From KCRW, I'm Evan Kliman and you're listening to good food.

I mean I have tried on many occasions to impress Chinese friends with Western cooking

with with no success whatsoever because they normally find you know they just prefer Chinese food

but funnily enough I have managed to impress quite senior Chinese chefs with roast potatoes which I parboil and then roast in you know

duck fat or goose fat and the Chinese don't really go in for potatoes in the

same way that Europeans do. And so they have found that lovely

crunch and the golden fragrance of rose potatoes utterly delicious.

Fuchsia Dunlap has dedicated the better part of her life to the study of Chinese cuisine.

As the first Westerner to train at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, she went on to write numerous critically acclaimed books on Chinese cooking and food culture.

Her latest project, Invitation to a Banquet, examines the history of Chinese food through a menu of 30 dishes.

Hi Shusha!

Hi, Avon.

Oh, it's just every time you come up with a new book, I'm just so happy.

I'm so delighted to hear that I'm so excited

Chinese cuisine is so epic it's such an epic cuisine

it goes back centuries, millennia.

Can you talk about how the culture itself, how Chinese culture is guided by food?

Well, I think that the Chinese, as I argue in the book, I mean, they very much have identified

themselves since ancient times as people who cook, who eat cooked food.

So in the distant past, in the classic texts,

you find this idea that the Chinese were people who

civilized their food after the discovery of fire by cooking it and at that point they left behind

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