‘Land of Fish and Rice’ and Elegantly Subtle Cuisine

“Yangzhou food doesn’t jump up and amaze you, like its Sichuanese counterpart. It won’t make your lips tingle, or dance jazz on your tongue. It is not a sassy spice girl with red lips and a sharp wit, thrusting itself into the limelight. Yangzhou food is altogether a gentler creature. It seduces by understatement.”

— Fuchsia Dunlop, Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China

London native Fuchsia Dunlop was the first Westerner to graduate from China’s Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, an experience documented in the compulsively readable Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China. She is perhaps best known in the United States for Every Grain of Rice, her James Beard Award-winning collection of easy Chinese recipes. Now, with Land of Fish and Rice, Dunlop brings readers an in-depth exploration of southern Chinese cuisine.

With Land of Fish and Rice, Dunlop returns to the investigative approach that characterized her first two books, Land of Plenty, and Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. Like food writers Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, Dunlop is a meticulous researcher, setting her recipes in their cultural, historical, and agricultural contexts. But it’s Dunlop’s deep affinity for all things Chinese that make her work so inviting: what better incentive to make Crabmeat, Tomato, and Potato Soup than a headnote describing it as “a gorgeous sunset of a soup”? The rice fields of Jiangnan “gleam like silver in the sun”, while a meal of Golden Scrambled Eggs with Shrimp were full of “quiet, understated joy”.

In discussing the broad geographical area encompassing Shanghai, Shaoxing, Ningbo, and Hangzou, Dunlop says:

I have chosen to write of an overarching Jiangnan cuisine, embracing the cooking traditions of Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces, southern Anhui and Shanghai. It’s a term that evokes the common geographical and culinary threads that link this diverse region and alludes to the ancient idea of Jiangnan, the beautiful south of China, as one of the heartlands of Chinese culture and gastronomy.

The fiery seasonings of Sichuan are absent here. Nor do readers find the scallion-ginger-garlic trinity common elsewhere in Chinese cookery. Jiangnan cuisine strives to achieve ben wei, or “true and essential tastes”. The term qing dan is also used, suffering in translation — it means “bland” in English. Dunlop hastens to explain the Chinese characters translate to “pure” and “light”.

In terms of ingredients, the south China pantry is rich with scallions (also called spring onions), dried shiitake mushrooms, and fresh ginger. As befits a region including Shaoxing, their wine is enormously popular. Southern Chinese cooks rely heavily on vinegars as well, including the hauntingly flavored Chinkiang vinegar, rose vinegar, and rice vinegar. Soy sauce is prominent, as is cooking with sugar. Seafood is fresh, dried, salted and fermented, while vegetables play a huge role. Pork is widely consumed; Jinhua, in the Zhejiang Province, is a noted ham producer.

A category of dishes referred to as gong fu cai, literally, kung fu cooking — dishes so complex and elaborate they fall within the realm of professional banquet cookery. Dunlop offers one recipe, Eight-Treasure Stuffed Calabash Duck, which she describes as the book’s most complicated, requiring “a certain amount of patience”. Calling for boning, stuffing, blanching, and deep frying a duck, just reading the recipe was enough to induce anxiety. Some things are best left to the professionals.

At a time when artisanal cookery has reached a fevered pitch in the West, with home cooks fervently pickling, smoking, and preserving foods, southern Chinese continue the tradition of chou mei flavors: “stinky and rotten” foods. These highly fermented foods — Dunlop describes stinking tofu as having an “aroma that smacks you in the face at fifty yards” — originated in Shaoxing, where extreme poverty drove people to place foods in a preservative but high-smelling brine. The result prevented starvation while making the inedible palatable.

Many of the recipes in Land of Fish and Rice call for ingredients found only in Asian markets or online. Those readers living far from Asian communities may need to think creatively, especially where produce is concerned. But this shouldn’t stop anyone from using the book.

Further, Land of Fish and Rice isn’t for beginning or timid cooks. While anyone can prepare Stir-Fried Potato Slivers With Spring Onion, Beggar’s Chicken or Shanghai Potsticker Buns are strictly for the skilled — or the intrepid. This is not a criticism. It’s merely to say anyone searching for “Quik n’ Easy Chinese In 20 Minutes” should look elsewhere. Those eager to learn more about this lesser-known cuisine, read on.

Into the kitchen.

Shanghai Red-Braised Pork with Eggs is one of the simpler recipes, calling for simmering pork belly in Shaoxing wine, star anise, cassia bark, soy sauce, ginger, spring onion, and sugar. Hard-boiled eggs are added, their whites slashed to soak up the cooking liquid. Once the meat is tender, the dish is chilled overnight, reheated and finished.

This recipe is a prime example of ben wei: the pork is placed in pan of cold water, brought to a boil, then cooled before being sliced and added to the wok. Skimp on the sugar, as I did at first, and the dish will be dull. Follow the recipe, adding the full three tablespoons of sugar, and the dish will be perfectly balanced.

Dunlop calls Clams With Spring Onion Oil “almost dangerously delicious”. The ingredient list is deceptively brief: littleneck clams, spring onions, fresh ginger, Shaoxing wine, soy sauce, and a final sprinkling of spring onion and garlic. Like most shellfish recipes, this comes together rapidly. The result is astounding: an ambrosial dish that is, indeed, dangerously delicious. Make lots of rice to capture every last drop of clam liquor. Don’t expect leftovers.

Green Bok Choy with Dried Shrimp brings out the best of each ingredient, the umami of dried shrimp harmonizing with bok choi’s slightly bitter edge. The aforementioned Stir-Fried Potato Slivers With Spring Onion will be familiar to westerners: slivered potatoes are stir fried with scallions, much in the manner of fried potatoes or french fries, without the mess of deep frying.

Rice lovers will adore Yangzhou Fried Rice recipe, while recipe freaks can geek out over the headnote, which charmingly dissects the best time to add egg — before or after the rice goes into the wok. Either way, the recipe “one of the finest variations on the fried rice theme” is a keeper. Shanghai Noodles With Dried Shrimp and Spring Onion Oil, a marvelous recipe from Every Grain of Rice, reappears here, while Cat’s Ears brings up an old, old argument between the Chinese and Italians over the origins of noodles.

The chapter on dumplings and snacks asks for a skilled hand — or a trip to a dim sum parlor. The timid among us can gaze admiringly at recipes for Yangzhou Slivered Radish Buns and “three-cube” buns. Maybe someday.

This reader experienced occasional difficulty with recipe writing. The Shanghai Red-Braised Pork with Eggs calls for fresh ginger and spring onion, which are left whole. This is never explicitly stated. In a book — indeed, an entire cuisine — where clean knife work is prized and foods are eaten with chopsticks, it would be helpful to note these items are not cut. The cook is also asked to crush the ginger and onion with a cleaver — before boiling and cooling the pork belly, a step taking a good 45 minutes. This means while the pork belly boils, then cools, the aromatics sit around oxidizing. They should be crushed just before going into the wok.

Green Bok Choy With Dried Shrimp asks the cook to rehydrate dried shrimp in a tablespoon of Shaoxing wine. It’s unclear whether or not the shrimp is drained and added to the wok alone or both rehydrated shrimp and its winey soaking liquid are dumped in together. After dumping shrimp and wine together, this cook realized the shrimp should be drained. The dish was delicious anyway.

These are quibbling criticisms. If blame — a harsh term — must be laid, lay it on shrinking editorial departments, not Dunlop herself. Even the finest writer benefits from human editors and proofreaders.

Land of Fish and Rice concludes with a few sweet dishes — Jiangnan cuisine has no dessert course — and drinks. A helpful basics chapter offers recipes for stocks, rendering lard, and gluten making, an ingredient that may make some readers shriek but is common in Jiangnan cuisine.

This review opens with a quote from Dunlop’s memoir, Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper. In 2007 Dunlop made her first visit to southern China. At the time, she was in crisis. Years of omnivorous, even gluttonous eating were taking a psychological toll. The words of a vegan friend lingered in her ears: the animals you’ve eaten await you in the afterlife. In this life, Dunlop fretted over the many endangered species she continued to encounter at banquet tables. As an honored guest, she was unable to refuse shark fin’s soup and bear paw. Nor could she ignore the increasingly horrific pollution dirtying the air and water, literally choking Chinese citizens. Sickened and increasingly panicked, Dunlop wondered whether her career might be over.

Visiting southern China restored her. In Dunlop’s words: “Yangzhou rekindled the fire.” It did so with meals of ben wei. There are no endangered animals, no Sichuan peppercorns, no platters of house pets, here, as she experienced and noted in Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook:

In the cold and damp of midwinter, every Hunanese person knows that it’s best to eat heating foods to restore the equilibrium of the body. One of the most effective heating foods is I don’t dare even to mention in the polite company of European and American readers, let alone suggest a recipe (let’s just say it goes “woof!”). Prized for the richness of its fragrance, it is made into nourishing soups and stews. It is, however, usually only eaten until the Chinese New Year, when sheep or goat, cooked in the same manner, are regarded as more efficacious. —

In Land of Fish and Rice it’s just meal after meal of elegantly subtle cuisine. Land of Fish and Rice closes on a strikingly humble note, with Dunlop thanking her Chinese friends for their help, adding she “could never do justice to their extraordinary culinary tradition”.

Fortunately for us, she is mistaken.