Invitation to a Banquet

The Story of Chinese Food

By: Fuchsia Dunlop

Narrated by: Fuchsia Dunlop

Length: 17 hrs and 20 mins

Publisher's summary

The world's most sophisticated gastronomic culture, brilliantly presented through a banquet of thirty Chinese dishes.

Chinese was the earliest truly global cuisine. When the first Chinese laborers began to settle abroad, restaurants appeared in their wake. Yet Chinese has the curious distinction of being both one of the world's best-loved culinary traditions and one of the least understood. For more than a century, the overwhelming dominance of a simplified form of Cantonese cooking ensured that few foreigners experienced anything of its richness and sophistication—but today that is beginning to change.

In Invitation to a Banquet, award-winning cook and writer Fuchsia Dunlop explores the history, philosophy, and techniques of Chinese culinary culture. In each chapter, she examines a classic dish, from mapo tofu to Dongpo pork, knife-scraped noodles to braised pomelo pith, to reveal a distinctive aspect of Chinese gastronomy, whether it's the importance of the soybean, the lure of exotic ingredients, or the history of Buddhist vegetarian cuisine. Meeting food producers, chefs, gourmets, and home cooks as she tastes her way across the country, Fuchsia invites listeners to join her on an unforgettable journey into Chinese food as it is cooked, eaten, and considered in its homeland.

©2023 Fuchsia Dunlop (P)2023 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Wonderful prose and subject matter

You know a work of art is good when it makes you feel something, regardless of what it makes you feel, if it gets you to feel, and that feeling sticks, I say it was good. This book made me feel hungry. Very, very hungry. So in that sense it was excellent!

Less important points: The information, and explanations, and historical stories were very interesting and engaging. Good blending of themes introduced early on to make sense of mid-way through concepts. It used enough googleable terms as well that its sad lack of precise recipes is not as sad as it may be in a time before the internet. But that wasn’t really the point either. To me, this seems an excellent high level map for the curious on Chinese cuisine. If I had to make a change, I’d ask for more & more precise history, but that’s just my own taste.

Fun

Enjoyable - learned a lot. Detailed explanation in a nice way, I look forward to listen. Historical text . Not a recipe book.

Knowledgeable and awful

Dunlop knows a lot about Chinese food. However someone must tell her that a whole book with “the West” vs “the Chinese” is unbearable and nonsensical. About nonsense: she seems to have completely assimilated all the most ridiculous cliches that many middle class, rather close minded and little traveled Chinese people may have. But why should she care, as she declaims how fluent her Chinese is and how sinicised she is! Terrible book, in spite of of the knowledge. If I hear more “west” and “western” this month I may scream