Fuchsia Dunlop

A History of Chinese Food

Invitation to a Banquet

Cassandra Tang

Chinese food may be popular, but it’s still widely seen abroad as cheap, low-status and junky. While western consumers are willing to pay exorbitant sums for sushi or European tasting menus, Chinese restaurateurs still struggle to persuade customers that fine Chinese food is worth its price.

The rice is plain, without oil or seasoning. Yet while it might seem modest and unremarkable, it is the cultural, moral and emotional centre of the meal.

A restaurant is a place that serves fan (fan guan), to cook is to ‘make fan’ (zuo fan) and a beggar is someone who asks for fan (yao fan). A glutton is a ‘fan-bucket’ (fantong). If you have a job, it’s a ‘ricebowl’ (fan wan); lucrative enough, it might be a ‘golden ricebowl’; if not, it might be a ricebowl of paper or clay.

All too often, when westerners consider Chinese food to be unhealthy, it’s because of the way they are eating it: ‘unhealthy’ is their own reflection in the mirror; it’s not a reflection of Chinese food at all.

Good food, in China, is never just about the immediate physical and intellectual pleasure: it is also about how it makes you feel during dinner, after dinner, the following day and for the rest of your life.

But even the imperfect, the discarded, the jagged, has a role to play: the point is not what it is; it’s what you do with it.

It is the transparent shadow of the ingredients, the scent a lover leaves in a room, the ripple of an absence.

‘If all the dishes are equally striking, none of them will make much impression, will they?’

Blandness is not nothing, but a kind of sublimation of the possibilities of everything.

Only a lunatic would invite friends for dinner at home and cook a whole menu of stir-fried dishes – an exhausting prospect.

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