In the fourth century, a Chinese official, Zhang Han, is said to have abandoned his post in the north of the country, unable any longer to endure his craving for the water shield soup and sliced perch of his hometown in Jiangnan, a region to the south; ever since, “thinking of perch and water shield” (chun lu zhi si) has been the Chinese shorthand for homesickness.

This is a story Fuchsia Dunlop, Britain’s greatest authority on Chinese food, tells in the introduction to her magnificent new book about Jiangnan’s culinary heritage, Land of Fish and Rice – and with good reason. Han wasn’t alone; several emperors felt the same. “No one who has fallen in love with Jiangnan ever wants to leave,” she goes on. “While every Chinese cuisine has its charms … I know of no other that can put one’s heart so much at ease as the food of Jiangnan.” Her own passionate affair with the region – Jiangnan spans the eastern coastal provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu, the city of Shanghai, and that part of southern Anhui province once known as Huizhou – began several years ago, when she walked through a moon-gate and into the “enchanted” garden of the Dragon Well Manor restaurant on the outskirts of Hangzhou, where the restaurateur Dai Jianjun had created a sanctuary for Chinese food using “radiantly fresh” produce and ingredients made by artisans to traditional methods. Suddenly, she had the subject of her next book. “I don’t go around choosing regions,” she says, when we meet at Bar Shu in Soho, a restaurant to which she acts as a consultant. “They choose me.”

The food in Jiangnan is known for its gentleness, or qing dan. Often translated as “bland” or “insipid”, the word combines the characters for pure and light, and expresses tastes that comfort and refresh: “It’s feelgood food, made in harmony with the seasons and the landscape.” It’s a cuisine that involves lots of fish, plenty of pork, and a vast range of other, rather more obscure ingredients: wild rice stems, lily bulbs, celtuce (aka asparagus lettuce, whose thick stalks have, paradoxically, a celery-like flavour) and, most bafflingly of all, fox nuts (a kind of chickpea that grows in fresh water). But there’s no need for alarm. “The internet has made things easier,” Dunlop says. “I buy lots of seasonings online. Mostly, though, it’s a case of applying Chinese techniques to produce you can easily find at home. There is a recipe for buns stuffed with shepherd’s purse [a plant belonging to the mustard family], for which I use kale. It works just as well.”

Dunlop, who grew up in Oxford, trained as a chef in China in the mid-1990s, having got interested in the country as a subeditor at the BBC (she took evening classes in Mandarin, and then won a British Council scholarship to study for a year in the Sichuanese capital, Chengdu). Her first cookbook, Sichuan Cookery, came out in 2001, after an initial struggle with publishers who thought it “too regional”. Since then, of course, things have moved on; most of us now know there’s more to Chinese food than sweet and sour pork.

“The emergence of China as a richer, more powerful country has changed perceptions,” she says. “It’s a place people visit, whether for their holidays or to do business. Theopening of Hakkasan [in London in 2001] was another turning point – somewhere so smart and glamorous. As a result people no longer think that Chinese food is either cheap and junky or terrifyingly exotic. But without going there, you can’t really open this great casket of wonders. It is such a huge country.” Why, though, do so few people here know about Jiangnanese food? “I guess it’s to do with patterns of immigration. The Cantonese dominated things for so long. When people do come here from this region, they tend to be well-heeled – they’re not the kind of people who would be cooks – while most chefs out there tend to say: ‘Why would we want to leave, when we have all these wonderful ingredients?’ Hangzhou is one of the most loved places to live in all of China.”

China, unlike many countries, has retained a strong sense of the regional when it comes to food. “There are more chain restaurants now. You can get Sichuan food all over China these days and some chefs are concerned about the loss of skills in the countryside; people move to the city leaving only the very young and the very old behind. But it remains incredibly diverse. The more I learn, the more I feel I’m just beginning.” Among her favourite recipes in the book are the one for dungpo pork, a sumptuous dish of meat so tender from slow cooking it will melt at a chopstick’s touch, and her “indispensable” Shanghai noodles with dried shrimps and spring onion oil. “I had it for lunch today,” she says, eyes widening with retrospective greed. “If you have the noodles to hand, that one only takes 10 minutes.”

Fuchsia Dunlop: the recipes

These dishes are mostly intended to be shared with rice as part of a Chinese meal, rather than eaten individually. For this reason, serving quantities are not included. 

Hangzhou breakfast tofu

Warm silken tofu is seasoned with savoury condiments and topped with fresh and crunchy garnishes. It’s based on the breakfast tofu I enjoyed near the West Lake in Hangzhou.

silken tofu 300g 

caster sugar ¼ tsp 

light soy sauce 2 tsp 

sesame oil 1 tsp 

chilli oil to taste

Sichuan preserved vegetable 2 tbsp, finely chopped 

spring onions 2 tbsp, green parts only, thinly sliced

coriander 1 tbsp, chopped 

peanuts 2 tbsp, fried

Boil enough water to cover the tofu in a saucepan and salt it lightly. Use a spoon to scoop up large pieces of tofu and transfer them to the water. Simmer very gently for 5 minutes to heat through.

When the tofu is ready, use a slotted spoon to transfer it to a serving bowl and break up the chunks into smaller pieces. Scatter over the rest of the ingredients and serve. This dish is best eaten with a spoon.

Suzhou breakfast tofu

Instead of the garnishes in the above recipe, put 2 tsp papery dried shrimps and 1 tbsp dried laver seaweed, torn into tiny pieces, in the serving bowl. Add the warm tofu and scatter with 1 tbsp finely chopped Sichuan preserved vegetable, 1½ tbsp thinly sliced spring onion greens, 2 tsp light soy sauce and 1 tsp sesame oil. Mix well before eating. This version is served at the Wumen Renjia restaurant in Suzhou.

Oil-exploded prawns

One afternoon, exploring the lake near restaurateur Dai Jianjun’s farm in southern Zhejiang, a fisherman offered us some live shrimp he had just caught. Back at the farm, Dai’s chef, Zhu Yinfeng, cooked them up in typical Zhejiang style, deep-frying and then stir-frying them over a high flame with a sweet, rich sauce laced with rice wine and vinegar. The deep-frying in very hot oil is known as “oil-exploding” (you bao), and it shocks the papery shrimp shells away from the flesh, making them delectably crisp and crunchy. The fragrant sauce clings to the prawns like lacquer, so they look as beautiful as they taste.

Small freshwater shrimps are particularly dainty in this recipe, but you can also achieve a marvellous effect using sea prawns, which is what I do at home. Be warned that this dish has what my father calls a “high grapple factor” and be prepared for some messy eating!

prawns 350g, raw, unpeeled (400g if you want to cook them without heads)

spring onion 1, white part only

Chinkiang or red rice vinegar 2½ tsp 

cooking oil 500ml 

fresh ginger a few slices, peeled

For the sauce

Shaoxing wine 2 tsp 

light soy sauce 3 tsp 

caster sugar 5 tsp

Use a sharp knife to trim the spikes from the head of the prawns (or their entire heads), and their legs. Use a darning needle to remove, as far as possible, the black veins that run along their backs, just under the shell. Rinse them thoroughly and shake dry. Smack the spring onion white lightly with the flat side of a Chinese cleaver or a rolling pin to loosen its fibres. Combine the sauce ingredients in a small bowl, and have the vinegar measured out and ready in another small bowl.

Heat the oil in a seasoned wok over a high flame to 200C. Have another pan or a heatproof container to hand. Carefully tip the prawns into the hot oil and deep-fry for 10-20 seconds (depending on size), stirring constantly, until they have curled up and changed colour. Remove with a slotted spoon and set aside.

Let the oil return to its original temperature. Add the prawns and fry for another 20 seconds or so, until the shells are crisp and tinged golden. Remove with a slotted spoon and set aside. Pour all but about 1 tablespoon of the oil into your heatproof container, then return the wok to a high flame with the spring onion white and ginger. Stir-fry until they smell wonderful. Add the prawns, stir once, then give the sauce a stir and pour it in. Stir rapidly as the sauce boils and becomes syrupy. Splash the vinegar around the edges of the prawns and stir over a high flame for another 5 seconds or so to fuse the flavours. Serve.