Well, here I am flying in for Cook the Books Club at the very
last second! I’ve had the book read for
ages, but just didn’t have the time or motivation to make a recipe.
Why was I so unmotivated?
Well, you can read my GoodReads review of Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour
Memoir of Eating in China by Fuchsia Dunlop (also if I’ve said it once, I’ve
said it a thousand times – anytime a title is *that* long, the book is certain
to be pretentious)

My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This was ok for a memoir I enjoyed learning about Chinese culture and how very different not only the food but also the people and culture are in different regions.
At times, the book was overly self-congratulatory. At other times, the foods describes were gag-worthy and I thought I'd scream if I read the words "offal" and "stench" and "tang of urine" describing foods anymore.
Ok, I just changed my rating from a 3 to a 2 - ick.
By the end, I was skimming to get through it. The book should have ended 4 chapters earlier. The book became depressing and boring as the author felt the need to wax on about endangered species, pollution, and climate change. While all of these topics are real issues in modern day China, the way in which they were presented was pretentious and boring.
The final chapter tried to lighten the mood but only mildly succeeded.
And the epilogue went right back to self-congratulatory pretentiousness.
Is this worth reading?
Sure, but I skip around to the good parts
View all my reviews
Oy.
I wasn’t making offal (*hurk*) or pretty much any of the
recipes included in the text – they were either vile or included such difficult
to obtain ingredients (remember I’m in the sparsely populated great plains
region) that I couldn’t do it.
I thought of just making a stir fry. But since all of my stir
fries are basically the same teriyaki-ish base it felt like a cop out.