Sam Enright: belief

Transcript context

…Sam, do you have a question for Fuchsia? Yes. I went to India for the first time over the summer, and the food was wonderful, but it struck me that Indian food had transferred with relatively high fidelity to very high-end Indian restaurants in Glasgow or Birmingham, and so on. Nothing in their cuisine was shocking to me in a way that I suspect it would be traveling around different areas of China. You mentioned Chinese food in the West being so Cantonese, but is there more to it than that, or more factors that determine which cuisines translate with higher fidelity? Yes. The first thing is that China is absolutely vast, and it has a very stunning diversity of different terrains and climates with all the implications for produce, so there are so many ingredients from different places. You’re only ever going to see small snapshots of this great richness of Chinese cuisine abroad, even though, now, we’re beginning to see Sichuanese food and different regional cuisines. There is so much more. I’ve been researching this for about 30 years, and I’m still discovering entire new styles and local traditions practically every time I go to China. In terms of fidelity, Chinese food, I said in the book, is a victim of its own success. It’s all about timing. Chinese is one of the earliest immigrant cuisines at a time when Western palates were probably more conservative, and it was more difficult to try and faithfully reproduce Chinese food abroad, and it got stuck. Public perceptions of Chinese food have got stuck there. But now things are changing, and there are so many immigrants, students, visitors from other parts of China living in cities like this and all over the place, who want to eat proper Chinese food. They want to eat the food they eat at home, whether it’s from their hometowns or it’s trendy cuisines like Sichuanese. It’s now possible for Chinese restaurants in the West — they don’t have to tailor to Western tastes. They can just start off doing food for Chinese clientele, so then it’s more faithful. I think one should also say — your Yunnan cuisine, for example. The marvelous thing about Yunnan cuisine is all this local produce. There are so many ingredients that you simply can’t find anywhere else in China, let alone abroad. You can’t really reproduce many aspects of Yunnan cuisine, wouldn’t you say?…

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