19. ①British gourmet Fuchsia Dunlop's posts (帖子) on WeChat or Instagram, serve up a diet of humor. Most of the posts are about her experience with food from around the world. But since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in London in February, 2020, cooking has becoming a way for her to manage the "endless lockdown". She says she cooks in a very relaxed way, going to the farmers' market at the weekend to buy seasonal products for everyday cooking — a mixture of Jiangnan, Hunan, Guangdong, and Sichuan dishes.
②"For me, there are so many wonderful things about Chinese food. The thing that I find is greatest about it is that you can eat food that is both really delicious and incredibly healthy, " Dunlop says. "The Chinese are experts at cooking vegetables, so it is very easy for me to eat Chinese food almost every day. "
③Growing up in Oxford, Dunlop dreamed of becoming a cook when she was little. However, her dream did not start to materialize until she came to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, as a university student in 1994. That was when she began learning local cooking skills at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine.
④Always keeping a notebook on hand wherever she went, she wrote down the recipes of the dishes she tasted. Based on her knowledge of Sichuan cuisine, Dunlop published her first book, Sichuan Cookery, in 2001, which was hailed by the Observer Food Monthly as "one of the top to0 cookbooks of all time".
⑤Since then, she has published four books about Sichuan cuisine, and one in 2016 about recipes from Jiangnan, called Land of Fish and Rice.
⑥Now, a Chinese version of Land of Fish and Rice, translated by He Yujia, is available. In the book, Dunlop displays her deep understanding of the food culture that runs deep in the blood of Chinese people.
⑦Having studied Chinese food culture for nearly twenty years, she sees the Jiangnan area as the heartland of the nation's gastronomy.
⑧"Although you have really interesting and delicious food all over China, in this area, especially, many people wrote about it and discussed it. Many of the old classic food books came from this area, for example. So if you talk about gastronomy, then Jiangnan is a really important area," she says.
⑨Dunlop spent 10 years researching the book.