Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food

"She calls it Invitation to a Banquet , and it has this sense of reveling in the pleasures of Chinese food, and also reveling in – and this is what I’m drawn to most about it – the variation within Chinese cuisines, a term that decidedly should at times be used in the plural even if there are situations in which it can be used in the singular as well. Some of her individual books have zeroed in on a region. I love her book about Jiangnan cooking. She’s famous for one about Sichuan food. In each of those, implicitly, there’s this idea that it’s a problem to imagine there’s something called ‘Chinese food.’ It’s the same problem as if you say there’s something called ‘European food’ or ‘Western food.’ Sometimes, in China, you’ll see a menu that says ‘Western dishes.’ Your first reaction is to think, ‘But these dishes have nothing to do with each other!’ If you had gone into a Chinese restaurant in the US or in the UK before the rise of regional restaurants, you would have said, ‘These dishes don’t go together.’ Invitation to a Banquet moves across time, across thousands of years, and it moves across the country and goes outside of China. It begins with her talking about her first encounters with something called ‘Chinese food’ while growing up in England. This food was very different from anything that she encountered when she got to China. In one way, this book is a celebration of food. This is a period when the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping is celebrating anything about the country it can brag about, from its monuments and philosophers from the past to its recent technological accomplishments. You might imagine that this book, which celebrates a part of the culture, would fit in with that, but in a way it challenges it. Not directly, in the way that Johnson and Branigan’s books do, but because it emphasizes the diversity, the variation, and even the limitations of imagining that there is something enduring that you can put your finger on as Chinese-ness through the ages. Dunlop writes about how dishes that have come to be thought of as quintessentially Chinese were influenced by flows from other parts of the world. You get an idea that the Silk Road wasn’t just about Chinese influences flowing out, but it was actually also about what we now think of as China being shaped by things flowing in from Central Asia. She talks about thinking of this cuisine as a cosmopolitan creation, the blending of influences from different parts of what we now think of as China with influences from places outside what we now think of as China. There’s a lot of memoir. This is somebody from outside of China, with a very simple idea about it, being awakened to its depths and spending a lot of time hanging out with and listening to people with expertise, which isn’t so different from what Ian Johnson did. Dunlop includes vignettes about Chinese chefs that she’s met or studied with, and blends these with travelogue and memoir. In Isabel Hilton’s wonderful review of the book in the Financial Times , she said there’s an almost pornographic quality to some of it. Dunlop is so good at evoking the sensual experience of eating food that it becomes almost food writing as a form of erotica."