Fuchsia Dunlop: belief

Transcript context

…Can we cook a 10th-century meal from Hangzhou today, or is that mostly lost to us? Well, the frustrating thing is that there’s an amazing source of — what is it? — 12th, 13th-century Hangzhou, describing all the food served in city restaurants. It is dizzying. There were all different kinds of restaurants: regional, Buddhist vegetarian restaurants, restaurants for students, and snack shops of different kinds. The author lists all these delicacies, but there are no recipes or descriptions. [laughs] There’s tantalizingly not very complete information, but you could . . . I know a chef in Hangzhou, actually, who has created banquets of Song Dynasty food as far as possible from the texts. I think we have to partly use imagination, and there are some continuities in ingredients and techniques. Fuchsia, we’ll give you a moment to eat. I’ll ask you, Dan, a question. Much of the pandemic you spent in China, some of that in Yunnan. What did you learn about Yunnanese food during those months?…

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