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Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-sour Memoir
of Eating in China
by Fuchsia Dunlop
320pp, Ebury, pounds 16.99
T pounds 14.99 (plus pounds 1.25 p&p) 0870 428 4112
Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table
by Sara Roahen
293pp, W W Norton, pounds 15.99
T pounds 14.99 (plus pounds 1.25 p&p) 0870 428 4112
Sacre Cordon Bleu: What the French Know About Cooking
by Michael Booth
319pp, Cape, pounds 12.99
T pounds 11.99 (plus pounds 1.25 p&p) 0870 428 4112
A pub within staggering distance of my house
has recently started advertising "Home-Made Food Cooked Daily". "Cooked" is a fairly generous interpretation of what goes on in the kitchen, which mostly involves the muffled ping of a microwave and whatever can be retrieved from the bottom of a deep-fat fryer: limp scampi, sweaty pastry, chips the colour of a Scotsman's fingers. Still, the customers seem happy enough. And why shouldn't they be? They've come for the sense of security and belonging that is held out by a promise of
home-made food. Eating familiar food reveals a tortoise-like desire to carry our homes around with us.
But as these culinary memoirs reveal, not all of us are tortoises. Some are chameleons, who seek to blend into their surroundings by eating like a local. Fuchsia Dunlop's account of several lengthy periods spent in China is the most compelling of the three, not...