We will have to wait in the US until Feb of 2007, but..... Fuchsia
Dunlop will have a new cookbook coming out, called "Revolutionary
Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province". Those UK folks will
have it much sooner, June 22, 2006.

Ian

ian wrote:
We will have to wait in the US until Feb of 2007, but..... Fuchsia
Dunlop will have a new cookbook coming out, called "Revolutionary
Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province". Those UK folks will
have it much sooner, June 22, 2006.

Ian

cool! the Sichuan one is absolutely salivating. i
read it just before going to Chengdu to eat and was
very impressed with *real* Sichuan cuisine. and the
hotpot there is out of this world, btw.

fabulous. not a fan of Chinese food [Sichuan is an
exeption] but i will check out her new book in my
usual UK book shop in Amstie.

Steve Wertz wrote:

On Wed, 10 May 2006 20:24:28 -0400, ian wrote:


We will have to wait in the US until Feb of 2007, but..... Fuchsia
Dunlop will have a new cookbook coming out, called "Revolutionary
Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province". Those UK folks will
have it much sooner, June 22, 2006.


Her Sichuan book was remaindered and selling for $5 here at Half
Price Books in Austin. I've been reading it at the dinner table
for the last few weeks. It's a very good book. She apparently
studied there and has some very authentic, classic recipes from
the area.

I wonder how good of a Hunan book she's have...

-sw

Wow - $5! Thats a steal. Buy two! The Kung Pao from her recipe is the
absolute best you will ever taste. The dry-fried beef in Sechaun bean
paste is delish. And so on - its a great book.

I'm expecting that the Hunan one will be at least equally as good.


ian

Saudades (FG) wrote:

ian wrote:

We will have to wait in the US until Feb of 2007, but..... Fuchsia
Dunlop will have a new cookbook coming out, called "Revolutionary
Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province". Those UK folks will
have it much sooner, June 22, 2006.

Ian


cool! the Sichuan one is absolutely salivating. i read it just before
going to Chengdu to eat and was very impressed with *real* Sichuan
cuisine. and the hotpot there is out of this world, btw.

Lucky you. I picked up a China travle book at a local sale recently, and
started reading about the Chengdu area. Soonr or latr, I will be visiting!

ian

Steve Wertz wrote:

On Thu, 11 May 2006 21:41:12 -0400, ian wrote:


Wow - $5! Thats a steal. Buy two! The Kung Pao from her recipe is the
absolute best you will ever taste.


I just made it tonight for the first time. Definitely a keeper.
It combines hot/pungent, sour, salty and sweet. You can never go
wrong with those 4 flavors together (and I added MSG too, for
that controversial 5th flavor).

That recipe doesn't make enough sauce, IMO. Double the sauce
ingredients, including chicken stock.


The dry-fried beef in Sechaun bean paste is delish.


I'm still having trouble finding a decent hot bean-paste.
Actually, any hot bean paste. Plenty of soy-based bean sauces,
though.

Sorry folks, I scoured the Internet looking for the Gong-Bao
(Kung-Pao) recipe to post it, but couldn't find the exact recipe
in the book. Send me $1 and I'll transcribe it for you.

-sw

I have never found a fava-bean sauce either, but the LKK Szechuan Hot
Bean Sauce (Toban Djian) seems good to me.

The recipe is available he

http://www.leitesculinaria.com/recip.../kung_pao.html

Cheers,

Ian

ian wrote:

Lucky you. I picked up a China travle book at a local sale recently, and
started reading about the Chengdu area. Soonr or latr, I will be visiting!

ian


a week after i returned from Tibet and China my 10kg
box of spices and tea arrived. and then i unpacked
the box... oooohhhhhhhhhhhh....the amazing smell of
Chengdu!!! that smell took me right back to that
place. the place of the good life, good food, good
tea. so cheap too! [where in China can a pair of
tourists eat dinner for less than a euro only
knowing how to say 'thank you' in Chinese ?!]

i think you'll want to go to Chengdu asap if you see
my China food pix! hahah....

cheers

another box from Tibet should arrive soon [i hope]

Halle-frickin'-luja.

I've two Hunan cookbooks, by Hi-Lit and by Wei-Chuan, both publishing
houses in Taiwan, and after reading, rereading them and
cross-referencing them with one another and with some of Wei-Chuan's
other cookbooks (Chinese Cuisine: Shanghai Style and Chinese Cuisine:
Taiwanese Style), I've come to the conclusion that they express a
Taiwanese rather than authentically Hunanese cuisine.

It's sort of depressing especially in light of the introduction to the
Hi-Lit "Chinese Regional Cuisine" Hunan book, which appears to be
cribbed together from other (unknown!) sources and bears almost no
relation to the recipes after it; the intro is full of tantalizing
descriptions of home-style specialties, famous local baked goods, teas
and unique regional ingredients (such as tea oil, and "mushroom oil")
which show up NOWHERE in the rest of the book. Both books feature a lot
of seafood (not a very inland-China sort of thing) and both seem to
showcase the Taiwanese creations of chefs at fancy Hunanese restaurants
in Taiwan. There's two strikes against that last one: on the one hand,
these are special fancy dishes, in some cases of very recent invention;
and on the other, the recipes as developed are calibrated to the
palates of Taiwanese diners. Eg. miniscule amounts of dou ban jian are
called for in Wei-Chuan's Sichuan book, compared to Dunlop and to Delf.
So perhaps there is some Hunanese style, heavily filtered through
Taiwanese cooking traditions and local ingredients (for example, "soy
sauce", instead of light and dark mainland chinese soy sauce; and all
that seafood), but not actual recipes from Hunan.

I'm not an unconditional fan of Dunlop's first book, but will be
delighted to see her take on Hunan.

Incidentally I've been haunted for years by the memory of the
specialties served by a small, junk-food-y restaurant which used to be
located near Purdue University around 1990. It was in a strip mall and
has long since been supplanted by several sets of other tenants; but it
used to be very popular with Chinese grad students in the area and was
very cheap - you paid something like $3 and got a plate with a large
pile of rice, 2 dishes of your choice and an egg roll. The specialties
in question - evocatively named "Chicken with Vegetable" and "Spicy
Chicken" - were nothing like anything I've had in a Chinese restaurant
anywhere else. Both dishes were basically long shreds of chicken with
sliced onion, sliced western style cabbage, and a few long chards of
carrot, drowning in slightly differing amounts of hot oil (with some
sugar and salty, maybe a hint of soy, in the background). American
ingredients, definitely not American style. I've long wondered what
regional cuisine it represented.

Best - krnntp

Hey! It turns out I misremembered my own cookbooks and my
dissatisfactions with them - it's a bit more mangled than I described
above, and Wei-Chuan doesn't have a Hunan book (I wondered why I
couldn't recall it better). It turns out that I compared Hi-Lit's
Taiwanese book to Wei-Chuan's Taiwanese book, the two of them to
Wei-Chuan's Shanghai book, the two of them again to Hi-Lit's Hunan
book, and then the Shanghai and Hunan books to eachother. The
similarities were depressing.

I'm all for, and interested in exploring, Taiwanese style cooking, but
it was a bit annoying to find that several books I had hoped weren't
Taiwanese seemingly were, at least to some extent... an extent which
for me was unknowable.

I'd looked in vain for a Hunan book besides Hi-Lit's, with no luck. So
Fuchsia Dunlop's newest will be doubly welcome.

By the way, the Hi-Lit Taiwanese cookbook suffered from some of the
split personality of the Hunan book. Once again, there was a
fascinating introduction which seemed unrelated to the main text: most
of the intro was a rambling paean to the many snack food specialties of
different districts in Taiwan (my achilles heel, snack foods / street
food and baked goods). Unfortunately, none of these recipes made it
into the cookbook.

Best - krnntp