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Fuchsia Dunlop, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food, Particular Books, 2023, 480 pgs.
China is a big country—but culinarily, it’s even bigger than even its intimidating reputation might suggest. Traditionally you can read about the country’s “eight great cuisines”, ranging from the numbing spice of Sichuan to the lighter, more delicate flavours of Guangdong. These two alone might appear be from different countries, including not just dozens of local specialties but also a hundred small variations on familiar ideas such as roast duck, cured pork, or fried noodles—and this is just the start. In 2016, when I first moved to China, even sampling China’s most commonly eaten foods was a formidable challenge. Days, months, then years have passed as I collected recommendations from friends, read books, scrolled Dianping (China’s super-powerful counterpart to Yelp), or dove deep onto Bilibili (a video platform similar to YouTube) to figure out what the heck was next.
That journey has ultimately been one of the most rewarding I’ve ever taken—though I quickly found that the eight cuisines I read about on the internet were just a starting point, with a few of them having fallen out of popularity and now hard to find. In practice, not just China’s 22 provinces, but many of its 662 cities and (probably) thousands more of its villages all have their own food, including local specialities that nobody more than a hundred kilometres away has ever tasted. As a result, “Chinese food” is such a broad label it might as well be a whole separate world. Even today, aside from their own local cuisine, even most people from China’s larger cities sample only the most famous dishes from other provinces—similar, perhaps, to how an American might only be familiar with a basic (often diminished) rendition of Korean Bibimbap, Japanese ramen, or Pad Thai.
As for trying the rest, it’s just too troubling—too ma fan for all but the most devoted foodies. Nobody could do much more while still living a normal life, especially when you factor in the time and money involved.
With that in mind, Chinese cuisine’s reputation as being “just too much” may indeed be well deserved. In Guangzhou, I spent years trying new things whenever I could, hunting through local markets for ingredients and passing weekends on day-trips to small restaurants on the outskirts of the city—but five years later, when I finally left the city, I still felt I was just starting out. And that was just my effort to explore Cantonese cuisine, a famous but by no means exhaustive branch of China’s endless culinary universe. To really grasp Chinese cuisine is a lifestyle, an exploration that takes not just decades but a whole lifetime—and along the way, due to the almost complete lack of writing on the topic in English, it’s a journey most non-Chinese have taken entirely without a guide.
But Fuchsia Dunlop has gone further than most, and she’s written this book to tell us about it.
Dunlop is already one of the best-known writers on Chinese food in English. As she recounts in Shark Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet and Sour Memoir of Eating in China, Dunlop moved to Chengdu in the 90s as a student, but soon neglected her studies to spend her days eating… and eating… and then eating more. Afterwards, she became the first non-Chinese ever to enrol at the Sichuan Culinary Institute, where she studied the techniques of a professional Sichuan chef. This led, in some way to another, to occasional work as a food journalist. And in the years since, aside from her memoir, she’s produced a series of well-received cookbooks, first on Sichuan cuisine and then on other regions.
Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper is a youthful written memoir brimming over with a love of food and life. I especially liked its first half, where Dunlop’s description of Chengdu’s (now vanished) small noodles stalls and food vendors is a pure joy. I was less pleased though with the second half, which was transparently a patchwork of small articles written throughout occasional trips to China. Almost two decades later, I had assumed Dunlop was done sith writing books, having settled down to a modest life of recipe testing and the occasional post on Instagram, where she runs a lively page focusing on whatever her most recent culinary experiments have been.
But I couldn’t have been more wrong. It turns out she was writing an encyclopaedia.
Unlike previous books on Chinese food such as Shark’s Fin or Serve the People: A Stir Fried Journey Through China by Jen Lin Lin Liu (another enjoyable book on working in China’s restaurant industry), Invitation to a Banquet isn’t a memoir. Instead, it’s nominally a series of essays on 30 separate Chinese dishes: dumplings, fried noodles, congee, barbecue, and hot pot all get some attention, in addition to countless others. But these aren’t simple expository meditations or reviews. Her chapter on hot pot surveys three thousand years of meat cooked in broth, lingering on the Mongolian roots of the dish, but still dedicating whole pages to a lush description of the mechanics of eating this quintessentially Chinese meal. Dunlop’s chapter on Cantonese barbecued pork begins with memories of sampling char siu in London’s Chinatown (a first step into the ocean that would eventually become her life), but within twenty pages she’s covered dozens of roast meat dishes from around China. And of course, when she writes about alcohol, we learn not just the unique history of Chinese fermentation but more about its role at meals and its use in the cooking of multiple different regions.
Fortunately, this is no bland academic exercise. Dunlop loves Chinese food and she’s good at making us love it too, anchoring each chapter with evocative descriptions of her travels and experience eating. These lengthy bouts of literary food porn are pleasant to read by themselves, but they’re most remarkable for her apparently effortless transitions to China’s history and culture. And it’s not just the more unusual delicacies that catch her attention—she even goes all out describing dumplings or a simple bowl of rice:
“The cool afternoon light catches steam rising from the blue-and-white bowl in languid curls. The rice has a moon-like glow, almost translucent. The grains are distinct but blurry-edged and they cling together in gentle clumps…. Perhaps it’s unsurprising when westerners complain, as they do, that Chinese food is too salty or greasy: it will be, if you eat spicy, salty or oily dishes on their own or with fried rice instead of plain. Most southern Chinese dishes are designed to be shared and eaten with plain rice; they are the seasoning, the salt, the oil and the tastiness. They are the relishes for the rice, not stand alone.
Aside from general insights like this, another pleasure of the book is its abundance of surprising factoids. From Dunlop we learn that millet (not rice) was the primary staple crop of northern China during the time of Confucius. Just as casually, we discover that before the invention of the gas range stove (which made cooking in a wok possible) for hundreds of years China’s nobility sat down to banquets of geng—thick, starchy stews comparable to egg drop, hot and sour, or contemporary Hangzhou beef stew, but made with a vastly wider array of ingredients and all varying subtly in their taste. We even learn of a time, before the Song dynasty, when soy sauce was not eaten in China, and instead food was flavoured with dozens of varieties of jiang—thicker fermented pastes that often included meat, of which soy sauce was originally only an unintended by-product that somehow caught on.
What a joy to pull out these little facts in conversation and discover that even my Chinese teacher was unfamiliar with them—but Dunlop doesn’t stop there. Her interests range from health-centric aspects of Chinese cuisine (epitomised by the country’s light, delicate soups) to a look at the modern practitioners of China’s “farm to table” movement, which is much older and has much deeper roots than anything in the west. She discourses on texture, taking care to defend the consumption of offal and other ingredients less consumed in modern societies as an “expansion of human pleasure”. She’s also interested in China’s identity as a polyglot cuisine, with influence flowing in from Turkey, Russia, and Europe for over a thousand years. This influence is especially evident in Beijing, where many of the city’s most famous foods are associated with or even prepared by the Hui minority—a lesser-known Muslim population (who also get their own chapter) whose culinary influence can be felt in every major city in the country. And this is just in the first third of the book.
In fact, the further I read, the more Invitation to a Banquet’s range become both a blessing and curse. This is no small piece of light reading: it really is an encyclopaedia, and looking back, I would almost definitely fail to pass a quiz on it. But what it does, better than anything, is make me want to explore. When I first moved to China, I tried new foods by making notes and spreadsheets, listing everything I wanted to try and where I could find it—but I’ve slowly fallen off in this project. These last two years I’ve even begun eating non-Chinese food again, especially after a recent move to Shanghai, with its endless selection of fancy French restaurants, chic Japanese-fusion spots and American-style gastropubs. But Invitation to a Banquet is a great reminder of what remains to be discovered, and certain chapters were occasionally so exciting I found myself subtly smiling as I read, pausing to jot down notes about a rare cuisine or hunt down a restaurant where I could sample it in Shanghai.
Unfortunately, this impetus to actually follow up on Dunlop’s recommends has also slowed my progress through the book… and even, eventually, halted it. My current list is well over 70 restaurants—and, at the moment, I’m barely halfway through the book. If I drop by one restaurant on that list a week, maybe I can get part of the way through that list in two years. And that’s as someone living in a city where it’s feasible to try less-famous cuisines from Shaoxing, Guiyang, or Yangzhou (though, like Dunlop, dreaming of the British-Chinese chicken balls and shrimp toast of her youth, I’ve never entirely gotten beyond my love of General Tso’s chicken). When Dunlop visits a new city, she’s frequently greeted by a professional chef before sitting down to an immense feast—but it’s impossible to imagine a normal person could visit all these places and try the dishes at their source. One life simply isn’t long enough. We don’t have the money or resources to hunt down much of what she eats.
With that in mind, I do wonder if readers outside China might be alienated by Invitation to a Banquet—since there is a banquet, but not everyone is invited. For readers in the US, a reasonable next step might be to check out Dunlop’s cookbooks or YouTube channels such as Made with Lau or Chinese Cooking Demystified, which offer more authentic recipes than were available even just a few years ago. Occupants of larger cities might stop by their local Chinatown and think a bit harder about where to try dim sum or hot pot; maybe they could even sample Lanzhou’s hand-pulled noodles or Xi’an’s Biangbiang noodles, which have recently been catching on abroad. But for many people there’s simply no way to follow Dunlop into the vast, disorienting landscape of China and its food.
Still, in 2024 there’s no better resource on Chinese cuisine in English than Invitation to a Banquet. Dunlop has exceeded expectations with this book, producing perhaps the first piece of food-writing that could reasonably be called a tour de force—and if you’ve got any interest in what is eaten in China, there’s no better place to start.
How to cite: Muntz, Kyle. “No Better Place to Start: Fuchsia Dunlop’s Invitation to a Banquet.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 1 Mar. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/03/01/banquet.
Kyle Muntz is the author of The Pain Eater (forthcoming July 2022 from Clash Books) and Scary People (Eraserhead Press, 2015). In 2016 he received an MFA in fiction from the University of Notre Dame, in addition to winning the Sparks Prize for short fiction. Currently he teaches literature and writing at the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in Guangzhou, China. [All contributions by Kyle Muntz.]