W. W. Norton & Company The Food of Sichuan

For first book I'd recommend Kenji's Wok book (or Food Lab). But if you want to deepen your knowledge in chinese cuisine and you're a fan of hot food - Sichuan will be the best deep dive.

Excellent book! good quality. Like Fuchsia Dunlop

I'm a chinese girl who was born and grew up in Canada. My mom spoiled me and never let me help her cook, so when I moved away for university, my cooking skill was 0/10. After cooking from western internet recipes for many years, I could only satisfy my homecooked chinese food craving when I visited home. That is, until I discovered Fuschia Dunlop's recipe books. My first one was Every Grain of Rice, (EGR) most recipes were ones I recognized from meals I'd eat with my family, and my confidence in chinese cooking started growing from there. Now, four years later, I think I'm ready to expand my repertoire, so I bought this one. It didn't disappoint, while EGR had classic meal recipes, this one also adds desserts, hotpot, how to pickle your own vegetables, making your own sesame paste, etc.I was so surprised when I opened the box. The cover of this book is a fabric texture with silver text, giving it the feel of a limited edition collectible or something. Very beautiful. The pages are a bit thinner than in Every Grain of Rice, but I think that's to lighten the weight because the book is already so thick. There's a nice ribbon bookmark attached to the spine. The recipes themselves are amazing, some of which use "unusual" meats (ex. rabbit) but I think it'll work perfectly fine substituting them with things I do eat, and I especially love her explanations and backstories to the techniques and recipes. Some of the popular recipes are overlapped between her books, but the text and explanations are newly written. Highly recommend this.

I am not Chinese, but my wife is, and we both love the complex taste tapestries of Sichuan food --- the red spicy sauces, the vinegary boiled fish, and especially the numbing peppercorns on everything. We struggle to find good authentic Sichuan restaurants near us in the US --- many of them seem to not use fresh or good ingredients, and the tastes are so inferior to what you can get in China even at a cheap takeout place. So I have been learning to cook more of it and have found some recipes on the internet myself, but it's been hit or miss.Enter this book --- it's fabulous! My Chinese is still rudimentary, so having a book in English is mandatory still for me. It's got recipes for things I know and love to cook already like mapo tofu (hot and numbing tofu with ground pork sauce), dan dan mian (noodles with spicy sesame sauce) but adds recipes for things I like to order when in China but have never made, like shuizhu yu (spicy boiled fish) and suanla chaoshou (pork wonton in vinegary spicy broth) . My wife asked me to check for the eggplant dish we recently had in China --- yup, there it is!And then there's dishes I haven't even tried yet, but am very curious about. Some have photos which is great since sometimes I can recognize the dish by searching on the main ingredient and skimming photos better than by the name -- this is one huge advantage of owning a comprehensive paper cookbook over the internet. Another is that she goes through all the tools, common ingredients, and prepping and cooking techniques which might not be immediately clear from an internet recipe.This book is going to bring me years of cooking exploration and really fill that culinary gap of Sichuan cuisine I feel between trips to China. It's only the second cookbook I own (because internet) but it was totally worth it.

Libro molto bello e ricco di informazioni. Belle foto. 4 stelle e non 5, perché avrei gradito una maggiore presenza di cibi fermentati, che nella cucina del Sichuan sono importantissimi. Probabilmente li si è ritenuti inadatti al palato occidentale, ma non è vero, a mio parere.