Quotes from Fuchsia Dunlop

Learning another cuisine is like learning a language. In the beginning, you know nothing about its most basic rules of grammar. You experience it as a flood of words, or dishes, without system or structure.

What we eat is an essential part of who we are and how we define ourselves.

In England we agonised over the demolition of every old shack; in Sichuan, they just went ahead and flattened whole cities! You had to admire the brazen confidence of it, the conviction that the future would be better than the past.

Think, for a moment, of the words we use to describe some of the textures most adored by Chinese gourmets: gristly, slithery, slimy, squelchy, crunchy, gloopy. For Westerners they evoke disturbing thoughts of bodily emissions, used handkerchiefs, abattoirs, squashed amphibians, wet feet in wellington boots, or the flinching shock of fingering a slug when you are picking lettuce

it takes several years of quite dedicated Chinese eating, in my experience, to begin to appreciate texture for itself. And that is what you must do if you wish to become a Chinese gourmet, because many of the grandest Chinese delicacies, not to mention many of the most exquisite pleasures of everyday Chinese eating, are essentially about texture.

There were no ready-made sauces, except for the slowly fermented chilli bean paste; we mixed them ourselves from the essential seasonings: sugar, vinegar, soy sauce and sesame paste in various combinations.

The Gentleman Gourmet is dressed in a three-piece suit, he carries a walking cane, and a rapier wit. He speaks in the rah-rah tones of a colonial Englishman, although he is Chinese-born. And he is so early-twentiethcentury elegant that I almost expect to see spats if I cast my eyes to his feet.

Six days a week at the cooking school were not enough for me. In my free time I sought out restaurants and snack shops I hadn't visited before, and begged them to let me study in their kitchens.

Are you afraid of chilli heat?' (Ni pa bu pa la?) is the customary warning for travellers on their way to Sichuan.

The cleaver is not just for cutting. Invert it and its blunt spine can be used to pound meat to a paste for meatballs: a time-consuming method, but the purée it produces is perfectly smooth and voluptuous. The nub of the handle can stand in for a pestle, to crush a few peppercorns in a pot. The flat of the blade, slammed down on the board, can be used to smash unpeeled ginger, so that its juices permeate a soup or marinade.

a passionate appreciation of food was respectable, even desirable, in the traditional scholar-gentleman.

university textbooks I'd encountered in my few weeks of class were deathly dull and totally impractical. Instead of introducing us to useful words like 'stir-fry' and 'braise', 'bamboo shoot' and 'quail', they had required us to learn by rote long lists of largely irrelevant Chinese characters:

it was my last night in northern Fujian and I felt I had to eat snake.

Sichuanese dialect is like Mandarin put through a mangle. So the Mandarin 'sh' becomes 's', vowels are stretched out like warm toffee, there are pirate-like rolling 'r' sounds at the end of sentences, and no one can tell the difference between 'n' and 'l' or 'f' and 'h' (the province of Hunan, for example, is known in Sichuan, helpfully, as 'Fulan').