DESIGNER

Raven Couzens

PROFILE/DESCRIPTION

Article text courtesy of nytimes.com A History of Chinese Food, and a Sensory Feast by Dwight Garner. 

“A really good cookbook,” Jan Morris wrote, “is intellectually more adventurous than the Kama Sutra.” Fuchsia Dunlop’s masterly new book, “Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food,” is not a cookbook per se. But it has an earthiness that calls to mind Morris’s comment.

It’s hard to write about food, for more than a page or two, without folding in comparisons and allusions to another form of carnal knowledge. Food and sex: their techniques and variety borrow from the same stock of language. What we eat is as revealing as what we do in bed, and as we grow older, food is sexual compensation.