Invitation to a Banquet

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.