Invitation to a Banquet (Fuchsia Dunlop)

Finalist for the 2024 IACP Award for Literary or Historical Food WritingAn NPR 2023 "Books We Love" Pick • A Food & Wine Best Food Book of 2023 • A Financial Times Best Food and Drink Book of 2023 • One of Smithsonian's Ten Best Books About Food of 2023The world’s most sophisticated gastronomic culture, brilliantly presented through a banquet of thirty Chinese dishes. Chinese was the earliest truly global cuisine. When the first Chinese laborers began to settle abroad, restaurants appeared in their wake. Yet Chinese has the curious distinction of being both one of the world’s best-loved culinary traditions and one of the least understood. For more than a century, the overwhelming dominance of a simplified form of Cantonese cooking ensured that few foreigners experienced anything of its richness and sophistication—but today that is beginning to change. In Invitation to a Banquet, award-winning cook and writer Fuchsia Dunlop explores the history, philosophy, and techniques of Chinese