Land of Plenty and the Recording of Sichuan Cooking

Land of Plenty is the book in which Fuchsia Dunlop set down the cooking of Sichuan province for readers outside China, drawing on her study at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine in Chengdu and on the kitchens, teahouses and markets of the Sichuan basin. The title echoes the name by which the basin has long been known in Chinese, tianfu zhi guo, the heavenly land of abundance, a reputation that rests on its fertile plain, its mild damp climate and its long agricultural wealth.

Before Dunlop, the English-language record of Sichuan cooking was thin and often misleading. Restaurant menus abroad offered a handful of dishes, usually sweetened and thickened, and gave little sense that the province held one of the most varied culinary traditions in China. Land of Plenty set out to correct this by treating Sichuan cooking as a system with its own logic, not as a list of fiery recipes. Its recipes are arranged by the way a Sichuanese cook thinks: by ingredient, by technique and by the course of a meal, with the principles of seasoning placed ahead of the dishes themselves. The book's central contribution is its account of flavour. Dunlop describes the Sichuan repertoire of compound flavours, among them the numbing-and-hot (mala) of Sichuan pepper, Zanthoxylum bungeanum, with dried and fresh chillies, the fish-fragrant (yuxiang) combination of pickled chilli, ginger, garlic and spring onion, and the strange-flavour (guaiwei) of sesame, vinegar, chilli and sugar together. She makes plain that heat is only one element, and that the cuisine prizes balance, texture and the sequence of tastes across a meal. Dishes such as mapo tofu (麻婆豆腐), twice-cooked pork and dandan noodles are explained through their seasonings and the handling of the wok, so that a capable cook can reproduce them with understanding and not by rote. The book also records the foundations of the Sichuan pantry. Pixian doubanjiang, the fermented broad bean and chilli paste of Pixian county, receives particular attention, as do the pickled chillies, preserved mustard stems, fermented black beans and the hot oils on which many dishes depend. Dunlop is explicit that these ingredients are matured and fermented over time, and that their quality governs the result more than any refinement of method. Her descriptions of knife work, of the stages of oil temperature and of the ordering of seasonings in the wok give the book the character of a working manual as well as a history. As a source, Land of Plenty rests on observation and on the testimony of Sichuanese cooks and teachers, and it should be read as a record of a cuisine as it was practised at the end of the twentieth century. It does not claim a single canonical Sichuan repertoire, and it notes the variation between Chengdu, Chongqing, Zigong and the countryside. Later books by the same author, The Food of Sichuan and Every Grain of Rice, revise and extend it, and the earlier work remains the foundation on which the later ones stand. Its place in this book's lineage is that of a modern authority standing beside the older written tradition, from Yuan Mei's Suiyuan Shidan to the agricultural and culinary compilations of earlier centuries. Where those texts record the tables of their own times, Dunlop's book gave the Sichuan table a detailed account in English, and it set the standard of precision and respect for regional cooking that later writers on China have followed.

The Sichuan table that Land of Plenty describes is built on contrast within a meal: cold dishes dressed with sesame or chilli oil, stir-fries of sharp, savoury and numbing character, mild soups and plain rice to settle the palate. A banquet or teahouse snack course is arranged so that no single flavour dominates, and the numbing heat of Sichuan pepper is balanced against sweetness, sourness and the rounder savour of fermented pastes.