Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food

by Fuchsia Dunlop

Chinese food is an inescapable cultural presence all over the world, from New York to Baghdad, Stockholm to Nairobi, Perth to Lima. Virtually every nation has its own ‘classic’ Chinese food, from my beloved sweet-and-sour pork balls to India’s chicken Manchurian, Sri Lanka’s hot butter cuttlefish and Sweden’s ‘four little dishes’. As a brand, ‘Chinese food’ has global recognition. Yet, from another perspective, Chinese food has also been the victim of its own success. The resounding popularity of a simplified, adapted, even bastardized form of Cantonese cuisine, first developed in North America and then scattered like confetti all over the world, with its childish predictability and limited range, its bright colours, sweet-sour and salty flavours, deep-fried snacks and stir-fried noodles, has clouded appreciation of the diversity and sophistication of Chinese gastronomic culture. Chinese food may be popular, but it’s still widely seen abroad as cheap, low-status and junky. While western consumers are willing to pay exorbitant sums for sushi or European tasting menus, Chinese restaurateurs still struggle to persuade customers that fine Chinese food is worth its price.

Typically marooned in British towns, far from their compatriots, the new Chinese restaurateurs were catering for locals more accustomed to eating fish and chips. Their food needed to be accessible, cheap and only mildly exotic, which is probably why most of them ended up adopting the formula tried and tested in California a century earlier, which bore little resemblance to their native cuisine. In America as in Britain, almost all the early Chinese cooks came from a single region: the Cantonese south. Moreover, just as the majority of Chinese cooks in Britain were farmers with little training in the culinary arts, the foot soldiers of American Chinese immigration were mostly not the accomplished chefs or discerning customers of the eating houses along the Pearl River in the Cantonese capital Guangzhou, a city known for its fine food, but people from a few rural counties who had been driven into exile by the pressures of overpopulation and poverty. Their knowledge of Cantonese cooking alone was limited, and they would have had little, if any, acquaintance with other regional cuisines. In both Britain and America, the new Chinese cuisine developed mostly as a tool for economic survival, not, like the restaurant at the International Health Exhibition of 1884, as a showcase for the glories of Chinese culinary culture.

Despite the world’s enduring love affair with Chinese food, such crass racial prejudice has never entirely died out. I’ve lost count of the number of people whose opening question to me, as a Chinese food specialist, has been, with an amused grin: ‘What’s the most disgusting thing you’ve ever eaten?’ Certain assumptions, explicit or implied, have become engrained: that ‘eating everything’ means a nation is slovenly, perverse or desperate; that preferring tofu to steaks is effeminate; that cooking in oil means that food is oily; that using MSG means you are a cheapskate; that food is cut into small pieces to make ingredients unrecognizable and cheat people; that Chinese is a poverty cuisine and that Chinese food should not be expensive. These are just some of the filters through which ‘Chinese food’ has been perceived in the west.

The primacy of fan in a Chinese meal makes social eating extremely flexible: as long as there is plenty of rice in the pot, if another guest suddenly appears you can just add an extra pair of chopsticks and the dishes can stretch a little further. Chinese children are warned by their parents and grandparents that any grains of rice left in their bowl may reappear in the form of pockmarks on the face of their future spouse, as a kind of punishment. For centuries, they have been reminded to respect their rice by a poem by Li Shen, written during the Tang Dynasty: The farmer hoes his rice plants in the noonday sun His sweat dripping into the earth Who among us knows that every grain of rice in our bowls Is filled with the bitterness of his labour.

Most of the ‘evidence’ for the unhealthiness of Chinese food is based on misconceptions, such as the idea that Anglo-American takeaway food bears any relation to what most Chinese people actually eat. Westerners choose fried rice over plain rice, chow mein over soupy noodles, and deep-fried over steamed foods – and then assume that Chinese food is greasy. They spoon oily food into their ricebowls rather than picking up pieces of food with their chopsticks and leaving the oil in the serving dish – thus consuming more oil than was ever intended. (One Chinese chef I know was appalled to see an American chef stirring sticks of butter into his mashed potatoes – ‘they call our food greasy, but the fat in their own food, while less visible, is all going to be eaten!’ she said.) Westerners guzzle boldly seasoned dishes while neglecting the neutral fan, and then brand Chinese food as ‘salty’. All too often, when westerners consider Chinese food to be unhealthy, it’s because of the way they are eating it: ‘unhealthy’ is their own reflection in the mirror; it’s not a reflection of Chinese food at all.

I have to confess that decades of privileged eating in China have turned me into a terrible Chinese food snob. Increasingly, I don’t believe any other cuisine can compare. This is not primarily because of the diversity of Chinese food, its sophisticated techniques, its adventurousness or its sheer deliciousness – although any of these would be powerful arguments. The reason, fundamentally, is this: I cannot think of another cuisine in which discernment, technique, variety and sheer dedication to pleasure are so inseparably knit with the principles of health and balance. Good food, in China, is never just about the immediate physical and intellectual pleasure: it is also about how it makes you feel during dinner, after dinner, the following day and for the rest of your life.

The great clan of Brassicaceae are prized not just for their leaves but also for their stalks and chunky stems, all of which can be eaten fresh, dried or pickled. Fat, knobbly mustard tubers are wind-dried, spiced and salted to make the fabulous zhacai or ‘pressed vegetable’ for which Fuling County in Chongqing is renowned, while whole heads of green mustard leaves are pickled in brine and later boiled up into refreshingly sour soups and stews. Stalks of another Brassica variety are twice-fermented with brown sugar and spices to make the dark yacai that brings a distinctive umami savour to Sichuan dry-fried beans and dan dan noodles.

Often, in the west, vegetables are either overcooked or served brutally raw as a demonstration of some strange kind of virtue (what’s the appeal of raw kale or broccoli, honestly?). They are nakedly boiled or drenched in cream and butter. But in China the cooking methods and seasonings are many and various, tailored to the specific qualities of each plant. Earthier greens like chards tend to be seasoned more boldly, with fermented black beans or chilli bean paste, while pale-flavoured Chinese cabbage is boosted by savoury stock, assertive sesame paste or fragrant vinegar. Fresh, perfectly tender greens are usually swiftly blanched or stir-fried so they are kissed by heat but still vibrant, with a sprightly hint of crispness, enhanced but not overcome by seasonings.

More than half of the world’s pigs are now in China. The price of pork is so politically sensitive that the Chinese government has a strategic pork reserve.12 Yet while pork is the most beloved Chinese meat, it has a somewhat contradictory social status. Many people would concur that it is the most delicious among meats, but is neither rare like venison, expensive like seafood nor exotic like bear’s paw. You can buy it in every neighbourhood market. You wouldn’t serve it to a high-ranking official or an important business contact you were hoping to schmooze. The Californian restaurateur Cecilia Chiang, remembering her childhood in a wealthy household in Beijing, noted that pork was never served at banquets.13 It’s still not the kind of ingredient that would appear centre stage at a diplomatic feast in the Great Hall of the People, China’s parliament. Pork may be tasty, but it is lowbrow, perhaps even a little vulgar. Pork is what you eat at home, greedily and happily.

Many Chinese gourmets express disappointment at the menus in highly regarded western restaurants. The most pervasive Chinese stereotype about ‘western food’ is that it is ‘very simple and very monotonous’ (hen jiandan, hen dandiao), in particular because of the relatively small number of dishes and comparative lack of variety of typical western meals. Years ago, when I dined with the Sichuanese chef Yu Bo at El Bulli in northern Spain, at that time the most avant-garde restaurant in the world, he was amazed that even here the dishes were grouped so that all the seafood came first, followed by all the meat and game and finally all the sweet dishes. In Chinese terms, this was a lost opportunity to enhance the variety of what was already an incredible menu, by splitting up blocks of similar ingredients and arranging them in a more fluid fashion.

The Chinese value qingdan dishes partly because they see food as medicine and balanced eating as essential to the maintenance of health. But there are also cultural and moral factors involved in esteeming food that is understated. The French philosopher François Jullien has argued eloquently (in In Praise of Blandness) that the idea of qingdan lies at the heart of Chinese culture, not only in cooking but in the arts of music, painting and poetry, because it is understood not as an absence or a deficiency, but as a point of origin.12 The Chinese, he suggests, have a deeply engrained penchant for the vague, the allusive and the impressionistic, whether in the dissolving landscapes of an ink-and-water painting, the musical note that fades into silence or the flavour that is flavourless. Blandness is not nothing, but a kind of sublimation of the possibilities of everything.

Trying to categorize Chinese regional cuisines makes me dizzy. You can travel and travel and travel around China and taste new foods every single day, which is pretty much what I have been doing for the last thirty years. And after all this time, I still find myself in the same state of wonder and bewilderment. Chinese cuisine is like a fractal pattern that becomes more and more intricate the more closely you examine it, to a seemingly infinite degree. The more I know, the less I feel I know. When it comes to Chinese food, I see myself increasingly as a small insect scaling a great mountain of human ingenuity.

Like many Chinese people, particularly those of the older generation, she didn’t show her love for me by hugging or soliciting emotional outpourings, but through food and fussing. It took me a while to become used to this way of expressing affection. At first I found it brusque and bossy: ‘Have some congee! Drink some soup! Put on some more clothes!’ But over time I came to understand what it meant. I can always tell, now, when someone Chinese is becoming fond of me because they start to cluck over my physical needs, urging me to eat or drink, to wrap up warm, to rest. When a stern-faced chef barks at me to have some more baozi for breakfast or Li Shurong presses me to have another mouthful of her red-braised pork, I know they are offering me the edible equivalent of a hug.