It’s the throwaway lines that offer some of the most arresting moments in Invitation to a Banquet, Fuchsia Dunlop’s love letter to several millennia of Chinese gastronomy. That she once cooked 350 duck tongues for a banquet — in Oxford, of all places; that she had her first taste of fermented camel’s milk at a Kazakh circumcision party in Urumqi; or that Yi Yin, the master chef in the service of Duke Huan, the 7th century BC ruler of the State of Qi (in present day Shandong), was said to possess a perfect palate, but was also said to have made his son into soup to please the boss.
Another food writer might be suspected of trying too hard, but such is the range and depth of Dunlop’s erudition, and so infectious is her enthusiasm, that she is above suspicion on that score. In the 1990s, she became the first foreigner to study at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine in Chengdu. Since then, she has — through her writing, journalism and food tours — sought to inspire others to adopt her own adventurous approach to one of the world’s great cuisines.
Invitation to a Banquet is not a cookbook, but an account of the central importance that food has had in Chinese culture, politics, religion and way of life, told through a series of chapters that explain key ingredients and techniques. We hear about Anji bamboo shoots with Jinhua ham, about yipin guo or “top-ranking pot” (a superlative soup concocted from fine ingredients that’s, according to Dunlop, “like listening to the start of a symphony”). There is a small essay on the marvels of qu, used to ferment everything from wine to soy sauce. We discover the complex relationship between foreign influences and post-Communist Chinese cuisine, embodied in lousong tang or “Russian soup”.