Fuchsia Dunlop's "Every Grain of Rice" review

Fuchsia Dunlop has been on the Chinese food scene for less than ten years, but she made such a big splash with her wonderful first book, Land of Plenty, that it is truly difficult to imagine thinking about Sichuan cuisine without her authoritative voice popping into my head.

But whenever I come to admire certain writers, the most difficult thing has been the wait between their books. You see, it has been five long years since her last guide to creating great Chinese food (the spicy foods of Hunan that time around), so I have been very impatient for her newest book to appear.

Every Grain of Rice (to be released February 4th) guides us through home cooking, mainly in areas south of the Yangtze River, and what a trip it is. Here is the beginning of my review for the online food magazine Zester Daily:

"British food writer Fuchsia Dunlop focused tightly on single regions of China in her first two cookbooks, Land of Plenty (Sichuan) and The Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook (Hunan). But in her latest endeavor, Every Grain of Rice, she expands her scope to easy comfort foods from a wide swath of China.

"Every Grain of Rice is the perfect introduction to cooking the way Chinese people do at home, with simple, clear instructions opposite lovely full-color photographs of almost every dish. For those who are just beginning to admire Chinese food, this book could nudge them over the edge into hopeless devotion.

"The beautiful photography is enticing, helpful and very welcome, for the lack of ample illustrations was one of the few quibbles I had with Dunlop’s first book, Land of Plenty. Drawing on her experience as the first foreign student at the acclaimed Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, her debut became an instant classic, enticing readers to succumb to the spell of central China’s chili-laden foods...."

Read the rest here.

The history of dim sum as told to Lucky Peach

The "Chinatown" issue of hipster food magazine Lucky Peach just hit the stands, and a combo article by moi is in there.

Called "The Beginner's Field Guide to Dim Sum," this introduces the history behind one of China's most gracious contributions to human civilization. This elegant definition of afternoon sloth around the dining table is none other than the glorious Cantonese tradition of enjoying a dim sum meal in an endless relay of tiny dishes. 

The article then breaks form and segues into an actual field guide replete with detailed line drawings on the best of the best dim sum, replete with their backgrounds and contents and the occasional weird story. The featured 24 delectable culprits have contributed to the delinquency of many a food tourist who wandered into a Hong Kong or Chinatown teahouse one day and was never quite the same again. 

If you relied only on the cover, you would never know that I was in there in a spread that stretches across eleven pages. No, I am not famous enough for that. 

I sob quietly as the likes of Anthony Bourdain, Fuchsia Dunlop, Martin Yan, and Danny Bowein bask in the limelight. But to be fair, a tiny slice of "Dim Sum" can be seen to the immediate left of the Lucky in Lucky Peach, so I guess I qualify as sort of a walk-on role here in a major crowd scene.

Chicken buns, or jibaozi

Be that as it may, I feel just like a small-town girl who landed a bit part in a major motion picture. I even got to draw everything here, and that was loads of fun. (Be on the lookout for a goldfish jiaozi with green eyes.)

If you do get your hands on a copy, please check out the article by the brilliant Harold McGee on "酒餅," which means jiubing, or Homemade Fermented Rice. Highly recommended.  

Lucky Peach is not yet available online, so you'll have to read it while you're standing in line at Whole Foods. When you do, turn to the blushing pink pages that run from 114 to 124, the ones that are bedecked with ink drawings that garnish "The Beginner's Field Guide to Dim Sum," which starts out like this...

"Nowadays, the terms "dim sum" (點心 in written Chinese and pronounced dianxin in Mandarin) encompasses a vast roster of small dishes selected from carts (rather than ordered from menus) in Hong Kong-style restaurants that serve little else during the daylight hours.

My drawing of Taotaoju
teahouse in Guangzhou

"In the beginning, dianxin was a verb that merely meant 'to eat a little something.' The first recorded use of the term dianxin comes from about 1,000 years ago. In the Tang shu 唐書 (History of the Tang), the wife of a man called Zheng Can said, 'I haven't finished putting on my makeup and so cannot eat yet, so you should first have a little something to eat (dianxin).'

"Around the year 1300, dianxin turned into a noun that referred to snacks and very light meals, a definition that has more or less remained unchanged to this day. In the entry for dianxin in every authoritative Chinese dictionary, this always appears as a complete term that cannot be reduced and thus defined according to its individual characters. What this means is that rather than translating to 'dot heart' or 'touching the heart' or 'a little bit of heart' -- which is what these characters mean separately -- the term dianxin refers solely to snacks and so has nothing to do with the heart at all, much in the same way that in English a 'cocktail' has no feathers..."

When you get to the actual field guide, be sure and read about Steamed Pork Buns, aka char siu bao, for "in Hong Kong, char siu bao suffers a reputation like that of hot dogs in the U.S. -- it's thought that any mystery meat could end up inside, even human. This urban legend was memorialized in a bloody 1993 Hong Kong movie called The Eight Immortals Restaurant: The Untold Story...."

Bon appetit!

Both ink drawings by Carolyn Phillips,copyright (c) 2012; all rights reserved.

Kung pao chicken

This is a dish that even most people who don't adore Chinese food tend to know and love. Kung Pao Chicken has been around for quite a while now here in the States -- at least from the Eighties, as far as I can remember -- so long that it's morphed into sort of a cliche in many restaurants. 

Some serve up really terrible versions that lack anything other than saltiness and peanuts, and that's too bad, because this is truly an inspired combination of sweet, sour, spice, heat, chicken, veggies, and -- yes -- peanuts. A signature dish of Sichuan province, this deserves some respect.

One place you can find it is in Fuchsia Dunlop's intensely wonderful Land of Plenty, which is not only a book of authentic Sichuan recipes, but also a memoir of her moving and (at times) quite funny months of being the first white woman to attend a cooking school in Chengdu. So, if you love Sichuan-style cooking, this is a great place to start.

Ground Sichuan peppercorns in marinade

Fuchsia has a lovely recipe for Kung Pao Chicken in her book, of course, and I adore it. Her version is all about the chicken, and she includes a story about how the story got its moniker: the dish was named after a late Qing dynasty governor of Sichuan called Ding Baozhen (as gongbao, or "kung pao," was his official title); he doted on this dish, so it got named after him. She goes on to relate the problems this caused the radicals during the Cultural Revolution, who renamed it until it was "rehabilitated" in the 1980s.

The story I heard was ever so slightly different. According to the food writer Huang Shaomo, Mr. Ding was the one who created this dish. (These names are particularly funny in Chinese because the title of this dish is Gongbao zhiding "Kung pao chicken cubes," and the creator's name is the name of this dish backwards, sort of: Ding Gongbao.) According to Mr. Huang, he used pretty much the same recipe for different main ingredients, so he had Kung Pao Lamb, Kung Pao Pork, Kung Pao Shrimp... you name it. 

But anyway, the variations on this story are probably as numerous as the recipes for this chicken dish. Fuchsia's version, like I said, focuses on the chicken, and other than the whites of some scallions, there really isn't a whole lot of vegetable matter in there. 

Plenty of veggies to add plenty of crunch

In my version, though, sweet red peppers and crunchy celery add all sorts of textural layers. This not only makes the dish quite colorful, but it also turns this into an ideal candidate for a one-dish supper: just pile the Kung Pao Chicken on top of a bowl of rice and settle down for a wonderful meal. Again, this is something that I personally like, and as with so many of these dishes, you too can play around with the ingredients to your heart's content until you find the balance that makes you smile.

I am not a huge fan, for example, of whole Sichuan peppercorns in stir-fries. These hard little nuggets tend to startle me out of my reveries whenever I bite down on them. So, what I've done is substitute ground toasted Sichuan peppercorns for the whole ones and add them to the marinade, and this adds just the right numbing edge for my taste. (But if you prefer them, well then, just add a teaspoon of the whole peppers to the chilies instead of the ground ones to the marinade.)

Also, I really love lots and lots of heat here, so I've doubled down on the dried chilies; they can be halved or reduced even further if you are not a chiliehead. If you prepare them the way that I suggest, you will find that they will soften and almost melt into the sauce as you work your way through the dish, which means that while you might start picking them out at the beginning, by dinner's end they will have slithered into the chicken and mellowed out.

One thing I suggest you do is to use kitchen shears or scissors to cut up the dried Thai chilies. This way, you can easily cut the chilies into small pieces without having them ricochet all over the kitchen. First, nip off the stem ends and then guillotine the chilies into half-inch sections. This loosens the seeds, which you can easily shake out the pods by lifting up the chilies and shaking them between your fingertips. 

An easy way with dried chilies

There's really nothing wrong with the seeds, if you prefer to keep them, of course. But I find that the seeds -- like the whole Sichuan peppercorns -- interfere with my enjoyment of a dish, so I dispense with them. This is all subjective, of course, and you should keep them in or toss them out as you see fit.

The final embellishment is fresh fried peanuts. Fuchsia talks about cashews as an elegant alternative, but I've never managed to get beyond peanuts. My peanut-loving husband would be very upset if anything ever derailed his chances for having peanuts for dinner, so there you have it. I imagine almonds and macadamia nuts might be splendid, too. But alas, I am destined to only speculate.

Kung pao chicken 
Gongbao jiding 宮保雞丁
Sichuan
Serves 2 as a main dish over rice, or 4 as part of a multicourse meal

Chicken:
12 ounces raw boneless chicken (boned and skinned thigh meat highly recommended; about 5 thighs)
1 tablespoon soy sauce
2 teaspoons Shaoxing rice wine
1 teaspoon toasted ground Sichuan peppercorns
2 teaspoons cornstarch

Sauce:
2 teaspoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon balsamic (or other good dark) vinegar
1 tablespoon sugar

Fry the dried peppers

1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 teaspoon cornstarch

The rest:
½ red bell (sweet) pepper
3 stalks celery
6 green onions
4 cloves garlic
½ inch fresh ginger, peeled and minced
5 to 15 dried Thai chilies (I prefer the maximum)
4 tablespoons peanut or vegetable oil
½ cup fried peanuts, unsalted

1. Rinse the chicken, pat it dry, and cut it into ½-inch dice. Place the chicken in a small work bowl with the soy sauce, rice wine, ground Sichuan peppercorns, and cornstarch. Toss them together and let the chicken marinate while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.

2. Mix together the sauce ingredients in a small bowl and set aside.

3. Cut the red bell pepper and celery into ½-inch dice. Cut the whites of the green onions into ½-inch rounds, and cut the green sections of two of the onions into ½-inch pieces for garnish. Lightly smash the garlic and chop it finely; add it to the ginger. Use kitchen shears as directed above to cut the dried chilies into ½-inch pieces, discarding the stem ends and the seeds. 

4. Heat 2 tablespoons oil in a wok over high and add the red bell pepper and celery to the wok. Quickly stir-fry them over high heat until the rawness is barely gone; remove them to the serving dish. 

5. Heat the rest of the oil in the wok over high and add the dried chili peppers; quickly fry them to release their aroma, about 10 seconds, and then add the garlic and ginger. Stir-fry these together for a few seconds and add the chicken. Stir-fry the chicken over high until the chicken turns white; add the whites of the onion. Continue to stir-fry the chicken until it is lightly browned and cooked through. Add the bell pepper and celery, toss, and then add the sauce. Quickly toss these together, and as soon as the sauce thickens, taste it and adjust the seasoning, and then add the peanuts and the green leaves of the onions. Serve immediately.