Fuschia Dunlop on Magic Ingredients + Fish Fragrant Eggplant 🌞
Last edited Fri Jul 18, 2025, 04:28 PM - Edit history (3)
Hello fellow wokkers 
MAGIC INGREDIENTS
One of the reasons simple Chinese cooking is so exciting is
the use of what I think of as magic ingredients: richly
flavored seasonings that transform common foods into
delicacies fit for an emperor.
Just as the Italians might use a sprinkle of Parmesan to awaken
the tastes of an entire plateful of pasta, or shave white truffle over
a simple poached egg to turn it into something ambrosial, Chinese
cooks use small amounts of dried shiitake mushrooms, soy sauce,
preserved vegetables, dried shrimp and other seasonings to enhance
the flavors of fresh produce. Getting to know these magic ingredients
is the key to making largely vegetarian ingredients taste
so delicious that you won’t miss meat at all.
A NOTE ON UMAMI
The word “umami” has come to refer to the rich, savory tastes of
some ingredients. It was first used in this way in 1908 by a Japanese
scientist who discovered that the irresistible savory taste of kombu
seaweed came from its natural glutamates; “umami” was the name
he gave to their taste. Many of the foods that cooks have used for
centuries to create intense savory flavors—such as cured hams,
Parmesan and dried fish—are now known to be rich in umami
compounds. Umami, it turns out, is just a new word for something
good cooks have known about for a very long time. I find umami
an invaluable concept in thinking about food, so I use it freely
in this book
Preserved vegetables
A wide variety of salt-preserved and brine-pickled vegetables are used
across China for their salt-sour, umami flavors. They add a delicious savory
richness to all kinds of dishes, and are particularly exciting with fresh peas
and beans. If you’ve ever eaten Sichuanese dry-fried beans and wondered
about those utterly delicious dark crinkly bits that cling to the beans, they
are one of these preserves, Sichuanese ya cai.
****************************************************************************
Recipe:
FISH-FRAGRANT EGGPLANT
YU XIANG QIE ZI
1¼ lbs (600g) eggplant
Salt
Cooking oil, for deep-frying (1½ cups plus 2 tbsp/400ml will do if
you are using a round-bottomed wok)
1½ tbsp Sichuanese chilli bean paste, or Sichuan pickled chilli
paste, or a mixture of the two
1 tbsp finely chopped ginger
1 tbsp finely chopped garlic
⅔ cup (150ml) chicken stock
2 tsp sugar
¾ tsp potato flour mixed with 1 tbsp cold water
2 tsp Chinkiang vinegar
4 tbsp finely sliced spring onion greens
Cut the eggplant lengthways into three thick slices, then cut these into
evenly sized batons. Sprinkle them with salt, mix well and leave in a
colander for at least 30 minutes to drain.
In a wok, heat the oil for deep-frying to 350°F (180°C). Add the eggplant in
batches and deep-fry for three to four minutes until slightly golden on the
outside and soft and buttery within. Remove and drain on paper towels.
Drain the deep-frying oil, rinse the wok if necessary, then return it to a
medium flame. When the wok is hot again, add 3 tbsp of oil. Add the chilli
bean paste and stir-fry until the oil is red and fragrant, then add the ginger
and garlic and continue to stir-fry until you can smell their aromas. Take
care not to burn these seasonings; remove the wok from the heat for a few
seconds if necessary to control the temperature (you want a gentle, coaxing
sizzle, not a scorching heat).
Add the stock and sugar and mix well. Season with salt to taste if necessary.
Add the fried eggplant to the sauce and let them simmer gently for a minute
or so to absorb some of the flavors. Then stir the potato flour mixture, pour
it over the eggplant and stir in gently to thicken the sauce. Add the vinegar
and spring onions and stir a few times, then serve.
From Every Grain of Rice
]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13707601-every-grain-of-rice
Who is Fuschia Dunlop?
In 1994 she won a British Council scholarship for a year of postgraduate study in China where she chose to study at Sichuan University. She began as a researcher on Chinese ethnic minorities but eventually stayed on to take a three-month chef’s training course at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine.[8]
Career
Returning to London, Dunlop studied for an Area Studies master's degree at SOAS and began to review Chinese restaurants for the Time Out Eating Guide to London. Continuing to write on Chinese food for newspapers and magazines, she now worked on her first book, rejected by several publishers as "too regional"[9] but published as Sichuan Cookery in Britain (2001) and as Land of Plenty in the United States (2003). It won the Guild of Food Writers Jeremy Round Award for a best first book.[10]
For her next book, Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, she looked eastwards. Hunan province is "revolutionary" as the birthplace of Mao Zedong, but Hunan cuisine, unlike that of its neighbour Sichuan, was scarcely known outside China: "Both are fertile, subtropical areas with rugged, wild terrain and rich cropland fed by major rivers, and they share robust folk cooking, big flavors and blazing hot chilies. Yet [she] argues persuasively for Hunan as a separate culinary presence", Anne Mendelson wrote in a review in The New York Times.[11][12] Continuing an exploration of regional Chinese food, in "Garden of Contentment" (in The New Yorker, 2008) Dunlop profiled the Dragon Well Manor,[13] a restaurant that is "committed to offering its guests a kind of prelapsarian Chinese cuisine" in Hangzhou, a centre of the ancient region of Jiangnan.[14] The cookery of this same region, modern Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces, is covered in her third regional cookbook, Land of Fish and Rice (2016). In China, she explains, this cuisine "is known historically for its extraordinary knife work, delicate flavors [and] extreme reverence for ingredients,"[15] as encapsulated in the nostalgic phrase chún lú zhī sī "thinking of perch and water shield", two ancient local specialities.[9]
Meanwhile with Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking (2012)[16][17] Dunlop gained her fourth James Beard Award
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuchsia_Dunlop