The Cultural Revolution's Break and the Return of the 1980s

The break belongs to the years of the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 until the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, and the return to the decade that followed under the policy of reform and opening. Fuchsia Dunlop's Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper, her account of eating and cooking in Sichuan and across China, is the book on which this essay rests.

Before 1966 the cooking of China was carried by restaurants, banquet houses, teahouses and the households that employed or admired good cooks, and the Qing and Republican tables had left a vocabulary of dishes that cooks across the country could recognise and refine. The Cultural Revolution attacked that inheritance as part of an attack on the old culture and on the bourgeois habits it was held to represent. Restaurants were closed or turned into plain canteens, and the elaborate dishes of the old banquet were out of keeping with the times. Cooks were set to work in state kitchens where the aim was to feed large numbers cheaply, and the cooking they were allowed to do was plain. A craft handed from master to apprentice was interrupted at the point where its practitioners were most exposed, and what survived was often kept in family kitchens and in the memory of older cooks. Scarcity and rationing in the same decades narrowed the table further, so that a generation grew up with little experience of cooking as a pleasure. After the death of Mao and the turn towards reform and opening, private enterprise returned to the kitchen. Small restaurants and street stalls reappeared first, and then larger dining rooms, as older cooks took up their trade again and trained the young. Dunlop, who studied cooking in Chengdu in the 1990s, describes the cooking of that country as one that had come through the break with its techniques still alive in the hands of the generation that remembered the older kitchens. The return of the 1980s was a revival of regional cooking, with the Sichuan table among the most visibly restored, and Guangdong and Hong Kong, which had kept a restaurant culture unbroken, feeding the demand for banqueting that spread north. The cooking of today rests on that recovery, and it explains why a cook of the older generation is valued as a living link to a table that had been interrupted.

The cooking of the break was plain by necessity, built on rationed grain, vegetables and little oil, and its flavours were those of the canteen rather than the banquet. The return brought back the full range of regional taste, from the numbing heat of Sichuan pepper Zanthoxylum bungeanum to the clear soups and delicate steaming of the Cantonese table, and with it the idea that a meal could be an occasion.