Will I love Invitation to a Banquet?

This is one of my favorite books about food in the past couple of years. Chinese cuisine has always fascinated me based on its breadth of styles, techniques, and depth of flavor. Not to mention that Chinese takeout generates some of my strongest autobiographic olfactory memories from childhood. Yet, until this book, learning about Chinese food has always been daunting to me.

Dunlop’s enjoyable coverage provides a wonderful overview of the difference between regional cuisines, use of ingredients, flavors, cooking techniques, and philosophy of food. It was not just a true joy to read, but it also inspired me to… show more.

Growing up, I loved to help my mom cook, and she was very adventurous. She particularly loved Chinese food—one of my earliest memories is of making dim sum with her—so I really enjoyed Fuschia Dunlop’s book about the role of food in Chinese culture.

Dunlop excels at showing just how different (and delicious) Chinese food is. She really helps you understand how China offers a different way of eating, one that can be healthier, more varied, and more environmentally sustainable than what we’re used to in the U.S. She also makes it sound insanely enticing.

I ended the book by… show more.

In this beguiling, appetising, elegantly written book, food writer and journalist Fuchsia Dunlop shares her deep appreciation of Chinese cuisine. As the English author of acclaimed Chinese cookbooks, she is well-placed to do so.

Seductive descriptions of beautifully cooked Chinese meals she has enjoyed—exquisite clear soups, thrilling stir-fries, delicately cooked prawns—are an inviting strand woven together with Chinese history and insights into the skills underlying Chinese cuisine. She writes from a place of excellent knowledge with clarity, insight, and wit.

Intriguingly, she notes both the sad, over-simplified stereotyping of Chinese food in the West and how ‘European’ cuisine is misunderstood… show more.

My kind of history - a 400-page bird's-eye view of Chinese gastronomy by a woman who knows how to tell a good story and isn't afraid to bring herself to the page - so important in a work of high scholarship, as this certainly is. 

The author just happens to be fluent in Mandarin, trained as a chef in the culinary academy in Sizchuan as earning a degree from its university, which makes her unusually qualified to set the record straight on what's surely the most complex, exacting, and least-understood of the world's great culinary traditions.

Noodles in the north,… show more.