Fuchsia Dunlop

Fuchsia Charlotte Dunlop is an English writer and cook who specialises in Chinese cuisine, especially Sichuan cuisine. She is the author of seven books, including the autobiographical Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper. According to Julia Moskin in The New York Times, Dunlop "has done more to explain real Chinese cooking to non-Chinese cooks than anyone".

Early life and education

Dunlop was brought up in Oxford, daughter of (Michael) Bede Dunlop and Carolyn Patricia Dunlop (née Baxter). Her father, a Corpus Christi College, Oxford-educated computer analyst, is son of David Colin Dunlop, Dean of Lincoln from 1949 to 1964 and subsequently an Assistant Bishop of Lincoln. Her mother was a sales executive. She attended Oxford High School, a private day school for girls. She studied English literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge (BA 1991). She took evening classes in Chinese at the University of Westminster, volunteered as a writer and editor on China Now and visited China twice. She reported being determined to eat "whatever the Chinese might put in front of me"

Career Returning to London, Dunlop studied for an Area Studies master's degree at SOAS and began to review Chinese restaurants for the Time Out Eating Guide to London. Continuing to write on Chinese food for newspapers and magazines, she now worked on her first book, rejected by several publishers as "too regional"

For her next book, Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, she looked eastwards. Hunan province is "revolutionary" as the birthplace of Mao Zedong, but Hunan cuisine, unlike that of its neighbour Sichuan, was scarcely known outside China: "Both are fertile, subtropical areas with rugged, wild terrain and rich cropland fed by major rivers, and they share robust folk cooking, big flavors and blazing hot chilies. Yet [she] argues persuasively for Hunan as a separate culinary presence", Anne Mendelson wrote in a review in The New York Times. Continuing an exploration of regional Chinese food, in "Garden of Contentment" (in The New Yorker, 2008) Dunlop profiled the Dragon Well Manor, a restaurant that is "committed to offering its guests a kind of prelapsarian Chinese cuisine" in Hangzhou, a centre of the ancient region of Jiangnan. The cookery of this same region, modern Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces, is covered in her third regional cookbook, Land of Fish and Rice (2016). In China, she explains, this cuisine "is known historically for its extraordinary knife work, delicate flavors [and] extreme reverence for ingredients," as encapsulated in the nostalgic phrase chún lú zhī sī "thinking of perch and water shield", two ancient local specialities. .

Meanwhile with Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking (2012) Dunlop gained her fourth James Beard Award. There have been moments of doubt, as quoted in a New York Times review, "as if my gastronomic libido is slipping away ... I’ve seen the sewer-like rivers, the suppurating sores of lakes. I’ve ... breathed the toxic air and drunk the dirty water. And I’ve eaten far too much meat from endangered species".

Publications Books 2001: Sichuan Cookery US edition, 2003: Land of Plenty: a treasury of authentic Sichuan cooking 2007: Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: recipes from Hunan Province US edition, 2007: Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: recipes from Hunan Province 2008: Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: a sweet-sour memoir of eating in China 2012: Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking 2016: Land of Fish and Rice: Recipes from the Culinary Heart of China US edition, 2017: Land of Fish and Rice: Recipes from the Culinary Heart of China 2019: The Food of Sichuan 2023: Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food 2026: Five Tastes: The Magic of Flavour in a Chinese Kitchen

Selected articles 2001: "'On the first day they gave me a chef's hat and my own cleaver...'" in The Observer (10 June 2001) 2008: "Unsavoury characters" in Financial Times (16 August 2008) (on the political pressure to give English names to Chinese dishes) 2008: "Letter from China: Garden of Contentment" in The New Yorker vol. 84 no. 38 (24 November 2008) pp. 54–61 2013: "London Town" in Lucky Peach (30 April 2013) (on London's Chinatown) 2014: "Dick Soup" in Lucky Peach (14 April 2014) another source 2018: "Fuchsia Dunlop on the fiery charms of Sichuan hotpot" in Financial Times (9 November 2018)