Chilli Mama's Szechuan Kitchen

The Sydney Morning Herald had a great story on the chef and author, Fuchsia Dunlop, one of the popularisers of Sichuanese cuisine overseas: ‘Fuchsia Dunlop wants us all to eat more Sichuan food.’

Dunlop went to Sichuan in the mid-1990s, and as the article explains:

While in Sichuan on a one-year visa, she decided to do a private course at the Institute of Higher Cuisine after falling in love with the dumplings, pickles, hotpots, fish cookery and the fact that the Sichuanese eat a chilli-laced meal three times a day. A few weeks before she was due to head home to the UK, Dunlop dropped into the cooking school to say goodbye. She bumped into the principal, who asked her to stay for another six months and do some professional training. She was the first Western woman ever to be asked to do so.

The long-term results have been impressive: more than five books on Chinese cuisine, including her book, The Food of Sichuan, which sits proudly in Greg’s home office. She was invited out for the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival, and the SMH took the opportunity to interview her and visit some Sichuan restaurants in Sydney with her.

Her book is a treasure, with stories about the cooks, the farmers and craftspeople who make the ingredients, and the many people of Sichuan who are so passionate about their distinctive cuisine. Although filled with authentic recipes and mouth-watering photographs, her cookbook also reads like an ethnographic study, a great anthropologist of food describing, not just how to recreate a dish, but how that dish fits into the lives of those who first created it.

The author for the SMH points out that the rise of Sichuan cuisine in Australia is part of a broader pattern:

There’s a cultural tremor you can taste, see and smell in Australia. If you spend enough time in any major capital city, you’ll notice that while the Cantonese restaurants still loom large and grandly, there are fewer of them opening. In their shadows, it’s the regional cuisines of mainland China moving in, with Sichuan province dominating. “It’s the same everywhere,” says Dunlop. “Cantonese is not the most fashionable cuisine. It’s Sichuanese.”

Although we love our Cantonese stand-bys, from the soup dumplings and char sui pork to the dim sum and congee that have long been part of Australian cuisine, we love being part of the rise of Sichuan and other regional cuisines outside the country. China is a continent-sized range of cuisines — so many adventures for the palate!