Lydia Chang: belief

Transcript context

…Tell us, is there a story? There is a lot of stories, and for the season right now, we incorporated blue Maryland crab. Today we’re taking it to a new version. You’re enjoying the crab roll. Fried cilantro crab roll. I actually have a question for Fuchsia. When you see the rise of Chinese cuisine . . . I think now the Chinese cuisine itself doesn’t have a boundary between the way they cook it in China and the way they cook it in the US, American Chinese cuisine versus the authentic Chinese cuisine. From my trips to China almost once every year, I noticed that food in China is slow to evolve, to change, as well. When I was at a Shanghainese restaurant to have this drunken shrimp, I noticed that they use Sichuan peppercorn in the marinade. It comes to a wonderful surprise with the Shaoxing wine, the Sichuan peppercorn. There’s really no fine line between Cantonese cuisine, Shanghai cuisine, or Sichuan cuisine. Where do you think the future modern Chinese cuisine is going? It doesn’t have to be in China. I think it’s a global trend. Yeah, I think that a cuisine is always a living form of culture that’s recreated on a daily basis. It’s just not something static, and that’s where you trip up when you start getting hung up about notions of authenticity. Particularly in China, again, and Sichuan is a good example of a place with feverish competition in the restaurant business, and so many different restaurants, all chasing new ideas and new concepts. There’s a period at the moment of extraordinary mixing, people traveling all over the world, all over China. As you said, you find Sichuanese dishes on everyone’s restaurant menus. Even the old Cantonese restaurants in London have to have some spicy dumplings or some spicy fish, because that’s what customers want. And also in Sichuan itself, like the fish dish we’ve just had, that you find the duo jiao yu tou, the steamed fish head with chopped, salted chilies, which is very Hunanese, is popular in Sichuan. There are other dishes from Zhejiang. But I don’t think this is actually something entirely new. When I was researching the new edition of the book, one thing that was really interesting was going back to the guide to Chengdu written in 1908, called the Chengdu Tong Lan (成都通览).…

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