n the fourth century, a Chinese official, Zhang Han, is said to have abandoned his post in the north of the country, unable any longer to endure his craving for the water shield soup and sliced perch of his hometown in Jiangnan, a region to the south; ever since, “thinking of perch and water shield” (chun lu zhi si) has been the Chinese shorthand for homesickness.
This is a story Fuchsia Dunlop, Britain’s greatest authority on Chinese food, tells in the introduction to her magnificent new book about Jiangnan’s culinary heritage, Land of Fish and Rice – and with good reason. Han wasn’t alone; several emperors felt the same. “No one who has fallen in love with Jiangnan ever wants to leave,” she goes on. “While every Chinese cuisine has its charms … I know of no other that can put one’s heart so much at ease as the food of Jiangnan.” Her own passionate affair with the region – Jiangnan spans the eastern coastal provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu, the city of Shanghai, and that part of southern Anhui province once known as Huizhou – began several years ago, when she walked through a moon-gate and into the “enchanted” garden of the Dragon Well Manor restaurant on the outskirts of Hangzhou, where the restaurateur Dai Jianjun had created a sanctuary for Chinese food using “radiantly fresh” produce and ingredients made by artisans to traditional methods. Suddenly, she had the subject of her next book. “I don’t go around choosing regions,” she says, when we meet at Bar Shu in Soho, a restaurant to which she acts as a consultant. “They choose me.”
The food in Jiangnan is known for its gentleness, or qing dan. Often translated as “bland” or “insipid”, the word combines the characters for pure and light, and expresses tastes that comfort and refresh: “It’s feelgood food, made in harmony with the seasons and the landscape.” It’s a cuisine that involves lots of fish, plenty of pork, and a vast range of other, rather more obscure ingredients: wild rice stems, lily bulbs, celtuce (aka asparagus lettuce, whose thick stalks have, paradoxically, a celery-like flavour) and, most bafflingly of all, fox nuts (a kind of chickpea that grows in fresh water). But there’s no need for alarm. “The internet has made things easier,” Dunlop says. “I buy lots of seasonings online. Mostly, though, it’s a case of applying Chinese techniques to produce you can easily find at home. There is a recipe for buns stuffed with shepherd’s purse [a plant belonging to the mustard family], for which I use kale. It works just as well.”
Dunlop, who grew up in Oxford, trained as a chef in China in the mid-1990s, having got interested in the country as a subeditor at the BBC (she took evening classes in Mandarin, and then won a British Council scholarship to study for a year in the Sichuanese capital, Chengdu). Her first cookbook, Sichuan Cookery, came out in 2001, after an initial struggle with publishers who thought it “too regional”. Since then, of course, things have moved on; most of us now know there’s more to Chinese food than sweet and sour pork.
“The emergence of China as a richer, more powerful country has changed perceptions,” she says. “It’s a place people visit, whether for their holidays or to do business. Theopening of Hakkasan [in London in 2001] was another turning point – somewhere so smart and glamorous. As a result people no longer think that Chinese food is either cheap and junky or terrifyingly exotic. But without going there, you can’t really open this great casket of wonders. It is such a huge country.” Why, though, do so few people here know about Jiangnanese food? “I guess it’s to do with patterns of immigration. The Cantonese dominated things for so long. When people do come here from this region, they tend to be well-heeled – they’re not the kind of people who would be cooks – while most chefs out there tend to say: ‘Why would we want to leave, when we have all these wonderful ingredients?’ Hangzhou is one of the most loved places to live in all of China.”
China, unlike many countries, has retained a strong sense of the regional when it comes to food. “There are more chain restaurants now. You can get Sichuan food all over China these days and some chefs are concerned about the loss of skills in the countryside; people move to the city leaving only the very young and the very old behind. But it remains incredibly diverse. The more I learn, the more I feel I’m just beginning.” Among her favourite recipes in the book are the one for dungpo pork, a sumptuous dish of meat so tender from slow cooking it will melt at a chopstick’s touch, and her “indispensable” Shanghai noodles with dried shrimps and spring onion oil. “I had it for lunch today,” she says, eyes widening with retrospective greed. “If you have the noodles to hand, that one only takes 10 minutes.”
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