INVITATION TO THE EXOTIC

I can’t remember when I first heard of, and started reading, Fuchsia Dunlop, the great scholar, eater and creator of Chinese food.  In some ways it seems like she’s always been there.   

Illustration by Anna Higgie

But I do know she was in the anthology The Wurst of Lucky Peach, a celebration of the sausage, in which she writes about opka hesip — sausage and stuffed lung — a favorite of the Uyghur people apparently.

Fucshia Dunlop wrote in that anthology “Cooked, the sausages are pleasantly piquant, the lung a strange hybrid of savory custard and offal that appeals, surprisingly, to those who like English puddings.” Now as then, I have to take her word for that.  Apparently opka hesip looks like this: 

Anyway I was in Hatchards bookshop last week and I bought a copy of Fuchsia Dunlop’s Invitation to A Banquet – The Story of Chinese Food. And it’s signed!!

 

It’s a deeply serious and erudite history of Chinese eating culture, with chapters on rice, knife scraped noodle, shunde and cultural appropriation, among many other topics.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not fun. 

 

It may be a measure of my own shallow-mindedness that the chapter I’ve liked best so far is titled ‘The Lure of the Exotic.’

 

Now we all now that in these days of saving the planet there are all kinds of things we’re not supposed to eat, including Chinese delicacies such as bear paw and shark skin soup, and Fuchsia Dunlop is a great cheerleader for sustainability, but back in the day she was obviously an enthusiast for eating the unusual if not the downright forbidden. 

 

     Mea culpa: I did once eat bear, which was terrific, cooked (and I assume killed) by Steve Rinella.  And it is in fact legal to hunt and eat bear in much of the United States.  I’m rather more upset that once, at a Chinese wedding, I did have shark fin soup – I only knew what it was afterwards – and I don’t think it was worth killing a shark for.

 

Nevertheless, I do still get a frisson when I read Fuchsia Dunlop’s tales of the eating of leopard foetus which might on occasion be imitation leopard’s foetus, or the ovarian fat of the snow frog which can look like this:

 

And then there's the Moose face.  Fuchsia Dunlop has a friend who gave her a dish called ‘red braised qilin face’ (hongshao qilin mian).  The qilin is a mythical creature, somewhere between a unicorn and a musk deer, and is sometimes depicted like this:

 

But the one she ate was made with the face of an elk.  “And there it was, an actual elk’s face, or rather its large nose, bizarre and amazing, lying in a pool of sauce on a great round platter and there I was staring into its enormous flared nostrils.’ Reader I salivated.  She continues, “it was utterly delicious, neither meat nor fat for skin, springy and sticky, while also soft as butter.” I’m convinced!  And she adds, “I knew I would probably never taste such a thing again.”  

Anyway, I’m glad she said probably and didn’t rule it out altogether.