The Food of Sichuan

The Food of Sichuan

Almost twenty years after the publication of Sichuan Cookery, voted by the OFM together of the best cookbooks of all time, Fuchsia Dunlop revisits the region where her own culinary journey began, adding quite 50 new recipes to the first repertoire and accompanying them together with her incomparable knowledge of the dazzling tastes, textures and sensations of Sichuanese cookery.
At home, guided by Fuchsia's clear instructions, and using just a couple of key Sichuanese storecupboard ingredients, you'll be ready to recreate Sichuanese classics like Mapo tofu, Twice-cooked pork and Gong Bao chicken, or try your hand at a standard spread of cold dishes comprising Bang bang chicken, Numbing-and-hot dried beef, Spiced cucumber salad and Green beans in ginger sauce.

With spellbinding writing on the culinary and cultural history of Sichuan and amid gorgeous travel and food photography, The Food of Sichuan may be a captivating insight into one among the world's greatest cuisines.

'This book offers an unmissable opportunity to utilise the wok and cleaver, brave the fiery Mapo tofu and expand your technique with pot-stickers and steamed buns' Yotam Ottolenghi

About the Author

Fuchsia Dunlop was the first Westerner to train at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine, and has been travelling around China and collecting recipes for more than two decades. She has written for publications including the Financial Times, the New Yorker and the Observer, and has appeared on Gordon Ramsay's The F-Word and The Food Programme on BBC Radio 4. Her previous books include the award-winning Sichuan Cookery, Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking, Land of Fish and Rice and Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China. She speaks, reads and writes Chinese, and she lives in East London.

Gorgeous book to read. You do need to buy quite a lot of ingredients if you aren’t used to cooking Chinese food but it is well worth it. Quite often I buy cooking books and read them without cooking recipes, preferring to use them more of a guide, but this one I have followed faithfully and the results have been really good!! Ha! Maybe I should do that more often. It’s just before I read Fuschia Dunlop’s book I wasn’t really tempted!-J. Yates

An incredibly detailed cook book. I have used other Chinese food cook books before, none have gone into the background and amount of detail as this cool book has for this exquisite and delicious food. One thing I learnt is that I will always have to have available in the kitchen, Shao Xing wine. -Eudonni

First to say that Fuchsia Dunlop's books have been nothing short of transformative for me, sparking an already deep interest in Chinese food and inspiring me to actually learn to cook Chinese food proficiently. Land of Plenty was one of the first Chinese cookbooks I ever owned, and while I loved it, I cooked from it far less frequently than from Every Grain of Rice, Land of Fish and Rice, and some other cookbooks from China, because it lacked pictures and had recipes organized in the typical western style, while her newer books have lots of photographs to show you what your dish should look like (its very difficult to properly cook a dish you have never seen before) and organize recipes in the Chinese cookbook style of separately listing marinades, flavorings, etc. The Food of Sichuan solves those issues by bringing the book up to date, not only with modern layout and design, but by adding pictures for nearly all recipes, and formatting recipes as in Fuchsia's more recent books in a manner more suitable to Chinese cookery. As a bonus there are also many new recipes that are not included in Land of Plenty. I've already cooked several dishes from the book that I had passed over in Land of Plenty due to a lack of photo, and I know this book will be in constant use. If you have any interest in Sichuan food, you should absolutely own this book, without regard to whether you already own Land of Plenty as it is materially improved in every possible way.-Rob