Writer shares Chinese dining experiences
By HOLLY RAMER, Associated Press WriterWednesday, July 30, 2008Duck tongues. Pig's kidneys. Rabbit ears. Cocktails made from the blood and bile of a freshly killed snake.
Fuchsia Dunlop has eaten them all, and in her new book, manages to transform the gross into the engrossing.
Dunlop, a London-based food writer and cookbook author who has spent more than a decade researching Chinese culinary culture, arrived in Chengdu in the early 1990s to study China's ethnic minorities but quickly abandoned her studies to focus on food. She later became the first Westerner to train at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine.
In "Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper," she recounts her journey from politely munching her way through goose intestines and grappling with chicken feet to truly enjoying and appreciating the food of China's Sichuan province.
Texture, she writes, is the last frontier. Foods Westerners find revoltingly gristly, slithery, slimy, squelchy and gloopy are prized in China for their kou gan, or "mouthfeel."
But toward the end of her book, she finds herself struggling with a moral loss of appetite, torn between her omnivorousness and what she describes as a growing minefield of ethical, environmental and health issues.
She worries about the endangered species she has consumed, meat and poultry pumped full of hormones and fish from polluted waters.
"Now I've eaten my fill; I just want to go home. I don't want to spend my life consuming rabbit heads and sea cucumbers," she writes. "I want to grow vegetables in my own garden, to cook shortbread and steak-and-kidney pie."
BOOK: Fuchsia Dunlop's "Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A sweet-sour memoir of eating in China" (W.W. Norton & Company, 2008)
