The affair began one September day in 1993. My friend Zhou Yu invited me out to lunch on my very first visit to Chengdu, the capital of China's Sichuan Province. We ate in a modest restaurant near the bus station, a small place tiled in white like a bathroom, with a few tables and chairs and nothing on the walls. I can still remember every taste of that delicious meal. The preserved eggs, with their green-and-yellow yolks and amber whites, cut into segments and arranged around a pile of chopped green peppers like the petals of a flower. Cold chicken chunks, tossed in a piquant dressing of soy sauce, chilli oil and Sichuan pepper. A whole carp, braised in a sauce of chilli-bean paste laced with the heady fragrances of ginger, garlic and spring onions. And fish-fragrant aubergines, a dish which remains my personal favourite, the golden, buttery fried aubergines cooked in a deep red, spicy sauce with hints of sweet and sour. Later that afternoon, as we sat in a riverside teahouse sipping jasmine blossom tea as the sunlight danced through the leaves of sheltering trees, I realised I had fallen in love. I would have to return to Chengdu.
A year later it was my fond memories of eating in the city which brought me back to Chengdu. I was there ostensibly to study at the university but I had only to step outside the campus to be overwhelmed by the hubbub of Sichuanese life with its sprawling teahouses, bustling restaurants and vibrant lanes. Every morning I would be seduced anew by the scent of frying guo kuei, pinwheel pastries with a spicy pork filling and a scattering of toasty sesame seeds. A hundred yards or so from the door of my room, just beyond a side gate of the university, was a market overflowing with fresh and seasonal produce. Fish leapt and eels wriggled in tanks of water, ducks and chickens squawked in their pens. Vegetables and fruits were piled up in great bamboo trays: water spinach and bamboo shoots, garlic stems and bitter melons, seasonal treats like three-coloured amaranth leaves, loquats and 'spring shoots', the tender leaves of a local tree. One stall sold a dozen different types of beancurd; others displayed great sackfuls of glossy red chillies and pink Sichuan pepper, or enormous clay urns filled with rice wine.
The restaurants around the university offered delicious food at incredibly modest prices. At lunchtimes I often sat outside a tiny noodle shop paying about 20p to slurp a bowlful of 'sea-flavoured noodles' in a scrumptious soup of dried shrimps, mushrooms and bamboo shoot, or gulp down the infamous 'dan dan noodles' in their fiery sesame sauce. In the evenings I devoured twice-cooked pork and pock-marked mother Chen's beancurd with plenty of stir-fried vegetables and plain steamed rice. At first it was hard to get used to the visible cruelty of Chinese cooking. In the markets, rabbits would be skinned alive for maximum freshness, live paddy eels impaled on a nail and stripped of spine and innards, chickens and ducks plucked when they were scarcely dead. Chinese cooks would prepare living ingredients as if they were vegetables, with no thought of any pain or suffering. Interestingly, the Chinese word for animal, dong wu, simply means 'moving thing'; it seems to carry no connotations of breath or spirit like the English 'animal' and its European relations. Some of this cruelty still disturbs me, but at least it's honest: and much less hypocritical than the cruelty of the British food industry where consumers buy their meat safe and sanitised while the animals languish in battery pens.
For the first few months, like most Europeans, I shied away from the wilder waters of Chinese cuisine, intimidated by the subtle play of slithery and crunchy textures. In the beginning it was English good manners which made me eat goose intestines, rabbit ears and ox's throat, but as time went by I found I was actually ordering these things myself. The Chengdu equivalent of the late-night doner kebab at that time was fried rabbit heads, a snack I'd heard about from a Canadian friend. I'd seen the rabbit heads sitting ominously in glass cabinets, earless and skinless, staring out with beady rabbit eyes and pointy teeth. The idea of eating one was utterly revolting. But one night, after a long dancing session, I fetched up at a street stall bedraggled and hungry. My reason befuddled by alcohol, I ate my first rabbit head, cleft in half and tossed in a wok with chilli and spring onion. I won't begin to describe the silky richness of the flesh along the jaw, the melting softness of the eyeball, the luxuriant smoothness of the brain. Suffice it to say that from that day on I ate stir-fried rabbit heads almost every Saturday night.
.Every day brought new gastronomic discoveries: perhaps a street vendor specialising in a type of traditional dumpling I hadn't encountered before, or a peasant with a basket filled with some unusual seasonal fruit. It wasn't long before I decided I had to learn how to cook some of the local dishes, and I was delighted to find out that Chengdu was the home of one of China's finest cooking schools. I set out on my bicycle one day to find it, and knew I had arrived when I heard coming from a window above me the sound of fast, regular chopping, and the gentle hum of china spoons in china bowls. I wandered in and found myself in a room filled with dozens of apprentice chefs, all engrossed in learning the art of sauces. Some pounded Sichuan pepper to a powder with iron pestles, others fine-chopped pale garlic and golden ginger stems. A teacher sat nearby, sniffing and tasting the dark liquids in their crucibles, jotting down marks in a little notebook. By the end of the day I had come to a deal with the staff of the school. They would provide a cooking teacher and an interpreter as well as all the raw ingredients, and I would pay them the equivalent of about £5 each for a class.
For the next month I took twice-weekly private classes at the school. The class teacher, Gan Guojian, a brilliant cook took me through the methods for several famous local dishes, such as 'fish-fragrant' pork slivers and Gong Bao chicken. In every class I would tackle a couple of recipes, learning the basics of cutting and marinating, and trying my hand at the wok. The cooking classes were the highlight of my week and so I was delighted when, some months later, I was invited to enrol as a regular student on a full-time chef's training course. This was a great privilege as no foreigner had ever done this. The school's leaders were particularly kind in allowing me to pay the same price as the other students - a little more than £100 for a three-month course. I think they were all intrigued and rather touched by a foreigner's passion for their local cuisine. On my enrolment I was issued with chef's overalls, two textbooks (in Chinese) and a personal cleaver, which I was expected to keep razor sharp by frequent visits to the enormous whetstone in the yard.
For three months I studied cookery every day with 45 young Sichuanese men and three young women. Professional kitchens in Sichuan are very male-dominated: women are rarely trusted with a wok, and if they are allowed to prepare food it is usually the cold dishes, which are assembled and seasoned in a separate room. None of my classmates at the cooking school had ever previously met a foreigner face to face and most of them weren't quite sure how to deal with it. In the beginning they avoided addressing me directly, and if they did pluck up the courage to talk to me, they would simply call me 'foreigner'(lao wai). It took a couple of weeks of campaigning before I could persuade some of them that I actually had a name. Being the only foreigner, and almost the only woman in a class of mostly 20-something Sichuanese men, could be wearisome, but such was my delight in the actual cooking that I never minded too much.
Every morning I would cycle across the city from my flat to the cooking school, picking up a couple of hot steamed buns or dumplings for breakfast on the way. The first part of the day, which began at about 8.30am, was spent in the classroom, listening to a lecture on the dishes of the day. Our teacher would take us through the minutiae of ingredients and cooking methods, scribbling diagrams and Chinese characters on the blackboard, answering our questions about cutting methods and oil temperatures. All our classes were taught in Sichuan dialect, and I struggled to keep up in the beginning. Fortunately some of my classmates would help me out when I got stuck, translating things I didn't understand into Mandarin, and jotting down vital Chinese characters in my notebook. Every student would be casually carrying around a lethally-sharp cleaver, which took some getting used to. To begin with I retained my European view of the cleaver as a bloody, murderous knife - it was only later that I began to appreciate it as the subtle, versatile instrument that it really is. (The cleaver is usually the only knife in a Chinese kitchen, and it is used for every kind of cutting, from peeling ginger and garlic cloves to chopping through meat and bone; the flat of the blade is also used for crushing pieces of ginger to release their juices, and for scooping up cut foods and transferring them from chopping board to wok.)
After the morning break we would reassemble in the demonstration room. Our teacher would start by tackling the raw ingredients, showing us precisely how they should be chopped and marinated, and mixing sauces in little china bowls. Our teachers' skills with the cleaver were mesmerising. I remember watching one teacher, Long Qingrong, showing us how to remove the bones and innards from a duck. She made a small incision through the neck and spine and then proceeded to undress the bird, casually removing the entire skin and flesh as she chatted, coaxing out the leg- and wing-bones, wielding the huge knife as delicately as if it were a scalpel.
For stir-fried dishes, every pair of eyes was riveted on the smoking wok at the centre of the room. Sichuanese cooks are famous for their skill of huo hou(the control of the degree and duration of cooking heat). Every dish would have its own huo hou requirements. 'Dry-fried' foods like beef and paddy eels would be stir-fried over a moderate heat until they yielded up their moisture and became partially dry and exquisitely fragrant. Sichuanese chilli and broad bean paste would always be 'fried fragrant' (chao xiang) in oil just hot enough to extract its deep red colour and sumptuous taste.
In the afternoons it was our turn to try. In groups of 10 we would prepare our raw ingredients, and then each of us would take our turn at the wok. As we worked, our teachers walked around the room, ticking us off for careless or irregular cutting. The art of cutting is fundamental to Chinese cooking. We had to learn all the different knife techniques, and the myriad of different shapes into which food can be cut. There were 'horse-ear' slices of pickled chilli; slivers, cubes and chunks of meat and poultry, 'fish-eye' slices of spring onion, wafer-thin 'ox-tongue' slices of radish and lettuce stem. The cooking itself was a very public affair. The person actually cooking would be surrounded by the rest of the team, who would jeer or giggle if anything went wrong. 'Too much oil!' 'It's all dried-out!' 'The sauce has gone all sticky!' I was always under particular scrutiny, and it was a great satisfaction when my dishes turned out well and impressed my classmates. Some of the cooking ingredients were alive when they reached us, and killing them was part of the deal. I was a bit horrified when I saw a classmate busily ripping the gills out of live crucian carp before he gutted them. 'Why don't you kill them first?' I asked. He shrugged his shoulders and looked at me as if I was a bit weird. 'They don't have a soul,' he said.
Since the cooking course finished five years ago, I have returned to Sichuan every year, sometimes for months at a time, to continue my research. The cooking profession has a low social status in China but the appreciation of food is something that transcends all class and cultural boundaries. My work has brought me into contact with all kinds of people: the eminent journalist and writer Che Fu, a lively man in his eighties, who entertained me with his loving reminiscences of Chengdu street food in the 1930s; the gloomy cadre I met once on a train bound for Canton whose eyes brimmed with emotion as he confessed to his terrible longings for Sichuanese pickled vegetables whenever he was away from home; the market vendor who took me home to her village to visit a beancurd-making workshop; the sullen taxi drivers who lit up with excitement when asked to describe their favourite dumplings.
Researching Sichuanese food has been a ceaseless pleasure. But it has also had its complications. Like everyone else, I started out in China with my own cultural prejudices, my own food preferences and taboos, which all had to be dismantled, one by one. But the more I learn about China's food culture, the more fascinated I become. Nothing written about Chinese food in the West gives you any idea of the grand scale, diversity and sophistication of Chinese cuisine. We might have heard about the four great regional cuisines of China, but we don't realise that almost every country town seems to have its own culinary speciality. We might know that the Cantonese 'eat anything that moves', but we don't really appreciate the cutting, flavouring and cooking techniques which can create innumerable different taste experiences from even the most common ingredients. There's a restaurant I know in Leshan, the southern Sichuanese city famed for its giant Buddha statue, which serves over 40 different dishes made with the fine local beancurd. And that's by no means extraordinary. So next time you dine on sweet-and-sour pork and egg-fried rice in a British Chinese restaurant, please don't forget that that is just the tip, the merest, tiniest tip of the iceberg.
• Sichuan Cookery by Fuchsia Dunlop is published by Michael Joseph £20.. Fuchsia first became interested in China while working as a sub-editor for the BBC. She began learning Chinese in evening classes, and in 1994 went to Sichuan University on a year-long British Council postgraduate scholarships. Afterwards, she attended a full-time course at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, and has since returned to Sichuan every year to continue her research into the local cuisine. She is now a cookery writer.
