Civilised food – with Fuchsia Dunlop

And it's such a vast country.

I mean, because we keep using the term or you've already used the term Chinese food.

But how do you define a cuisine? Is there a cuisine that belongs to a country that's the size of a continent? How do you even is it possible? Like, can we give it like an abstract definition of what a national cuisine is?

Well, I think sort of to initially say no to that question, that I remember when I was at cooking school, one of my young classmates said to me, Fuchsia, I don't like Western food.

And I asked him, like, how had he come to this conclusion? Because...

there wasn't any Western food in Chengdu in 1995 or whatever.

And he said, well, I had KFC once and I didn't like it.

So I don't like Western food.

And I always tell this story because I think that people in the West often have made generalizations about Chinese food, which are just as ridiculous.

So yes, it's incredibly diverse.

And that diversity is now really showing up in cities all over the world.

Sichuan food, of course, very familiar just to name one of them.

But at the same time, there are sort of certain, I would say, themes and characteristics of Chinese food that you can say, yes, these are Chinese.

So Chinese food is a combination of some aspects that really go back thousands of years and have changed very little, like fermenting soybeans or steaming food or... cutting food into little pieces and eating with chopsticks.

And those, you can say, yeah, these are really, this is what makes food Chinese.

But at the same time, you know, China has been plugged into an international economy 2,000 years ago.

There were all these new ingredients coming through the Silk Road, like, you know, black pepper, which is known still in China as hujiao, which means barbarian pepper because it came from the northwest.

So my last book actually called Invitation to a Banquet was a sort of attempt to ask these questions like what is Chinese food and how can we appreciate it and how should we eat it? But I think it's just, you know, it's useful to come up sometimes with definitions of what Chinese food is as long as you remember that it's It's also, you know, cuisines don't really have borders and they change all the time.

And there are cultural sort of exchanges and interactions.

So just, you know, you can try to make some definition, but with heavy scepticism.

Yeah, that makes sense to me.

And I often think about it in terms of there were like practices, ingredients, but also ideas as well.

And we'll come on to some of those.

Because I think your book, Invitation to a Banquet, obviously, we're going to talk about your brilliant new cookbook.

But your book, Invitation to a Banquet was so inspiring for me when I was writing this book about English food, because you just you explore it with such depth and such clarity.