Profile | British chef and Chinese cookbook author Fuchsia Dunlop on why she’ll ‘never get bored’ of spreading China’s regional cuisines to the world
- Fuchsia Dunlop’s first cookbook on Sichuan food broke the mould in the UK, and she has since demystified Hunan cuisine and more to the English speaking world
- The author talks about her culinary journey through China and why she’ll continue writing, ahead of her appearance at Hong Kong International Literary Festival
My mother claims she can remember the look of radiant joy on my face when I first tasted solid food as a tiny baby. She taught English as a foreign language and growing up in Oxford we always had a foreign student or two living with us as au pairs and helping out with me and my younger sister.
They would always cook a bit and leave a few recipes in the family repertoire. My mother would invite her students over for dinner. They came from Japan, Greece, Sudan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. So, I had an unusually international life for 1970s Oxford when it came to food.
From when I was very small, I always loved helping my mother in the kitchen and she was always teaching me. I loved shelling peas and picking over rice to get the stones out as a child. As a teenager, I did a lot of French patisserie and loved making pastry and choux.
Oxford was a very academic place and most of my friends’ parents were pushing them to practise their instruments or do their homework, but my parents were relaxed. I wasn’t terribly good at doing my homework, but I did do a lot of cooking and drawing and painting.
An Italian student who stayed with us gave me Leith’s Cookery Course by Prudence Leith and Carolyn Waldegrave in my early teens. It was a hefty book for my age but became my foundation book.
I learned how to pluck and roast pheasant from that book and make creme patisserie. As a teenager, my dream was to go to cooking school in Paris, but I didn’t have the money and it didn’t happen.
