Fuchsia Dunlop first travelled to China as a student, but quickly became fascinated by the country's cuisine and eventually became the first westerner to study at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine. This journey is outlined in what is perhaps her best-known book, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper, a thoroughly enjoyable (and multi-award-winning) memoir on her first decade in the country. The purpose of her current book, Every Grain of Rice: simple Chinese home cooking, is to celebrate "the ability of ordinary Chinese cooks to transform humble and largely vegetarian ingredients into wonderful delicacies".
This transformation is brought about by by adding umami flavours to dishes, sometimes by using small amounts of meat or fish, but more often with intensely flavourful ingredients such as preserved mustard greens or fermented beancurd. Other methods, such as cooking spring onions and slivers of ginger in very hot oil, are also used. Fuchsia's written a short summary of these techniques here, from how to use chilli bean paste to making Sichuanese salad dressings.
By way of further illustration and, hopefully, inspiration, we've extracted three recipes from the book. Fuchsia's runner beans with black beans and chilli and stir-fried potato slivers with chilli and sichuan pepper recipes do unexpected things with familiar ingredients. The idiosyncratically-named pockmarked old woman's tofu is a much-loved Sichuanese dish usually made with beef or pork but here given as a vegetarian recipe, and is, in the author's words, "equally sumptuous".
Fuchsia will be live on this thread on Friday 15 June from 1pm BST - post your questions now!
