Fist-thick Chinese cooking bible full of regional recipes

In the footsteps of Fuchsia Dunlop

In all the years that Alice has been in China, she has built up an enormous collection of cookbooks, right down to centuries-old source texts. She also attended workshops there. In 2010, for example, she did a course of a few weeks in Chengdu (Sichuan) to understand Chuancai, the cuisine of Sichuan. That was exactly the same school where the famous Fuchsia Dunlop had attended before her. From 2001 onwards, this Englishwoman was the first to put Sichuan cuisine on the map in the West, with award-winning cookbooks.

Alice: “I really wanted to go there, of course! That’s how I ended up at a chef’s school among a few thousand young students, the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, a top course. With a small group of foreigners we were taught there and learned, for example, that there are as many as 23 taste profiles in the cuisine of Sichuan, of which the taste of the dish mapu doufu is one. In the cooking bible I describe what I experienced there, but I didn’t incorporate all those differences into the recipes in the book, that goes way too far for the home cook,” laughs Alice.

Not cuisines but regions

According to the common Chinese classification, there are four or eight Chinese ‘cuisines’. Lǔ cài , for example, is about the Shandong region. Alice: “That is often difficult for outsiders to understand. That is why I have opted for a regional approach in the cooking bible. Six regions: north, east, south, west, northeast, northwest. Within that, I cover 22 cities, with ten recipes per city. This created structure. I first looked at the most famous dish, for example the soup noodles from Guilin, and looked for more recipes. In Kunming (the Yunnan kitchen), recipes with fresh mushrooms and bamboo are central.”

Makeable in Western cuisine

For Alice, it is important that dishes are doable in an average Western kitchen. For example, dishes such as the famous boiled freshwater fish Xīhú cùyú from Hangzhou (Zhejiang) did not make it into the cooking bible. The black Changsha chòu dòufu (smelly tofu from Hunan) also turned out to be too complex in practice. Alice did include the sauce, the broth, of that dish in the book, so that it can be prepared with the tofu we are familiar with. So without that black color. A recipe to make tofu yourself is in the book, as is the one for dumpling sheets and noodles.

Fan of pasta from northern regions

On the other hand, she certainly does not shy away from challenges for the reader. What about ‘steamed oat tubes’, a paste made of oat flour, rolled in a kind of cannelloni shape? Alice: “A recipe I had heard of, but had no idea how to make it. It was a very nice job to figure that out. Just like the ‘three-layer pasta’ from Taiyuan: first a layer of wheat flour, then a layer of sorghum flour and finally wheat again. Delicious! By the way, I am a big fan of pasta from the northern regions.”
A well-known region in the north is Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu. There, Alice followed an intensive course in noodle chef training in 2019. “A real Chinese education. Even on weekends, the lessons continued, it was very intensive and we slept in the dormitory. We learned not only to pull noodles by hand, but also to make soup and other side dishes.”

All of China is eating hotter

In recent years, numerous Xi’an and Lanzhou-like noodle eateries have also settled in the West, often from Chinese chains. Many people are now familiar with the famous, wide and hand-drawn noodles Biángbiángmiàn 𰻝𰻝面 from Shaanxi. Those dishes can also be quite hot in taste.
Alice has noticed that people in China have generally started to eat hotter in recent years. “In the past, kitchens were and remained mainly local. But now there are many migrant workers who travel all over the country in search of work. They bring their own flavors to the areas where they end up, making the restaurant offer much more diverse everywhere. Sichuan cuisine in particular has been well received nationally; hence the trend of eating hotter.”

Back to the cooking bible: it contains no less than 230 recipes (one of which can be found at the bottom of this article) and a brief history of Chinese cuisines. Alice publishes a more extensive version of that history on her Substack Big Biang Café https://alicedejong.substack.com/
(longread) https://alicedejong.substack.com/p/een-korte-geschiedenis-van-de-chinese

Anyone who has been cooking Chinese for some time will undoubtedly also know Alice from the Tokowijzer.nl https://tokowijzer.nl/ the platform where she shares all her knowledge about tokos and the ingredients that are for sale there.

Another interview with Alice can be heard in the podcast Watschaftdepodcast.com (ep. 190) https://watschaftdepodcast.com/podcasts/

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The Bible of Chinese Cuisine, by Alice de Jong. 496 pages. Publisher Carrera Culinair.