Lunch with Fuchsia Dunlop at Mama Chang (Bonus)

Hi everyone, this is Jeff, producer of Conversations with Tyler. Today we're bringing you a bonus episode featuring Chinese food expert Fuchsia Dunlop, who has a new cookbook out called The Food of Sichuan. Now, longtime listeners might remember we had on Fuchsia way back on episode 15 to talk all things food in China. I encourage you all to check out that episode if you missed it. But for this episode, we opened things up a bit. Instead of a mostly one-on-one conversation between Tyler and Fuchsia, we invited several other guests from the DC food scene to chat over a homestyle Chinese meal. Now the perfect place to host that meal is Mama Chang. It's the newest restaurant from chefs Peter and Lisa Chang and one of the best places to eat in DC. Lydia Chang, their daughter, whoever sees the business, hosted us at the table with with a menu she and Fuchsia developed together. So here's everyone who was at the table. Tyler Cowen, Mercatus Center, host of Conversations with Tyler. David Hagedorn, Washington, D.C., and I'm a former chef and restaurateur turned writer.

Stephanie Ganz, program director at Cookology, which is a cooking school in Arlington.

I'm Saeng. I'm a chef and owner at Deep Khao Hanuman Sen Khao in Phadhek.

I'm Natasha Cowen.

I'm married to Tyler Cowen, and I love Chinese food.

I'm Rivka Friedman, and I am an avid home cook and a follower of Tyler's blog.

I'm Yana. I'm Tyler's daughter. I visited Chengdu for the first time this summer.

I'm Pichai Ong. I'm between pastry chef and chef. I live between New York and D.C.

I'm Lydia Chien, the daughter of Chef Elisa. I am Peter Chan, and I love that we're here at Mama Chan today.

And I'm Fuchsia Dunlop, writer of several books about Chinese food, including now The Food of Sichuan.

For pictures of the meal, click to the transcript in the show notes. For what it's worth, I didn't get to eat anything during the conversation either, and I still enjoyed hearing all the comments, so I think you will too. Special thanks, of course, to Lydia, chefs Peter and Lisa, and all the staff at Mama Chang for the fantastic meal.

Enjoy.

Conversations with Tyler Cowen is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, upcoming dates, visit conversationswithtyler.com. We are here today to commemorate the publication of a revised and extended edition of Fuchsia's The Food of Sichuan. Fuchsia's books on Chinese food are, in my opinion, actually among the very best, greatest books of the entire millennium. They are storehouses of learning about food, culture, history, education, training, everything possible. They are beautifully written. The food in them is delicious. They are fun to read. The pictures and images are amazing. So we thought we would create a special bonus episode of the podcast, Conversations with Tyler. But unlike most episodes of Conversations with Tyler, this one I mainly will be eating, not leading the discussion. So the discussion will be led by Fuchsia and also Lydia Chang. Lydia is connected to the restaurant Mama Chang, where we are eating. One of my very favorite restaurants in the entire world. I eat here at least once a week. It is fantastic. Cauliflower is my favorite dish. But for now, enough from me. I will interject a bit later. Fuchsia, Lydia will do back and forth, and the food will come, and it will be explained and clarified. And the rest of us, we will all eat and later ask questions.

Actually, I would like to tell you a little bit about Mama Qian and the concept behind it. Everybody knows that is professionally trained, and everybody kind of has this idea of Peter Chan restaurants. But when we started working on this concept, we want to focus really on the homestyle cooking. So a lot of people think Mama Chan has this real-life figure, like, who is Mama Chan? It's his way of paying the tribute to the home cooks, which a lot of the time are women chefs. So that's why, you know, we are doing the homestyle, very jia chang cai. At the city of Fairfax. A lot of people find eating here is like having a meal at friend's home or at their own household.

So it's mainly based on Sichuanese food, is it? Or inspirations from all over China?

All over China. Our hometown is actually in the Hubei province, and some of the dishes has the inspiration from Hunan as well. So Hunan, Hubei, and Sichuan.

And are your customers, are a lot of them Chinese or are most of them not Chinese?

60% Chinese.

Yeah, that's a good advertisement that it makes people excited to find out.

So, Fuchsia, maybe you could just introduce how you think about Chinese food and going out to a restaurant with a group of 10 people, as we have here. How do you approach that?

Well, um, with great appetite. And I think one of the things about Chinese food is because often you eat family style, so with a big group, it enables you to taste a good variety of dishes. And that's one of the reasons actually that I think Chinese food is very poorly represented by the international arbiters of taste, for example, the Michelin Guide, their system is based on one inspector going out on their own and sampling what a restaurant has to offer. And for most Chinese restaurants, that's very, very difficult because, you know, the way you should eat is with a group and having a good variety of dishes. So Lydia and I have been discussing the menu, and we were trying to have, you know, a selection of different flavors, different ingredients, some lighter dishes to balance the strongly flavored ones. Which is something I always look for in ordering a Chinese meal. Mm, first dish is arrived.

Cauliflower is here. Lydia and Fuchsia, if you could speak to it and also pass it around and we can all start eating.

So what we're starting today is with the dry fried cauliflower. Tyler's most favorite, your family's most favorite.

So Gan Bian.

Gan Bian. Gan Bian Hua Cai.

So yeah, Gan Bian is a particularly Sichuanese cooking method where you toss an ingredient in a dry wok without much oil, and then you add oil and seasonings later.

And make sure you have the greeneries too. Yeah, cilantro, green onion, with just a lot of seasonings, the flavors.

And cauliflower has become so trendy in China in the last few years for some reason. Every, every—

in the US as well, really.

Every Chinese restaurant, are they doing—

are they mashing it and grinding it and make it into like mashed potatoes and rice there too?

And it's like a cauliflower crust, like as dough, or just as the vegetable like this? There's one dish that appears on practically every menu, yoji huatai, which means organic cauliflower. I very much doubt that it's all organic, but it's always tossed with these spicy seasonings and sometimes served in a, in a gang wok, like a black clay pot or an iron pot.

The cooking is a little bit different. I think what they do in China is to do a stir-fry or with maybe some source of protein like a ham or bacon. But our way of doing it, it's lightly battered, deep-fried first, and then we fry in the wok again to add the seasonings.

And what's amazing now is that if you actually shop in an Asian grocery store in the US, you're going to see something that's called Chinese cauliflower, which actually has less floret and more stem. Yeah, the way Chinese like it.

Yes, it's looser, isn't it?

It is, but ironically, it's not really a Chinese cauliflower, but it just so happened that this is what we like.

Marketing, marketing.

And you know, I work in restaurants with a very heavy Asian accent, and so we embrace it fully and purchase those cauliflower. We have to drive out of our way, right, Sam, to get this cauliflower at like Good Fortune or— yeah, the Chinese supermarket.

Yeah, there's a— I always ran into that and I was like, why is it Chinese? I never heard of Chinese cauliflower, so I guess someone just marketing term using that. Yeah.

Now, Fuchsia, you and I, we did our last podcast about 3 years ago, I think almost to the day. And since then, you've been back to China plenty. How has food in Chengdu changed, and in China more generally? Because 3 years is a long time in China. A lot happens, right?

Yes.

What are the differences?

Well, I would say the craze for hot pot carries unabated. Hot pot and spicy skewers.

This is a negative to me. Am I wrong to think that? They're all— I like them, but they're all a bit the same unless you go to a very, very good one.

For me, it's a negative. I think hot pot is really fun once in a while, but it's sort of cook-your-own-dinner stuff, and it doesn't really showcase the myriad of different cooking techniques. And in a way, it's just one narrow aspect of Chinese cuisine. And I think, you know, if one looks at it cynically, The spread of hot pot is partly because it's very cheap and easy for consumers, but also it's very cheap and easy for restaurateurs because you don't need skilled chefs. You need one master broth and you need people to slice up a whole load of ingredients and then you can make a lot of money. So, and also some new ingredients. So okra and ice plant have popped up on menus everywhere. And also, I mean, this dish actually, the cauliflower dish, something that's become ubiquitous.

What we're coming up next is some Wuhan street snacks. Ròugànmiàn, the Wuhan sesame noodles, and we have sānshén dòupí, the triple-layered dòupí.

This is really exciting. So, per your request. Yeah, because I went to Wuhan in 1992 on my first trip to China, and I haven't been back since. And I remember tasting particularly the dòupí So the skin is— tell me, talk me through the dish.

It's mung bean.

So that's the dough, the bean. It's bean skin, literally.

With eggs.

And it's stuffed with fried rice, right? With little nuggets.

Sticky, sticky rice. The triple layer indicates one layer of the skin, one layer of the rice. And then also there's the minced pork, Sichuan jiguana.

And that, I mean, I really, I haven't seen that dish. Anywhere since, so in more than 20 years. And the Reogan Mian, hot dry noodles, is a very famous, probably the most famous with Doupi of Wuhan snacks, right? So, and this is, is it made with Jianchuan Mian?

Or— We make our noodles here in-house. We couldn't find the right consistency for the noodle. Again, this is not going to be as close as what we get in Wuhan, but Because of the quality we have on noodles, we're able to make them in-house.

And this is with pickled beans or fresh beans? Yeah, so this is with salted yardlong beans.

Very good, isn't it? And Lydia, what would you say characterizes the food of Wuhan? If someone has never been to Wuhan and you had to tell them on a postcard what it's about.

It's a lot of fresh river fish. We are by the Yangtze River, so a lot of really fresh produce, river fish, and also the flavor. It's, um, we don't use Sichuan peppercorn. Sichuan peppercorn is from Sichuan typically, but now I want to say the cuisine in China is so fluid and translucent. You can almost eat dumplings anywhere in the south, and you can eat Sichuan, anywhere like the further north you go, you can eat Sichuan too. So if we are really talking about the regional differences, we use a lot of local vegetable like hongshen tai tai. It's something we, well, haven't had or there's no chance to eat outside of Wuhan.

Hongshen tai tai, the winter vegetable.

Yes.

That is one of my favourite vegetables in the whole world. Red or purple rapeseeds, right? And just in the winter, and they are stir-fried and they have a hint of bitterness and they are juicy and they are just marvelously delicious. This, um, this dhokki, to an English person, is reminding me a little bit of shepherd's pie. So there's a layer of sort of sauced pork and then sticky rice instead of potato and the golden bean skin instead of like maybe you might have a layer of grated cheese and grill it on top.

Now you learned Chinese food in China, of course, much of it in Sichuan Province, Hunan Province. As Chinese teach food, how is the method of education and training different from, say, Great Britain or the United States?

Well, I haven't been to culinary school in Great Britain or the United States, so I'm not sure.

But you've been to school in these countries.

Yeah, well, I mean, I suppose that, I mean, the first thing is that when you go to cooking school, you are learning the building blocks of a cuisine, which is like the grammar of a language. So the basic components, the basic processes and flavours, which you then put together to make a multitude of dishes. So whereas I guess if you were studying French cuisine, you will learn some, you know, classic sauces, a bit of knife work, techniques of pastry making, and in China, in Sichuan, absolutely fundamental was dao gong, the knife skills.

I actually have a story to share about Dad's cutting knife. He said when he first started learning, there was, uh, in school there's only limited time, but he wants to really excel at it, so he returned back to the dorm, started cutting, using cleaver to cut newspaper to practice. Really?

Yeah.

So they're like, they would spend a lot of time outside of school to be able to cut better, and it's not, doesn't matter what you cut as long as you are cutting.

Well, I remember actually my classmates at the cooking school, they, they were all a lot of them were actually living in, and sometimes they would invite me up to the dormitories in our lunch break and they would be practicing vegetable carving and dumpling shaping and so on. But yeah, when I enrolled at the school, I was given a cleaver and my chef's whites, and that was the tools of the trade really. And so we had to— almost all the cutting, very sophisticated cutting, was done with this one knife, which is not a heavy butcher's chopper, but a very light and versatile cutting cleaver. I would love to know how you got into and fell in love with Chinese cuisine generally. Well, I was already a very enthusiastic eater and quite a serious cook from childhood, so in my teens I was reading cookbooks and cooking, particularly French patisserie. I love pastry making in my teens, and then I got into China through a job I had, went there on holiday, loved it, started learning Mandarin. It wasn't a plan, it looks like a plan in retrospect but it really, really wasn't, and ended up in the Sichuanese capital Chengdu as a British Council scholar and I was supposed to be doing academic work but ended up spending all my time in kitchens and then did some private classes at the cooking school and finally was invited to enroll as the first foreign student they'd had in a chef's training course. But it wasn't, it was, what it really was, was I had since I was a teenager been in the habit of keeping a diary and the diary always ended up being recipes and menus and descriptions of food. So that just carried on when I was in Sichuan. And I was a scholarship student at the university, so didn't have huge amounts of money to spend, but there were all these little noodle shops and street stalls and little restaurants around the university. Serving spectacular food and it was all freshly made, dazzling flavours, healthy, delicious. And so I was just curious about it. So I started not with some master plan to write books about Chinese food because of course it would have sounded insane for an English woman to want to make a career out of writing about Chinese food in the '90s, you know, insane. But it was just out of interest and I got more and more interested as time went on.

When you visited street stalls and all these small food shops, how willing were people to kind of open their kitchens to you and show you behind the curtain?

Surprisingly willing. Just to put that in context, so in the '90s, China was really just beginning to open up. And so in this Chengdu, this provincial capital city, there were only, I think, a couple of hundred foreigners. And so we were very novel and hugely interesting to local people, just as China was very interesting to us. And so I would go to a restaurant owner and say, "May I study in your kitchen?" And people were just stunned that a foreigner and a woman and a university graduate student would actually like to be mingling with chefs and getting mucky in a kitchen. And so I think people just found it rather intriguing and hilarious. So, and I always say this, I mean, all the work I've ever done is completely dependent on the generosity of people in China, and it's very much a collaboration. You know, people who have all this knowledge, but they don't have the means to communicate in English, and they have always been very supportive and generous.

So, coming up next, we have the salt and pepper lotus root sandwich. Oh. Xiao yang ou jiang. Which again is a very typical Wuhan cuisine. We generally have this over Chinese New Year or a big celebration. Something deep-fried, it's a luxury. We, a day-to-day, like households don't really do a large batch of oil and deep fry, so that's something we really consider as precious back then.

It's like sandwiches, thin slices of lotus root with minced pork, is it, in the middle?

Ah, yes.

And then coated in batter and deep-fried. Great.

I don't know how well you know American Chinese food, like what you can find in America. I assume you do know it well, and I wanted to find out how is it different from what you can find in England. Is it basically the same scene, or is it a different scene?

I think, so you have the old-school American Chinese food chopsuey, egg foo young, I would say were not as big in Britain. They were in the early days, but you don't see them anymore. But I actually had my first American Chinese chop suey last year in Los Angeles, and I went to this café in the Grand Central Market with Yu Bo, a famous Sichuanese chef, and I made him eat chop suey because I wanted to see his reaction. And, well, he was very diplomatic and said that he thought it was quite a healthy and cheap meal, a mixture of meat and vegetables and rice and so on, but definitely light years away from his own style of cooking. But so there are certain dishes that are really popular in America, in particular on the East Coast, General Tso's chicken, which doesn't really exist in England at all. So our traditional Chinese dishes were, when I was growing up, we had sweet and sour pork balls, So a nugget of pork meat dipped in a very thick batter, deep fried, and served with a bright lurid red sauce. And this is what I adored as a child. And then more recently, every Chinese restaurant really, certainly in London, but I think nationwide, has crispy duck. So it's the easy way to do a Peking duck. Peking duck is very complicated. You need to wind dry it, you need a special oven. But crispy duck, the duck is marinated and steamed and then deep-fried in pieces. So you can just order a quarter of the duck, but it's served Peking duck style with the very thin pancakes and the sweet fermented sauce and scallion cucumber.

It all sounded like a variety of fish and chips.

So it's just different, and it's, you know, different communities and different markets. And different evolution.

And now we have what, koriander fish rolls? That's a Peter Chang specialty created by him, am I wrong?

Created by him.

Tell us, is there a story?

There is a lot of stories. And for the season right now, we incorporated blue Maryland crab. Oh. So today we're taking it to a new version. You're enjoying the crab roll.

Mmm.

A cilantro crab roll. I actually have a question for Fuchsia. You know, when you see the rise of Chinese cuisine, I think now the Chinese cuisine itself doesn't have a boundary between like the way they cook it in China and the way they cook it in the US. You know, American Chinese cuisine versus the authentic Chinese cuisine. I think we are actually, for my trips, to China almost once every year, I noticed that food in China is slowly to evolve, to change as well. When I was at a Shanghainese restaurant to have this drunken shrimp, I noticed that they use Sichuan peppercorn in the marinade. So it comes to a wonderful surprise with the Shaoxing wine, the Sichuan peppercorn. There's really no fine line between Cantonese cuisine, Shanghai cuisine, or Sichuan cuisine. And where do you think the where the future modern Chinese cuisine is going. It doesn't have to be in China. I think it's a global—

Yeah. I mean, I think that a cuisine is always a living form of culture that's recreated on a daily basis. It's just not something static. And that's where you sort of trip up when you start getting hung up about notions of authenticity. And particularly in China again, and Sichuan is a good example of a place with feverish competition in the restaurant business. So many different restaurants all chasing new ideas and new concepts. So, there's a period at the moment of extraordinary mixing. So, people traveling all over the world, all over China. And as you said, you find Sichuanese dishes on everyone's restaurant menus. Even the old Cantonese restaurants in London have to have some spicy dumplings or some spicy fish because that's what customers want. And also just in Sichuan itself, like the fish dish we've just had, that you find the dúojiao yútou, the steamed fish head with chopped salted chilies, which is very Hunanese, is popular in Sichuan. There are other dishes from Zhejiang, but I don't think this is actually something entirely new. And when I was researching the new edition of the book, one thing that was really interesting was going back to a guide to Chengdu written in 1908 called the Chengdu Tonglan. And this has a list of restaurants and dishes and snacks. And you can see from that period that it was already quite cosmopolitan, and there were quite a few dishes that were clearly from the Jiangnan region. There were Western dishes like sort of certain pork chops and dishes with curry, which would have come, I think, from the— there were missionaries, foreign missionaries living in Chengdu early 20th century. So in the 20th century, there was a period when China closed in on itself. But we're now just having another period of flowering, but with increased transport links, of course, it's faster and crazier and more international. But I think you're right that the big difference with Chinese food in the West is that you no longer have a community of mainly Cantonese American Chinese people who are catering for Western tastes and who don't have access to many local ingredients. Apart from dried and, you know, preserved food, which they could import very early on. But you now have a fluid interaction between food in China and food in Chinese communities abroad. And many of the customers, as you, as you've said here, are actually Chinese and they're recent arrivals or temporary residents in the States. And they don't want to eat Americanized Chinese food. They want to eat the same food they have at home. And then also I think in California there are people growing Chinese vegetables, there's fresh produce air freighted in. So it's not just soy sauce and dried shrimp things that you can get to make Chinese food. You can get so many ingredients.

Lydia, the new dish?

Yes, we have Grandma's Sticky Rice Ball with Crab. Again, typically the filling, it varies. Traditionally with minced pork. Pork is heavily used in Central East China. But again, because of crabs, uh, it's in season right now, that's why we, you know, it's about where you are, uh, the food changes.

So is it just crab, or is it crab mixed with pork?

Uh, crab mixed with tofu.

Oh, really? Yes. Oh, interesting. And they look very pretty, all speckled with rice grains, don't they, on the outside?

Lydia's father, um, is of a generation who in China lived through the Great Famine, and Indeed, it wasn't until he went to cooking school as a young man that he was exposed to food in abundance. I mean, there were many things he had never tasted before because the farm they came from in the country, it was such deprivation. How has that experience for so many chefs of this generation informed the cooking of China?

Well, I suppose everyone of that generation had experience of acute hardship of different degrees depending on where you were living. And so one of the great joys of the reform period has been the easy availability of food, and particularly meat, because people who lived through those years told me that they used to dream and fantasize about pork because they never had it. And some people used to for example, have a small piece of fatty pork and use it to wipe around the wok for stir-frying vegetables and then keep it for the next dish because they really didn't have enough meat to eat. So I think that sometimes the excess of Chinese dining out with just tables laden with dishes, which is something the Chinese government is actually trying to curb now, there's a campaign to make people waste less food and eat what's on the table, but that's a reaction to the period of deprivation. But one thing that really amazes me is how, despite these very tough years, and not only the famine but also the Cultural Revolution, which was an assault on, you know, bourgeois and elite culture, when fancy food and elegant restaurants were attacked and forced to change their ways and become more proletarian, that it's extraordinary that the cuisine has recovered and that you can once again get exquisite and refined Chinese food. And I was talking to one elderly chef recently about the Cultural Revolution period, and I was asking him about the effect of the movement on the dishes they were allowed to cook. And he said, well, actually, that was the least of our problems. The main problem was there just wasn't enough of everything. So, given that China is a particularly food-focused culture, and it's always been so important I think, yeah, the memory of deprivation is very strong for the elder generation, but of course not for the younger generation, right? So you don't have any direct experience of this. Luckily. Yeah. What's your most popular dish with Chinese guests and with non-Chinese guests here?

Now it's all infused. We get a lot of reviews, luckily, from the Washington Post, the Washingtonian, and People are— they have the urge to try something different. They want to know more about why the food is cooked this way. Of course, they're going to get their favorite kung pao chicken, the mapo tofu, but also when you see this fish dish with piles of chopped fresh chilies, how can you resist? So, this is the dish that's very popular on the menu, the fresh chili flounder fish with vermicelli.

Mm. That's a bit like the Hunanese, duojiao yu tou.

Yeah, exactly.

In Hunan, a very popular dish is the head of the giant carp, big-head carp, split in two on a huge platter and covered in pickled chilies and steamed. And this is a more small version of that with flounder.

Well, I remember the first time I actually experienced Sichuan peppercorn was in the '90s. I have a very different background of, you know, being Chinese because my parents left China during the war in the late '30s and early '40s, and I was born in Thailand and grew up in Singapore. I don't have any, you know, Sichuanese in my blood. But it's really strange that the first time I actually encountered the taste was through Japanese cooking with Sichuan pepper. And in Japanese cuisine, you know, Sichuan pepper is actually like Chinese peppers. And because perhaps the Japanese palate likes more subtle flavor, it's always brined or soaked in water or sugar water. Is that correct? And then it's, it's a very different effect because it has a very gentle numbing effect, which is the main characteristics of Sichuan peppercorn. And so in the '90s, it was a big shock for me, and it actually took me a whole decade to kind of become accustomed to that, you know, heady, spicy sensation that lasts for a long time, actually beyond chilies.

Yes. Yeah.

But you're right. There are many different varieties of the plant.

Yes.

Yes, so the classic red Sichuan pepper, there are actually different varieties from different parts of China, and it's thought to express its terroir like wine grapes. So some boutique Sichuan pepper producers now are starting to label the exact place of origin of their pepper, and you can really taste the difference. But there's also green Sichuan pepper.

Yes.

Which has appeared on the market only since the late '90s. That was a a previously wild variety that was then licensed as a food in the late '90s and is everywhere now. And it has a very zesty, refreshing lime flavor, and it's particularly good with fish, with frog, in sort of light, vibrant, um, soupy dishes.

And this will also take over the world, in my opinion.

It will take over the world. Yeah. And Sancho is another variety, and But there are also in the countryside in China, I've stayed in farmhouses where people use wild varieties of Sichuan pepper and they add them to their green tea, for example.

How is Chinese or Sichuan farmhouse cooking different from, say, the urban styles a tourist would more likely encounter? Is it more fermentation or what else?

Well, I think city people would often say that country cooking tastes the best because you get often people growing their own vegetables.

Right. Is it otherwise different other than just freshness?

You have, I would say, less meat generally because people traditionally would rear their own pigs for meat. And fabulous cured pork, so bacon and sausages, which will be used, and salt pork used in small amounts and cooked with country vegetables and sometimes more sort of coarse vegetables like potatoes and sweet corn and so on. And also wild vegetables, so a certain amount of foraged greens, for example. And pickles, yes, traditionally everyone would have a pickle jar and they would use pickles to add umami flavors and refreshing sourness to their dishes.

I have the most naive question possible. As an economist, I'm interested in the geographic spread of innovation. And mala, I find to be one of the glories of cooking anywhere, the whole world. But why has mala not spread to more locales, either within China or elsewhere? What hinders the spread of mala? And if you look at the border condition, well, there's mala here but not there. What accounts for that? Do you have any sense of that, Fuchsia?

Well, firstly, it's just concerned with patterns of immigration. So the ma taste, the tingly taste, and that's the word in Chinese which also means pins and needles and anesthesia, the tingly taste of Sichuan pepper. So that ma flavor is very particular to Sichuan. Sichuan is an inland province. And did not send people out into the world en masse until comparatively recently.

But I cook with it. Why don't the people, say, in Wuhan or some other part of China?

I think now they do.

Now they do.

Since the reform and opening up in the '90s, there are Sichuan restaurants all over the country, and people are crazy for mala. But I think one of the reasons is that it's, it's so stimulating. So mala is a flavor that holds its own in a very crowded marketplace. And also that some more delicate cuisines, they speak more quietly and they don't attract your attention in the same way. And I think they get drowned out, like the delicate cooking of the Jiangnan region around Shanghai, which we were talking about last time, that that's more subtle, more difficult to do well, relies more on particular ingredients. Sichuanese, the mala flavor, is this flavor bomb you can apply to anything. So you're right, it travels very well. But I think your question about why it's not more pervasive is just because it's early days. It's going to be everywhere.

So it will take over the world.

It will.

Lydia's mother has a good story about Sichuan peppercorn.

So when she first encountered Sichuan peppercorn, she's like, she's very adventurous.

Where is she from in China?

Wuhan.

OK, Wuhan, yeah.

Yep.

Like Tricia said, we didn't know what the ingredient is until in the '90s. And that's when mom started to discover this new sensation. She's the first one in her family to step out of the comfort zone, be like, "Oh, this is really interesting. Let me see what I can do with it." So nowadays she even uses Sichuan peppercorn in her cookies. That's how crazy she is. The soup we're drinking right now, it's black bone chicken soup, wujitang. Typically you would see the spice that we use dàn liù to make the soup. But the version that we make it now, it's very clear. It's like how my mom likes to drink.

Is that dàn gui? You know?

Yeah.

Chinese angelica. Yes. That slightly astringent taste.

Yeah.

What is that?

It's a medicinal herb. Chinese angelica.

Dàn gui.

Yep.

There's also Chinese dates. You see the red goji berry, and then the Chinese yam.

The Chinese yam, which has a lovely consistency, a bit like potato but a bit slippery as well. But I particularly asked Lydia for this soup because, for one thing, I thought it would be nice to have a very refreshing palate-cleansing contrast to some of the spicier dishes, and also because soup is so important in Chinese meals. And almost every Chinese meal will have some sort of soup, even if it's really rudimentary. Just mi tang in the countryside, which is the leftover water used for parboiling rice, or you might just have some pumpkin boiled in water, and it's a palate cleanser. And that's one real difference, I think, between Western and Chinese cuisines, that soup is more necessary for Chinese people as part of the diet. I agree. If I'm cooking for friends at home, if they're not Chinese, I might make a soup or not, but if I'm cooking I will put a lot of effort into making a beautiful broth because they'll really appreciate it and it'll make them enjoy the whole meal more as well.

What does China do best in Western food?

Pastry.

Actually, you're right. You're quite right.

And it's actually the greatest love affair for a Chinese person. And, you know, as you were mentioning the cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitan cities with the people of expats and the locals. The idea of pastry from all over the world have really penetrated China with a very full kind of synergy.

Yeah, you've absolutely nailed it.

Combination bread, steamed, baked, and it's really taken on to a next level where, you know, in Taiwan in particular, like, bread is just infused with local ingredients like longan or local wine, tea. So I think that that's kind of the greatest, you know, marriage of technique and ideas.

And it's funny because you get in China, one thing that's quite trendy is toast. So you get toast cafes, but this is not toast as English people like it, sort of crusty toast.

Or anywhere, really.

Yeah.

And they have these very soft square loaves which are served with all kinds of different toppings, sometimes ham and cheese and ketchup. Or, yeah, sometimes the bread is mixed up with red beans. So it's a totally fusion food. And you also get pizzas that would outrage any Italian, like durian pizza, lychee pizza, strawberry and chocolate pizza. But also in Chengdu, and this is one thing, French patisserie. I had some of the best croissant that I've had anywhere in Chengdu recently. Made by a young Sichuanese pastry chef who's married to a Frenchman and lived in Paris and trained in Paris. And there are several patisseries in Chengdu, and these are not fusion creations that would horrify Italians like the pizzas. They are doing patisserie, but with Chinese ingredients, sometimes a bit less sweet because Chinese tend not to like the sweetness of, say, Americans or even French. But done with stunningly beautiful technique. Absolutely ravishing displays of patisserie. You just want to eat everything.

I agree, and I was surprised because I've been traveling to China since the '90s as well, and I see the change. And cities or towns that weren't very popular back then, like Xi'an, like, I managed to find really top-notch croissant.

Yes, and it's the thing that's really remarkable about that is the speed, because it's happened in 5 years, 10 years, not more than that. It's just like lightning. Suddenly they've cracked patisserie in the way that the Japanese have. And one thing also that's really, really shocking to me is, for a great tea-drinking nation, is the popularity of coffee. So not only Starbucks, which has spread like a rash over the whole country and now has a local imitator called Luckin Coffee, which emerged from nowhere and bim. But also there are so many little cafes doing freshly ground coffee beans. And I went to a little town near Leshan, where the giant Buddha is, in pursuit of a particular fermented tofu, which I adore. And I was dying for an espresso, and I thought, "No hope in this little county town." But I found a little café, and I had a superb espresso made with freshly ground beans. Absolutely amazing. But the only thing was they served it with a little dish of mala pickled radish, which is a really unpleasant flavor combination in my opinion. Where would you go in China if you were somebody restricted meat?

And I'm also curious from a home cooking perspective how you make a good meal without meat.

Yeah, well, if you want to make a good meal without meat, then Chinese cuisine offers plenty of fabulous solutions because the Chinese are brilliant at using fermented foods like soy sauce, black beans, Sichuan chili bean paste, and fermented tofu, all of which have almost meaty or cheesy or creamy umami flavors to cook with vegetables. So you can make the kind of dishes that are actually very appealing and satisfying to meat eaters as well as vegetarians because of these very bold and satisfying flavors and mouthfeels. But vegetarians in China do have a bit of a problem. And that is because the Chinese approach to vegetarian eating is very different from the Western approach. So in China, people often make a distinction between Chinese sushu, vegetarian eating, vegetarian food, and sushuju yi, vegetarianism. So Chinese people are— many Chinese people believe in Buddhism and will have vegetarian food when they go to visit a temple or on certain on holy days, but they don't abstain from meat all the time. And I've even met an elderly monk who was a lifelong vegetarian who said that when he was sick or weak, he would eat a little meat to boost his strength. So vegetarians traveling around China have this problem that sometimes they ask for vegetarian food and it has little bits of meat in it, or it's cooked with lard or stock or dried shrimps. So it's quite hard. You have to really insist to restaurants that I am a total vegetarian. I don't— you have to list the things you don't want to explain. And the only place that traditionally you would get pure vegetarian and even vegan food is in Buddhist monasteries and sometimes Taoist monasteries, which have— the larger ones have their own restaurants which cater for pilgrims and patrons and do extraordinary vegetarian cuisine. So partly it's simple vegetarian cooking and partly it's fānghún cài, imitation meat dishes. You know, Impossible Burger, they got there centuries before you. And so you can go in Sichuan to a monastery and you can feast on spare ribs and shark's fin and sausages and gong bao chicken, and they're all totally vegetarian. So one change in the last few years is that there are a small number of Chinese people, maybe cosmopolitan intellectual types in cities, who are becoming vegetarians in that Western way. It is actually often connected with Buddhism, but they are abstaining totally from meat, and not only from meat, but also from the wu hun, the pungent aromatics like garlic and all kinds of oniony vegetables, which is also part of the Buddhist diet.

Lydia, the next dish, if you could please.

Yes. So what we have here, it's a Jinzhou-style fish cake with the yellow eggy skin with Grandmother's fish ball. So again, this is, you know, the dish that's beloved by our Westerner and Chinese clients.

That's so pretty.

Yeah. Everything in here is made in-house. You know, that's years of culinary experience. Yeah.

And that's very sort of classical presentation.

Precisely.

With all these carefully cut rectangles of egg skin, and you don't actually often see that now, even in China.

Right.

And this fish ball dish, this reminds me of a lot of New Year dishes in many regions of China, which are quite laborious to make because separately you've made a fish cake and fish balls and then cut them up and reheated them in a big festive pot. So people people would often do that sort of thing for the Chinese New Year.

So is laoganma spicy chili crisp?

Oh, laoganma. Yes, yes, yes. So that's delicious.

Is that, is that a here thing or there?

It's everywhere.

Oh, it's very trendy, and it's from Guizhou Province, another spice-eating province in southwest China. And it was invented by a woman, laoganma, and it's now mass production and It has been popular in China for a long time, and now Westerners are getting addicted to it. It's quite funny, when you take a flight on Sichuan Airlines, they have pretty good food and Sichuanese dishes, maybe with rice. And the steward will go around with a jar of laoganma sauce and offer to put a spoonful on your food. What airline is that? Sichuan Airlines.

Lydia, the next dish, if you could please.

Yes, the red pepper chicken with sesame. Again, that's our version of the Chongqing chicken. We want to make something a little lighter, not so heavily battered, and the sesame flavor just creates a balance of the red peppers.

I have a question.

What are some of the kind of most interesting economic historic determinants of food? So for example, in Italy, in the north of Italy, it was typically a wealthier region, so the pasta dishes come from a lot of 00 flour, whereas in the south, semolina is more popular, and that's really shaped the food scene. What are some of your favorite stories from China of kind of the ways in which those economic realities or just technological realities have shaped the direction of food development?

Well, I suppose the first thing is that patterns of trade historically— and one thing that I always find very fascinating is that many Chinese ingredients bear the names of the era and the place from which they were imported. So for example, pepper in Chinese is called hu jiao, barbarian pepper, because it was an imported pepper from the northwest where the Hu barbarians lived from the Han dynasty onwards into China. Jiao pepper was the original Sichuan pepper. So lots of imports from that. You can tell from their names that they came from that, from the northwest in that period. More recently, and there are other ones like the ingredients that came from the sea during the Ming Dynasty and the early Qing bear the name fan, which is another word for barbarian. So the tomato is called fanjie, which means a barbarian eggplant. And one of the early names for chili was fan jiao, barbarian pepper. In Sichuan, they still call it hai jiao, sea pepper. And in terms of connection with economics, it's very conspicuous that the great Chinese cuisines have just always followed the money. So you had a flourishing restaurant scene in Kaifeng, the city now known as Kaifeng, which was a Northern Song Dynasty capital. Capital from about the 10th century, and there were restaurants including Sichuanese restaurants at that time in Kaifeng. And when the Song Dynasty was overrun by nomadic barbarians in about, I think, the 13th century, the capital fled south to Hangzhou, and then you had the court and so on in Hangzhou, and that became a flourishing cultural center, and that's where you also had an extraordinary cuisine, food writing, poetry about food, restaurants. And the Jiangnan region, that sort of Hangzhou and Yangzhou, all these cities were the crux of trade patterns, the salt trade, where it all went through Yangzhou. There were lots of rich salt merchants, and they were the people who were having lavish dinner parties, entertaining the Qianlong Emperor on his southern tours. And many of the grand old dishes come from there. Then later, you have Shanghai and Ningbo and these areas becoming rich treaty ports and having a different sort of cuisine. In Shanghai, an early fusion cuisine with— there are Western restaurants in Shanghai dating back to about 1900 doing a Shanghainese version of Western food. And then during the Cultural Revolution and and so on, the sort of the place where you had all the Chinese money and the elite, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and those places became the sort of custodians of traditional gastronomy.

So for those who've been anticipating for the spice, the Mama Qian homestyle is not very too focused on just the heat, the spicy, but actually a lot of balanced flavors. So, so far we didn't really have something that's too intense. However, this one, it's— we call it Guo Jiang Niu, Yangtze River Beef, because of where we are from in Wuhan City. We are by the Yangtze River. So the main spice we're using here is actually pickled chili with some bird's eye chili and pickle juice.

And those are the really deadly little green— yeah, xiaojiao. They're called wild mountain chilies. So you look at that and it's a delicate jade green. It doesn't look really red and spicy, but they're the hottest sort of pickled chilies. And also the bird's eye little rice chilies in Chinese.

I think I have that version with fish, with flounder. Yeah, I remember having that. I was really surprised how Sichuan used the pickled chili. Yeah. That was my first time here, actually here. And I was just, can't stop eating it.

That's kind of our way of incorporating what we can find here in the United States. So we use a lot of Thai chili with the pickle juice.

Now you're a famous Laotian cook. When you encounter Sichuan food and also from Wuhan, I mean, what connections strike you or what differences? You must see this all through a different lens.

Yeah, I remember having encountered Sichuan I've seen it actually through Peter Chang because I remember when I first moved here, I actually went to my friend's house who was from Northern Laos and she was making this chili paste. It's a dry chili paste with Northern Lao peppercorn. It's very similar to Sichuan peppercorn, but it's milder, flore. And I encountered it the first time, I took the first bite, I was like, what is How come I never experienced this in my life before? And it's from Laos. So I actually did a lot of research and I found Peter Chang actually was thinking about driving all the way to Williamsburg to try that, but I, I didn't make it out there until Peter Chang was opening here. So I've ever since then, I just start to experiment with more Sichuan peppercorn infused with Laotian cuisine. So I actually made dish recently with steamed chicken. With the steamed chicken, the Sichuan peppercorn is like a chili paste with a little bit of oil because I pretty much do a lot of research on Sichuan cuisine as well. So, we don't use oil when we make chili paste. So, I start to infuse that with oil and use that on the chicken.

In Laotian food, do you— because I don't really know about Laotian food, but do you have that sweet, sour, spicy, salty thing going on?

Oh, no, mostly savory and sour, spicy, and a little bit complex. I would say complex because of the— a lot of different herbs that we use.

And some funky.

Definitely funky. I forgot that one. Definitely funky. We use a lot of fish paste.

So, is this very different from your other restaurants?

Yes.

Explain that a bit.

Well, first of all, we wanted to do more homestyle cooking. And the upbringing, my family has spent most time in Wuhan besides our time in the US right now. So like, for example, the fish cake, it's originated from one of the guzheng jingzhou. So it's a very typical fish cake in that region. I typically don't really see this kind of fish cake like outside of Hubei Province. So again, you know, this is something takes a lot of skill, and people outside of the region would have a different variety of fish cake. But the way to make it an eggy skin, again, that's something very typical in Hubei. So our main focus here is really to launch what we like to eat at home. For example, the veggie dish, that's vegetarian. If you It's for vegetarian to eat eggs. A farmer's stir-fry. It's a stir-fry of some green peppers, Chinese celery, tofu skin, and eggs. And this is something my grandma can easily make out of the ingredients she can get from her garden. Sometimes it's tofu skin, sometimes it's just homemade tofu.

I think it's so interesting because certainly when I started writing about Chinese food, I was reviewing Chinese restaurants in London for Time Out magazine. And a lot of the Chinese restaurants at that period, they had the English language menu intended for English speakers, and they would have secret Chinese menus with all the really good and interesting dishes that the Chinese people wanted to eat. I mean, not strictly segregated, but a lot of the funkier dishes or the more unusual ones.

That you don't find translation to.

Yes. And I think that a lot of Westerners used to go to Chinese restaurants with a very fixed idea about what Chinese food was, and they would want those classic familiar dishes. And that's totally changed. So now you can put anything on a Chinese menu, and the foodie people, the more adventurous people, are keen to try new dishes, right? So you don't have to cater for different audiences anymore?

No, we don't. And sometimes we do find our non-Chinese customers are more open to having— trying new things, because the Chinese normally come having this same menu over and over. Uh, pretty funny.

Yeah, I have a writing question because I, I write cookbooks for other chefs, and, um, you've updated this cookbook, and I like to explain to people that there's fashion in cooking just like there's fashion in anything else, and they change and they, and they grow and they reference the past, but also in writing styles too there's a fashion. How has the writing world and the writing style changed now compared to when you set out to write this?

Well, I think there's a huge appetite for detailed cultural information about food. And when I sent a proposal for my first Sichuan cookbook in the late '90s, it was rejected by all 6 publishers, and they all said that, well, British readers would not be interested in a regional Chinese cookbook because it was too niche and too narrow. And I think, you know, you can see how ridiculous that statement sounds now, because I think there's a real hunger for specific and specialized cookbooks. So that's completely changed. So it's not an outlying thing to want to do a very local and regional cookbook. And I think there's been an explosion in food writing as a genre. I mean, not just in books, but on the internet and all kinds of new indie food magazines and an appetite for more stories about food. So that's just become very mainstream. But I would say that the main difference perhaps— well, one is that the greater availability of ingredients and the hunger for authentic information. But also just in design and people wanting lots of photographs and visual information as well.

And has the way you've written the recipe—

written—

the way you approach writing recipes now, has that changed over the years?

No, I don't think so. I mean, I'm more experienced, so I think it's a bit more streamlined, but I would say that it's possible to push the boat out a bit further in terms of more adventurous dishes and ingredients. Because I always want to have the majority of dishes in a cookbook doable for someone without— But not all of them.

So every now and then you sit back and you cackle, "I'm gonna put one in that none of them can make." Yeah, yeah.

Being ahead of the curve.

And which recipe would that be in your new book?

Well, there's a very popular, very fiery Chongqing dish called mao xue wang, which is spicy blood stew, and it's made with pig's blood. Pig's blood and offal, and it can actually be made with duck's blood if you have it, but that's something that is not available in every Chinese shop, and you have to be more adventurous to make. Yes.

So I think you can see the difference in the cauliflower more, even more so in this steamed stir-fry version, that is a little bit different with more stem.

Yeah, so my addition with that beautiful purple Chinese eggplant We call it Garden Jewel, again from grandmother's garden.

Two vegetables.

You want to know what creates the consistency? Yes. Oil.

Sorry to tell you, but globally eggplant always a lot of oil.

From eggplant parmesan to Chinese cooking, it's pretty much soaked up in that.

That creates the meaty texture, you know, It's very tender. It's like eating pork belly.

So, recently I just came back from Shanghai and I went to a restaurant that you had written about, Yu Ji Lan. So, how did you come about meeting Chef Lan?

Well, so I've known him for 15 or 20 years and he's actually one of the chefs that I brought to the CIA, Culinary Institute of America, in I think 2000— 2004, and I came with him and two other leading Sichuanese chefs to do a demonstration there. So he's always been an extremely creative and talented chef, like one of the most outstanding chefs of his generation. So I followed his career with interest, and when I first met him, he had a restaurant serving more farmhouse food called Xiang Chu Zi, the Village Chef, and this was all the hearty, spicy Jia Changshai homestyle flavors, really. But he had this dream to open a very fine restaurant doing his own style of high-level cuisine. So Yudilan, I can't remember which year it opened, but there— so that's what he's trying to do, is to recreate the ambiance of an old Mandarin's house. You know, a lot of the finest food in China was in the private dining rooms of Chinese officials who would have private chefs. So, I think there's a maximum of about 18 seats in that restaurant. It's tiny and it's run by Chef Lan and his wife and his sister-in-law and a few other staff. And it's typical of Sichuanese banquet cuisine in that you have some of the spicy flavors of folk cooking. But you also have very delicate flavors based on exquisite stocks made from chicken and ham and fish, depending on the dish. And so I think you can also see that he has some very traditional dishes, like you might get some mala niurou, numbing and hot beef as a starter, or a spicy rabbit dish, very traditional. But then he becomes extremely inventive. He also designs all his own tableware. Which are handmade in Jingdezhen, the porcelain capital. So it's quite an experience and very different from the kind of restaurants, Tyler, that you write about. Yeah, sort of holes in the wall, the popular places.

It was high-end, but I was most impressed when I had a little tour of the kitchen and there was only one wok, like a portable wok. And you know, this is— if I'm okay Chinese cook, and I always tell people like my weakness especially Lydia's dad, that I can't wok. If you want me to cook with you, you're doing everything on the wok. I'm just going to fry and do the salads, do the steaming, the dim sum. I can do any of that but not the wok. And so when I saw the kitchen of Yuji Lan, I was very impressed because I always have been like thinking about, is it possible to do a Chinese restaurant that's not wok-focused? And if you see the wok here, I mean, he's got what, 10, 12?

Around.

Yeah. I wouldn't be able to handle a kitchen like that, but I think that this new no-wok or less-wok Chinese restaurant, you know, I never figured out how they do that. Like in New York, there's a very popular one called Hao Noodles by Madame Zhu.

Oh yes, beautiful place.

And you know, this is all over China, and there's no wok. It's very interesting.

Really?

Yes. So I think I think you can't tell from the menu, but you definitely have, you know, can go through, you know, quite an exquisite meal without realizing that, you know, nothing comes from the wok.

I mean, I would say that when people think about Chinese cuisine, they often think about stir-frying as the Chinese method par excellence, but it's one of many different cooking methods. And certainly steaming has been done in China since the Neolithic age, and you can say that is the classic Chinese cooking method, really. But often a good meal will have steamed dishes and boiled dishes as well as stir-fries. And also, particularly in Sichuan, wonderful cold dishes. So cold dressed meats, cooked salads. So yes, it's not all about wok cookery.

Given your background in Singapore, how do you assess Chinese food in Singapore? What's it good at? What's it not good at?

In the last century, if you speak to a lot of Chinese who migrated to, let's say, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore. The crème de la crème went to Singapore, and they mostly went before the war broke out, during famine times of the rest of China. And I find Singapore Chinese food at the core to be Cantonese-based, I would say, for the longest time. And over time, it's been infused with Malaysian influence, some Western, some Thai, and Indian. And so you find a lot of spices. You find a lot of fermented flavors, curries, and you know, cinnamon, a heavier use of cinnamon, clove, star anise, which are not— it's used in Cantonese cooking but not quite bold. And grew up with a lot of that. And it's different, it's in its own category altogether, would you say?

Yeah.

What I found, I can't get very good Sichuan food in Singapore, or at least I don't know how to find it. That southern Chinese, Hokkien Fujian, it's weird, but it's pretty good. Singaporean food is amazing, Malay food is amazing, but a lot of the harder-core Chinese regions, somehow Singapore has too many other good things. For Singaporeans to be interested in them. Or do you have a different impression?

Well, to clarify a little bit more, there's restaurant Chinese food and there's home Chinese food. The home Chinese food might even be more simple, probably a lot of Hokkien or Teochew kind of flavours, which has a lot of soups and clear broths and almost like no stir-fry and very little oil used in the cooking. And lean meats, lean cuts of meat. And restaurant tends to be spicier. But I would say that Sichuan is, for some strange reason, for me in Asia, it has taken a slower growth, especially in Thailand, where you almost never see Sichuan restaurant. It's ironic because you mentioned the complexity of the flavor profile, and I agree with you, but in Thailand, for some reason, you just don't find a whole lot of Sichuan restaurants. And the same thing in Singapore. I would say that you probably find more in Hong Kong and the rest of China, which is a huge—

I think it is the story of immigrants. Yes. You know, the immigrants in Thailand, a lot of them were Chaozhou or Teochew people. And, you know, Cantonese immigrants in Southeast Asia, Hakka and Fujian. And that's a completely different flavour profile. And then in Thailand, they have their own spicy food, so maybe they don't need Sichuanese in the same way.

There's something also about the mentality too, of culture, because I think spices for a lot of Southeast Asians are seen as almost like not as high so as Cantonese, because you do have to consume with some kind of starch or rice. And a lot of Singaporean Chinese or Thai Chinese, they prefer to eat more things like that, or the vegetable for sure, where you don't need rice and it becomes more of a lighter meal and something that maybe, you know, on a society level is considered more of the way to eat.

And this one, this is tofu gaab. Yeah, pressed tofu. Larou.

Really? Larou chou xiang gan.

Oh, this is lovely.

What's the significance of that?

So we use cured pork belly with smoking house, with some leeks, smoked tofu. And again, the last— when we see the greens, we know this is the last dish of the meal. Snow pea tips, simple stir-fry.

And this is real, this is like also in Hunan farmhouse cooking. So a little bit of cured pork. With tofu, also with that smoky flavor and the Chinese garlic or leek. Delicious.

That's something else about Chinese food. It needs to be consumed at the hottest point, temperature-wise. So going back to the Yu Zi Lan story, yes, a lot of— there are like cold dishes, there are courses it's okay to have at room temperature. But generally, Chinese food is not the best for tasting menu. It's because everything needs to be consumed super, super hot. I haven't really— have you seen anything that really worked out in terms of Chinese tasting menu? Or for Sichuan?

Oh, well, I mean, I think that the food at Yu Jilan and also Yu Bo's restaurant are fantastic. But as you said, there's actually less of an emphasis on stir-fries, so you don't get a big piping hot stir-fry dish and more soupy dishes and braises and so on. So, yeah, but I think, I think one of the reasons that some Chinese chefs are now going for tasting menus is partly with an eye to international recognition, actually, and wanting each dish to be presented beautifully and not on a shared dish that gets messed up as it's passed around the table.

Are we, uh, is it sort of similar to like the Michelin Guide, but coming into China and maybe a lot of those restaurants, it follows the format basically, I think.

Yeah, and I think that's unfortunate.

It is.

That Michelin, as I mentioned before, is not very well equipped to judge Chinese food. And the first Chinese restaurant to win 3 Michelin stars was one in a fancy hotel in Hong Kong that did a tasting menu of courses which one person could enjoy. But I think chefs in China, as they become more internationally minded, they do feel a bit hard done by. You know, they have this great cuisine and why is it not recognized? Why is it not put on a par with Japanese, for example, that people are willing to spend money on? And so some chefs are definitely— I wouldn't say at all changing the cooking technique or style, but just a bit the presentation, and aiming at that market of elite international cooking.

Well, I appreciate that kind of restaurant too, because I do travel to— often travel by myself, and I can actually go to Yu Ji Lan and eat at the bar by myself. And enjoy like a myriad of dishes with so much technique, um, solo, and not have to eat 10 sea cucumbers at one time, but rather just one perfect one.

Yeah, so you could be a Michelin inspector.

I may be.

I'm kidding.

You talked about how you think about preparing food if you're having people over for a Chinese meal. Can you just walk us through kind of if you were creating the balanced meal, what are the pieces that you want to hit? You mentioned soup already.

Well, the first thing is that if I'm cooking at home, I don't want to be like a banshee over the stove for the whole evening, so I would not choose a menu that's all last-minute stir-fried dishes. Particularly important cooking at home. So I would always do a spread of cold dishes, and how many depends on my energy levels and how many people, but maybe at least 3 or 4 cold dishes, and they're easy to prepare in advance and really delicious, and people can start eating them while you prepare the other dishes. I would also do a slow-cooked stew, like some bread-braised pork or beef, really delicious. And then some— I normally do mapo tofu just because it's one of the greatest dishes in the world and everyone loves it, and it's very easy to make, and that's a strong dish, so I would also always have a lightly stir-fried vegetable. And then another dish that I often do is a steamed fish Cantonese style, and it's so easy to make, and I almost feel embarrassed that it wins so much praise. There's something about that method, a really fresh fish, and you just marinate it in a bit of Shaoxing wine, ginger, and scallion, steam it, strew over some slivered ginger and scallion, sizzle over some hot oil, and then baste it in a little soy sauce and that's it. And it's so easy and it's sublime. And that's a nice contrast to the hotter Sichuanese dishes. So, yeah, and I would try and get a balance between dry dishes and soupy ones. So you have different mouth feels, different shapes. So if the meat is in big thick cubes, I might have a stir-fry that's slivered. So it's not very scientific, but it's impressionistic. And I just try and think about how will these things will taste in sequence and in relation to one another and how they will look on the table. And then in China, you don't normally have a separate dessert course, you normally have fruit. So either cut fruit, I try and get some Chinese fruit seasonal, maybe tangerines in winter, maybe dragon's eyes or lychees in another season. And then because my guests may be Western and need a sugar hit, then I sometimes buy in some little little baklavas or chocolates to serve with the fruit and some nice Chinese tea.

Or sometimes it's a rice cake. For example, we're going to have in a minute, it's mi liang gao, wei po mi liang gao. It's fermented rice cake, which is this white, a little translucent.

And how do you think more generally about serving Chinese final course, or I may call it dessert, in America, where Americans expect big heapings of pie and sweetness and sugar. How do you approach that? What do you pick? What do you recommend?

We actually do have a sesame flourless chocolate cake on the menu, uh, right now being made by PJ, uh, and also matcha cream cheese, uh, soufflé cheesecake. Those are things that's not So after a big meal like this today, there's just hardly any room left for it. Yes, you always have a separate stomach for dessert, but—

Yeah, I'm very much in favor if you want to have a sweet hit. It doesn't have to be Chinese, right? If you want to have sweet, have a chocolate cake. That's right.

For a long time, the— fine dining Chinese restaurants in the US, you just get a chocolate mousse cake or— or a croissant. Or crème brûlée. Yeah. But with my Shanghainese mother and heritage, I do have a very, very, very sweet palate. Like, you know, I grew up eating chocolates for breakfast.

What other cuisines do you really like to cook? Do you have a secondary? Like, this is your major, what's your minor?

Basically other Chinese cuisines. I mainly cook Chinese food. All the time?

Even at home?

Yeah, that's what I instinctively do, and when— that's my comfort food now, and that's the easy thing to rustle up. So I do do a bit of Italian. I really love Marcella Hazan's books. And yeah, and a bit of Turkish. I spent some time in Turkey when I was much younger. But the thing is, when I have guests, they want me to cook Chinese food. And then that's what I like eating as well, so.

I certainly hope they don't want you to make Yorkshire pudding.

No, and I don't—

and bangers.

I don't know how to make Yorkshire pudding.

How do you experience the oppression of being famous at cooking? What's the major disadvantage of that? Is it that you always feel obliged to be pleasing other people if there's a meal, or can you just set that out of your mind and make other people cook?

When I published my first book, suddenly my friends started saying, We're scared to cook for you. And that's a shame because it's lovely being cooked for and you don't have to be a professional cook. But the funny thing was that after my first book was published, I had a total cooking paralysis at home for ages. I was too scared to cook for people because I thought everyone was going to be thinking, "Oh, she's a professional cookbook writer. It's got to be really good and I would only disappoint them." And now I don't care anymore. But the great advantage about writing about food, particularly Chinese food, is that I do get invited out for the most wonderful meals in China, and I feel so privileged for that.

On that note, why don't we end the podcast formally? I'd just like to thank Fuchsia and again recommend heartily her new book, The Food of Sichuan. What I find most remarkable in her books, as someone who writes books and reviews many books, most books there are just pages, pages where the author is coasting. Like, what's there might be fine, it might be true, but there's parts that are really good and then parts like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And in Fuchsia's books, there is no page, there's no paragraph, there's no word that's coasting. Like, it's all as great as the best parts. And to me, that's a phenomenal achievement just in terms of the production function of Fuchsia Dunlop. Whether or not Chinese food is your thing, they're just marvels of books to read to understand books. And to thank Lydia and her family and all of the people in the kitchen, all of those serving us. Lydia, this was a remarkable meal. I'll repeat again. Mama Chang is one of my favorite restaurants on planet Earth. I come here many, many times. I'll, of course, see you and all the others again. And this was just phenomenal. And to all of our distinguished guests, thank you for coming, your remarks, and so on. And let's just have a round of applause for Fuchsia and Lydia. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app. And if you like this podcast, please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review. This helps other people find the show.