Fuchsia Dunlop: belief

Transcript context

…When you visited street stalls and all these small food shops, how willing were people to open their kitchens to you and show you behind the curtain? Surprisingly willing. Just to put that in context — in the ’90s, China was really just beginning to open up. So in Chengdu, this provincial capital city, there were only, I think, a couple of hundred foreigners. We were very novel and hugely interesting to local people, just as China was very interesting to us. I would go to a restaurant owner and say, “May I study in your kitchen?” And people were just stunned that a foreigner and a woman and a university graduate student would actually like to be mingling with chefs and getting mucky in a kitchen. I think people just found it rather intriguing and hilarious. And I always say this. All the work I’ve ever done is completely dependent on the generosity of people in China, and it’s very much a collaboration — people who have all this knowledge, but they don’t have the means to communicate in English, and they have always been very supportive and generous. Coming up next, we have the salt and pepper lotus root sandwich (Jiao Yan Ou Jia), which, again, is a very typical Wuhan cuisine. We generally have this over Chinese New Year or at a big celebration. Something deep-fried is a luxury. Day to day, households don’t really do a large batch of oil and deep-fry, so that’s something we really considered as precious back then. So it’s like sandwiches. Yeah.…

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