On sliminess and shivers of pleasure – Andrew Irwin in TLS:

‘Having studied in Chengdu in the 1990s and enrolled in the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine, Dunlop is today one of Britain’s best-known writers on Chinese cooking, with books including Sichuan Cookery and Land of Fish and Rice. In Invitation to a Banquet she offers a vivid account of China’s food culture, going back to its mythical past to trace the diversity of flavours, textures and techniques that blossomed in the millennia that followed.’

(…)

‘Early on the act of cooking ingredients took on a special cultural weight, a symbol of civilization itself. For the ancient Chinese the development of cooking marked a distinction not just between human beings and animals, but also between the culture of China and those of neighbouring groups. “To be Chinese”, writes Dunlop, “to be civilized and properly human, was to cook, to transform the world through fire and seasoning.” Remnants of that idea persist today: “despite the recent appearance of leafy salads and sashimi on metropolitan restaurant menus, most food is transformed from its untouched natural state by heat or at least by pickling, and the old disdain for raw foods lingers. Vegetables are most commonly cooked; raw meat and fish dishes are extremely unusual”. She recounts the disappointment she observed among her Chinese companions on a visit to the Culinary Institute of America, provided day after day with an unending battery of excellent salads.’

(…)

‘Impressive here is not just her evident mastery of her material, but also the skill with which she translates it to her audience, gracefully pitching the level of context and explanation. Across subsequent chapters Dunlop sketches the development of geng and tang – the former a thick stew-like soup, the latter a delicate, clear broth that, at home, is drunk “with almost every meal”. She lays out the vast territory that the soy bean occupies in the Chinese culinary landscape and tells the history of soy sauce and its thicker antecedent, jiang, which “dates back more than two thousand years, to before the time of Confucius”.’

(…)

‘Dunlop has a particular knack for conveying the multisensory experience of eating. Of drunken crab, a dish of freshwater crabs soused in baijiu, she writes: “Ice-cold and vividly slimy, with a scintillating kick of liquor, the flesh and ovaries of the crab made me shiver with pleasure. They were as creamily voluptuous as foie gras, yet simultaneously as brisk and arresting as a raw oyster”.’

Read the article here.

To be civilized is to transform the world through fire and seasoning. This minimalist approach is dear to me.
Of course, we make an exception for cannibalism.

See Peter Greenaway’s movie ‘The cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover’.

Seasoning doesn’t help the cannibal much.