though you're doing everything it says in the recipe, you're not going to— you realize how much little skill is required just to make a recipe come out right is stuff that you don't even know you're doing. Because you know how it should be. You know how this thing works. And so what do people who are starting out with a completely new cuisine, and for both Chinese and Western cooks going each way, how do you bridge that? What's the—

Well, firstly, I totally understand where you're coming from. And I can remember before I went to China cooking from a a Chinese cookbook and sort of already a keen cook in other traditions but thinking, I just don't know the grammar of this cuisine. I'm just following step by step and I don't know what it means or where it's going. So I do understand that. I think, of course, it helps to have tasted some of the food, you know, to try to recreate recipes that you have maybe tasted.

I have cooked from your cookbooks, by the way. I always worry that I'm not doing it right in some way, you know.

Well, I suppose that the book before this one, Every Grain of Rice, was specifically designed to address this, which is to introduce sort of basic techniques and concepts and fairly straightforward recipes which can be the building blocks for a sort of understanding of what's going on in Chinese cooking. So I would start with the basics, trying to understand like, you know, simple stir-fries, the art of mixing flavours for a cold dish, a little bit of cutting. So just take it step by step. And also, I think also you just have to make one leap, which in terms of Chinese cooking we've already discussed. You have to go with a list of things, preferably in Chinese, to go to a Chinese supermarket, stock up on a few basics, and then, you know, you're not going to have to do that every time you make a recipe, you know.

I had everything on your list except the fava bean paste, which I will now buy.

Mark. Mark Miller, good friend of Future's, long time. In your books, you use a lot of the language that gets reinterpreted into texture or flavor, and I've been studying basically how we actually learn perceptual taste. Part of it is by memory of tasting something on the street, and part of it is the structure of how we approach perception and how we frame it. And don't you think that The example of your chef who couldn't taste the food at the French Laundry, what he didn't have was basically the framing of how to approach that perception. So, my question is, one, is within Chinese perceptual framing, why can't they move over to, for instance, a meal at French Laundry, and why can't, when they say nature, just appreciate like a roast squab or roast chicken with nothing done? None of the fishiness or the wildness taken out, but just accepted as natural and then roasted.

Well, I mean, I suppose that— I don't think that their experience at the French Laundry is any different from a Western— you could get someone, a very accomplished Western eater who's eaten at many fine restaurants, but who will not get sea cucumber, the texture of sea cucumber. It's totally alien.

But I only eat sea cucumber in Spain where they actually know how to— they actually do a better job because they don't have that slimy part and they've actually perceptively changed it. They're called espadrilles in the southeast of Spain. I go to the Indian market.

Yeah, so they take that sea cucumber. Oh, I like those. See?

So it's a cultural framing again. Yeah. One culture doesn't accept— it's not the ingredient, but basically how we use our senses and frame that experience. One part is food that's accepted to the body. The other part, these things are very strange, I have no reference, and I really don't like it, right?

But I don't think there's anything remarkable about this. No, no, it's just—

but the Chinese have this problem with accepting— like, you said you cooked a meal of Western food for your Chinese friends in your memoir, and they said, "So boring." And yet, I think roast chicken or roast squab just by itself, you know, is perfect. Roast game, roast beef.

Yeah, but from a Chinese point of view, it is very boring.

And like, you know, but there are subtleties within aged beef, for instance, they're not getting a really good—

well, no, I think that, you know, China, more cosmopolitan Chinese eaters who are now traveling are getting very interested in steak, actually, and aged beef. But I think that, um, I'll give you a great example.

Like, I spend most of my time in Japan, and we have a really developed rice culture in Japan. The Japanese person will pick up a bowl, they'll smell it, it's not fresh, meaning that it's milled more than a month ago, they can tell you where it's from. The chefs will talk about their mixtures of rice in sushi. In China, I've never myself personally seen that sort of connoisseurship about rice.

Oh, well, I have about chilies, for example. Chefs I know in Sichuan who can go on for hours about the subtle distinctions of chilies. But I think, you know what you're saying, that lots of Chinese people, and it's absolutely hilarious, I've lost count I've lost count of the number of Chinese friends who said that "Xi san hen jian dan, hen dan diao," which means Western food is very simple and very monotonous. And, but the point is, I can understand why. A roast chicken is a beautiful thing. You know, say you have a perfect roast chicken, but a roast chicken is even better if you follow it with a light, refreshing broth and a stir-fried green, and then you have the contrast of the sort of roasty skin, which is quite rich and heavy, and the flesh, and then this delicate stir-fried vegetable and a refreshing soup. And so Chinese food, it's about the whole experience, and that's why you have a whole variety of flavours even in a relatively simple meal. And it stimulates the palate, and it also leaves you feeling very shu fu. You know, Chinese people really understand the comfort of eating. You don't go out and finish with 7 courses of sugar and butter and cream, because you might have a great sensory experience, but it's not going to leave you sleeping very well that night.

Hi, I'm Eva from China, Shandong Province. And I know that you are a fluent Chinese speaker, so my first question for you, I want to ask you a question in Chinese.

It's just that, you know, people often talk about in terms of 8 great cuisines in Chinese cuisines, one of which is the cuisine of Shandong Province known as Lu Cai. And so, Eve is just asking me, you know, which dish do I consider most representative of Lu Cai, of Shandong cooking. One very representative dish in one which I adore is sòngshāo hǎishēn, which is sea cucumber.

Are you just trolling Mark and Tyler? Because that would be good.

Or she is representing a sea cucumber.

Big sea cucumber.

No, so it's sea cucumber braised in a sort of dark sauce with jīngtóng, that kind of Chinese leek, which is like a very, very big and very mild kind of leek, scallion vegetable. And that's a great classic. And in terms of Shandong cooking, it's sort of rather labor-intensive to prepare using a very expensive dried ingredient. Sort of banquet— Shandong cooking, lu cai, is associated with sort of stately banquet cooking. But you do have this gorgeous flavor, the fragrance of the leek, onion, And then the lovely slippery crisp texture of the seafood dumplings.

So, you've emphasized in this discussion the balance of the meals in a way that often gets overlooked. The way that American eaters will have a Chinese meal and think, "Oh, the bok choy is dull. I'm going to have more of the 700-chili chicken." What are the other pieces of Chinese cuisine that Americans underrate their importance in the experience of eating? Of the meal?

Soup. Like, almost every Chinese meal includes soup. And even if you, like, if you go out to a very casual restaurant on your own and have fried noodles or fried rice, like a one-dish meal, almost always it will be served with a bowl full of broth, maybe with just a couple of scallions or something. And the idea is, because, you know, if you have something fried, it's a bit drying, and it's very comfortable to sort of moisten the throat and refresh you with a soup. And I think that the way Westerners order Chinese food, often they wouldn't have soup. Almost every Chinese meal, whether at home or in a restaurant, you have soup. We don't have a soup on the table here because there wasn't room for it, but I did order it.

An American eating problem.

And also, I think with Chinese soups that the classic Chinese restaurant soups, for Westerners are those like thick hot and sour soup or sweet corn and crab meat. And that's really not a tang, that's one word for a broth-like soup, that's a gung, which is a more substantial kind of stew soup. I'm talking about these broths, which again might be very, very simple, like lovely sort of sour umami pickled vegetable and tofu, just that, and it's like a refreshing drink.

Do you think that China will, after it sort of goes through its flirting with this modernization and accepting Western brands, whether it's Starbucks or other, come out with a brand new authentic modern Chinese food? And the young chefs are going that way in China?

Well, I would say you can get very excellent, you know, contemporary Chinese food rooted in traditional techniques. But the sad thing is that, you know, Chefing has become rather fashionable in the West. You know, young people want to do it. It's kind of glamorous and exciting. That's not the case in China. It's still a low-status profession, although people love food. So parents don't really want their children to become chefs. I know outstanding chefs in China who, if they were in the West, would have queues of people from all over the world wanting to come and do stages in their kitchen, and they don't have apprentices. So I always hear this complaint, young people in China, they're not willing to "chukou," eat bitterness, to really apply themselves diligently to the craft of cookery. So, I think there is a problem, this sort of disjunct between people who are obsessed with eating, but not yet the idea that, you know, a young person might want to take over an artisanal soy sauce factory. I think it may be coming because people, you know, there's a Some people have this kind of, you know, idea of going back to a simpler life, back to nature. There is a kind of revival of interest in Chinese cuisine as culture.

Neil's Yard, when I went to London, when I was a student in the '70s, it was very hard to find a farmhouse regional British cheese. And then Neil's Yard basically started the revolution again that sparked that. In America, we now have over 10,000 beers made in the United States with 4,200 microbreweries, and I grew up with probably 30 or 40.

Yeah, that's a really good idea, really good thing. And actually, one, one of the inspirations for my most recent book was the Dragonwell Manor Restaurant in Hangzhou, which is an exceptional place where the owner Dai Jianjun, otherwise known as Adai, is trying to sort of nourish the traditions of the region by supporting supporting food artisans, peasant producers, and trying to give people an honest living for producing what urbanites now consider to be premium, what we think of as organic products. And what I fervently hope is that more Chinese people will see what he's doing as truly inspirational, as a sort of, you know, yeah, just a sort of wonderful example of how to nourish Chinese traditional culture, make it economically viable, and kind of make it contemporary relevant Does he teach classes for Westerners? No.

Oh, because that would be good. No, no, I just think— I was just in Shanghai 2 weeks ago, and I go into K11, and what do I see? It's like Chinese women taking classes on how to make birthday cakes for their kids. And then I see the kids' school, which is all about Western cooking, and I'm thinking— I looked at the whole directory for the next 3 months, there wasn't one dish in Chinese— I mean, one Chinese cooking class being taught there.

And also in Hangzhou, which, you know, has been a center of gastronomy for 800 years. 800 years ago, they had a restaurant scene with regional restaurants, Buddhist vegetarian restaurants, restaurants specializing in iced dishes, you know, it's kind of like—

See cucumber restaurants.

So, in Hangzhou, a few years ago, they opened the Hangzhou Cuisine Museum. A single city has a huge museum with fantastic reconstructions like sushi models of all the classic dishes over 800 years, literally. But they also have a teaching element. They have a restaurant attached, they have activities and classes. So that's another example of sort of big local investment in sort of trying to promote local food culture to a new generation.

Chinese desserts, to a Westerner, they seem kind of meh.

And you know, is that—

I can come up with multiple theories of that. One is Chinese people just don't like dessert that much, which you've actually kind of suggested. One is that pastry cooking is fundamentally a wheat activity. If you're in the rice half, you don't get as much of it. But also, the US, if you look at the history of dessert as a major thing, it actually starts in the US because we're closest to the sugar, and then that sort of spreads. So as sugar spreads into China, um, does dessert get better, or is it that they don't like what we, what we like, and I'm missing the magic of Chinese dessert?

Well, the first thing to point out is that Chinese don't have dessert as a course, right? So you finish with fruit usually. So sweet dishes tend to be either sort of incidental snacks between meals or, you know, something you have with tea, or you might have a mingling of sweet and savoury dishes. Like, you can have some sweet dishes with quite a lot of sugar in them. There are also some regions where they have a lot of sweet foods— Suzhou and Wuxi in the Jiangnan region, for example, or the Chaozhou region of the Cantonese South. There are a whole range of wonderful sweet pastries, you know, rice-based in the south, wheat-based in the north, But for me, you know, as a great advocate of Chinese cooking, I do have to admit, I think that the sort of desserts and sweet things, I think, is possibly one aspect in which Western cuisines might have the edge. And I think that's because of the use of dairy products. So you get the wonderful umami richness of butter, the textures of cream. Chocolate, of course, is not used traditionally in China. So those things— so if you take them out of Western desserts, desserts, you're not left with very much in a way. So in China, a lot of the desserts also, they're less sweet. People have less sweet tooth apart from a few regions. So you have things like sweetmeats based on dried beans, like mung beans or sweet potatoes. And they're actually very delicious, but they don't hit that extreme sweet spot that Westerners like for their dessert.

So could I ask a follow-up, which is You know, dairy, obviously, I know if you're lactose intolerant, as many Asians are, drinking milk is probably never gonna happen. And I agree with you, I don't drink milk either, and my family are kind of dairy farmers. So, but all of this dairy in Western cuisine, and you see, I look at just, I grew up in New York City, and even so, if I look at the kind of range of exotic ingredients that were available even to me shopping in what was the then, I think, the best food city in the US. And what is available now is just so much better. And I think that's true all over the world. I still remember eating Mexican food in London in the '90s, and that was a bad, bad, bad experience. But now I'm told— I have British friends who swear that no, really, now it's different.

Don't believe them.

I don't quite, but I am willing to believe it's It's better. I have a German cookbook with a recipe for guacamole in it now.

But—

You probably shouldn't believe that recipe specifically.

No, no, I've never tried the recipe. I have only— but so as more Chinese people come to the West on vacation, to study, et cetera, I met a grad student in Wisconsin of all places who was like, I love— Chinese grad student— I love cheese. I can't— I don't know what I'm going to do when I go home. And I was kind of shocked because he's the only Chinese person I've I've ever heard say this. But does dairy have a future in China? Is there going to be more of a spread for—

Absolutely. And I think lots of Chinese parents now feed their children milk, because they think it'll make them grow big and strong. I mean, you know, all this thing about baby milk being imported in large quantities, and so on. So yes, milk specifically is a kind of nourishing thing for children. And cheese is still a bit of a niche thing. Like, you can buy it in supermarkets cosmopolitan cities like Shanghai. But yeah, I mean, you know, Chinese— China has a very dynamic, open food culture, and people are always into the next best thing. And chocolate also, you know, when I was a student in China in the 1990s, I craved chocolate, and the Chinese chocolate was awful stuff, you know, it wasn't chocolate at all. And now you can get chocolate of some kind all over China. So I think, you know, anything can happen.

Okay, fuxia.

Okay, so you know, in China and everywhere, people often talk about food culture and wine culture. So in China, what's the relationship between— so what was the last bit? Yeah, Chinese culture. So food culture and Chinese culture. I just think, you know, food is and has always been really at the heart of Chinese culture. And there are two very important reasons for this. And one is the kind of ritual importance. So food is not just, and hasn't always been just a social thing, the sort of cement that binds families and friends together, but food was the means by which you communicated with your ancestors and gods. And many of the rituals of state were to do with agriculture and with food. So it's been a sort of serious business. Also because food has, since the beginning of Chinese history, been understood as the absolute foundation of good health. There's no difference between food and medicine in China. They say shiyi tongyuan, the food and medicine come from the same source. So every food has its tonic properties. If you're unwell, the first thing you do is address you can express your diet. So food is very important in that way, you know. And so, and I think another argument that's sometimes given is that, you know, often, you know, Chinese people haven't really been able to express themselves individually, and there have often been political constraints on freedom of expression through history. And food has been a source of immense joy and fun and something kind of free of all that. So it's also, I think food in China particularly, it's a place where you— people— it's a culture that expresses itself intellectually through food. The lyrical names of dishes, the stories associated with them, you know, talking about food and gastronomy is conversation in this culture. So in all these respects, it's just, you know, China is a— food is culture in China.

So it's often observed, sometimes a little smugly,— that a lot of what goes as Chinese food in America is not recognizable to folks in China. Is there anything Americans have done with Chinese food, either in the American Chinese space or in the more, oh, Momofuku, Chinese, fancy Chinese fusion space, that is, in your view, an actual genuine advance, something that would be valuable or valid in China?

Yeah, well, I think in recent years, the growth of regional cuisines, regional restaurants like this one. I mean, here we've got some kind of authentic Sichuanese dishes, some dishes from Shanxi in northern China. And so the opening up of sort of regional cuisines and regional street food is changing perceptions of Chinese food.

So you wouldn't have this in China— you would have this in China, though.

Yeah.

But what could— have we done anything interesting here that should go backwards? Like, is there anything interesting in, say, the Momofuku sort of efforts that— is actually Americans contributing in some way to?

Well, I would say, I mean, at the level of individual dishes, very interesting dishes, but China has it all already, you know, amazing combinations, you know, it's just China is so diverse, you know, apart from dairy and some sweet things and so on. It's, you can find, you know, you can, if you like hamburgers, you know, that's the Xi'an rou jiamo, it's a kind of Xi'an hamburger, and that's one thing that they've kind of got it all already.

I think that means no.

What does General Tso's chicken taste like to a Chinese person?

Well, interestingly, I did the whole research thing about this, but it's supposed to be a Hunanese dish, right? But I was very mystified when I went to Hunan to research my Hunan cookbook to find that nobody had ever heard of it, really. And it turned out, anyway, to cut a long story short, it was It was invented by a very famous Hunanese chef in Taiwan, and it went from him to New York when he opened a restaurant there near the United Nations. And at one point, this chef, Peng Chang-wei, did go back to his hometown Changsha in Hunan, the capital of Hunan Province, and he opened a restaurant there. And one of the dishes he served was General Tso's chicken. And I heard from people who remembered that restaurant that the food there was too sweet. So that's a dish that in some ways, you know, it has some characteristics of Hunanese food— the suan la, sour and hot, use of vinegar and scorched chilies. But for American tastes, there's a whole load of sugar, which they don't really add to savory dishes much in Hunan.

When I've eaten dishes in Taipei, generally they— earlier on, the food in Taipei was better than mainland China because they had access to better ingredients, and it was an educated elite class that left China and brought with them their culinary traditions with them. And so they had access to the recipes, the technique, and so forth. So does Taipei, you think, a repository of some of the more difficult dishes or of the older style? Because a lot of that was interrupted, it seems like.

In China?

Yeah. And also, Taipei is a little bit more concerned about providence of ingredient.

I would say that I think in the early days, so 1949, the defeated Nationalists fled to Taiwan with, as you're saying, that, you know, the chefs and their food traditions. And at that time, you know, the Nationalists all thought they would go back, and they were all missing their home provinces, and they wanted to eat the classic traditional food of, you know, of the elites of these provinces. And so the restaurants, I think, by all accounts, sort of in the '50s 50s and 60s were very, very traditional and authentic. But what's happened since then is that, you know, there's been a lot of mixing up. The younger generation of chefs are Taiwan-born, so they might work for a bit in a Hunan restaurant, then go into a Zhejiang restaurant. So they're all very mixed up. So you go to a regional restaurant in Taiwan, and they're either very old school and somehow not so good anymore, or they tend to be a bit more fusiony. In Chinese terms. And also in Taiwan, you have this whole Japanese influence from the colonial occupation.

Yeah.

And also a particular regional bias for the Fujianese history of many of the Taiwanese people. So, I think sort of 60 years on from that, I don't— there are some, like there's a fantastic Suzhou bakery in this food street in Taiwan where they make really traditional Suzhou pastries.. But a lot of it is, you know, a sort of mixed-up version of Chinese food. Not to say there's not excellent— Taiwan's a fantastic place to eat. But, and in China, sometimes it is difficult to find the real old-school cooking. And that's why what the Dragon Well Manor doing is— Well Manor restaurant doing is so important. It's like recruiting retired chefs to teach the younger generation the old skills.

What is the dish in your cookbooks that is a place you would tell beginners to start? What is a dish that they'll be capable of making and the results will hook them?

I think gong bao chicken is a really good introduction to stir frying because it's not complicated. It doesn't have many stages. You can assemble all your ingredients in little bowls first, and then they just go one by one into the wok, and it's a kind of knockout flavor. You know, everyone likes chicken. There's no bones in it, um, bit of spice, lovely layering of flavors. And that's one dish that I think people are surprised to find how straightforward it is, and it's addictively tasty.

For sure.

Yeah, we as well know you have been to China so many times. Yeah, so what's your next destination of China tour? And what's the most want to discover?

I think— I just feel like the more I find out about Chinese food, the more there is to discover. And, um, yeah, I mean, I feel like I'll be learning my whole life. So I would love to do more work on the northern pasta arts. I'm currently learning a lot about the food of Yunnan, which is one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth, and as you'd expect, has a rather extraordinary range of ingredients. But I think, I mean, the thing about China is that its cuisines have been so relatively unexplored by the English-speaking world, and so there's so much to discover and write about all over the country.

Tell us what's so unusual about Yunnan, because that to me was the big revelation. Every part of China I've been to, Yunnan surprised me the most. Dishes I'd never even dreamt of and would not have thought of as Chinese. So you'd have some bread dipped in honey, or you'd have donkey in a red sauce, almost in some ways like a curry sauce, or mushrooms in ways you had not imagined. But what makes Yunnan special for you?

Well, it's always been a kind of marginal region with, I think, 20-something of China's 56 ethnic minorities. So it's extraordinarily diverse culturally. It borders Burma, Laos, and Vietnam. So if you go to the south and the southwest of Yunnan, you're really getting into Southeast Asian flavors and cooking techniques and ingredients. Also mentioned this incredible diversity of ingredients: insects, flowers, mushrooms, bee larvae. Bee larvae, yes. And also it's just so— it's always been— it's not really, um, you can't really understand it in terms of the classical schools of Chinese cooking. It's a bit more adventurous, and it's got things like— I mean, like the fact that there are a couple of notable forms of local cheese in Yunnan, which is just exceptional, you know. So, I think it's that diversity and that sense of being sort of on the edge of empire, and it was a region that was sometimes part of China and sometimes it was doing its own thing, and you really feel that in the food.

To close, 4 relatively quick questions, one from each of us. Eva, your quick question for Fuchsia?

So, just you have said, you have introduced the gong bao ji ding, right? So, what's your most favorite Chinese dish?

Well, one of my first loves and my best loves is yu xiang qie zi, is fish fragrant eggplant. Because that, for me, it's a really simple everyday Sichuanese Chinese dish, but it's got knockout incredible flavor. So, it's eggplant with the classic fish-fragrant combination of pickled chilies, ginger, garlic, scallion, a bit of sweet and sour. And it's just— that's, for me, an example about how you don't have to be rich, you don't have to be sort of particularly accomplished in the kitchen to eat just fantastically well in China.

Isra, the opposite of that question. What is your favorite Western chain restaurant? And your favorite dish at it?

Well, it's not exactly Western, but the chain restaurant I eat at most often is the Royal China chain of dim sum restaurants in London.

This is not— I'm not accepting this answer.

OK. Chain restaurants. I don't really eat at chain restaurants.

There's no part of you that loves a McFlurry or—

Pret? Do you go to Pret?

Oh, yeah. I mean, I get sandwiches at Pret a Manger.

Which one is your favorite there?

Um, um, I can't really think. Um, you know, BLT sandwich at Pratt.

All right, Mark.

Um, this beautiful picture in your new book of the hams— this, what does he call it?

This, the Jinhua ham.

Can you explain the taste of that? I really, I love ham. I'm just— oh yeah, can you explain the difference Which ham would it be closest to in my sort of— would it be Spanish, Italian? How is it cured, and what's the flavor like?

Oh, it's closest perhaps to Spanish hams. And a lot of Chinese chefs in the West would use that, would use Spanish ham as a substitute, because you can't often import Chinese meats to Europe. So it's very intense. It's sort of fairly dense, garnet-colored meat. It's not eaten raw. It's used as an umami flavoring in cooked dishes mostly.

How long is it aged?

Uh, not sure, actually. I mean, I think a whole range, but—

Thank you.

Megan.

What is the last Western food that will become popular in China, and what is the last Chinese food that will become popular in the West?

Um, the last Western food, um— Maybe a really ripe, heady, stinky brie. I have an experience of trying to feed this to people in China. And the other way around, I think it would have to be something textural.

Sea cucumber.

Sashimi sea cucumber. Sea cucumber is not allowed as an answer.

Well, I could mention one very extreme textural delicacy that I've only ever come across once in China. And probably most people in China wouldn't eat it. But Szechuanese love their rubbery, crunchy offal. And that is the upper palates of pigs, which they call tian tang, paradise. And I found it at a late-night street stall covered in chili and Szechuan pepper oil. But I don't think that will be a big hit in New York or London anytime soon.

Very last question goes to me to close. What is your favorite Chinese film and why?

Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. So Taiwanese, and it's a lovely story about food. But what's extraordinary is the actual food you see in that film. And actually, by chance, I've come across the book, the books, the set of books that was clearly the source for that. So there was an amazing series of cookery books produced around 1980, I think, when they photographed the classical cuisine, the classical dishes of four great cuisines of China, and they shot them beautifully in antique dishes. And this is for me the sort of absolute pinnacle of classical Chinese cuisine. And they, the people who researched the food for that film, have done their homework, and it is just ravishing, historically accurate Chinese food.

I thank the panel, and most of all, Fuchsia, thank you very much for a wonderful time and for the ordering. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.