Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford’s new book, Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China, is one of the best cookbooks I’ve ever read. Duguid and Alford have compiled twenty-five years of personal history, observation, photographs, travel narratives, and recipes into a collection that illustrates just how rich and varied non-Han Chinese culture is today, and just how endangered. In a year when China is in the news more than ever, the book serves as a reminder that the country is more than its capital city. I spoke with Jeffrey and Naomi a few weeks ago at the Random House Canada offices.

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Your own personal history is woven throughout this book and one gets the sense that these areas have been important to you for a long time. So why this book now? Why wasn’t it, say, your second book? What has changed politically, or in your own experiences, that made you want to write this book now?

Naomi: Well the ones out earlier, we put bits of those things in them—in our first book, Flatbreads and Flavors, we managed to squeeze Tibet in there, there was a lot of Xinjiang in there, and we started the book with flatbreads from Kashgar. But even now on our sixth book, we think this is lucky to be able to write about somewhere that is relatively so far out. So to have a contract even after a track record of six…that’s got to be our answer, partly. This has always been an interest of ours.

Jeffrey: in fact, a long time ago, Naomi wanted to do a book on Tibet. And I kept saying no way in the world…

N:…will anybody ever publish it. Stones and Silk, I thought. That would be a title.

J: Our editor was working on our second book with us, the one on rice, and she said, “you know, I’m okay to have my feet in the mud…”

N: “…in the rice paddies…”

J: “But please not over my knees.”

N: And that notion of conservatism has stayed with us. Not more than knee deep. And this feels like we’re in pretty deep into territory that’s unfamiliar. And we said to her, because of the Olympics, we’ll hurry to get it out, and she hurried as well, and both our times were a bit compressed. We had a lot of material to work with, but we needed to stay focused so the book could come out ahead of the Olympics. We though there would be general interest, and people will want to know about more than just Shanghai and Beijing. But Jeff had actually had anticipated that there would be some kerfuffle. He said it’s a political moment, and some things will come forward, and there’s going to be discussion about human rights in China. And now, of course, there’s more than just discussion. So there’s a lot of things we’re not having to laboriously explain. And there are things we allude to in the book, but we hope in an unheavy way. Because it’s a complicated question.

The book is concerned with the increasing encroachment of Han Chinese culture into these areas. Is there a sense where this book in your twenty-odd years of traveling in this country has become a now-more-than-ever moment? Is there a preservationist instinct to it?

J: For sure, and that’s why we’re so happy to write it. It’s strange to have a cookbook that’s…I mean, we wanted the book out now. It’s a little strange with a cookbook to be talking about politics.

N: So overtly, at least. We’re always talking about politics, but to be doing it so overtly.

J: Now with the book out, both of us find ourselves waking up really early, which is certainly not in my usual routine, and just churning over a lot of these things in our heads, because it’s something that we care about a lot. And then trying to find words to put to it, and also trying to be careful about it, because it’s easy to fall into cliché about what’s going, and it’s really not about what’s going on right now, because this has been going on so long. We used to write for this magazine called Cultural Survival, a quarterly anthro journal out of Yale—I think it still exists—and so in our world of food, we’re around a lot of preservation initiatives. And there’s this notion that cultural diversity is good, and here in Toronto, multicultural is good. We don’t know entirely how come, but we know these are good things. And in China it’s important for everyone that this cultural diversity continues. And if ever anybody wants to China bash, let’s just look at what’s happened in North America, or Australia, or Russia.

N: Where indigeneous cultures have been all but destroyed in various places.

J: So it’s not about placing guilt or blame. But just about ‘How do we do this? How do we keep everybody culturally intact?’

One of the things I liked about the book is how you’ve made food and politics seem so organically connected. The point you make in the introduction—that it we were to redraw the map of a given place based on its food culture, everywhere would look different—really resonated with me. The book’s food is so different from what the West thinks of when it thinks about canonical Chinese food. But having traveled to these regions for so long, and having seen the rise in interest in things like Tibetan food, have you seen any crossover start to happen in these different ethnic foods influencing more mainstream western ideas of Chinese cooking? Even on the ingredient level?

N: We don’t think people know yet. In a way, you could say, well yeah but Tibetan food has some Nepali inflection and so on, and it’s taken in soy sauce in some of it, but some Tibetans say it’s not pure Tibetan if it has soy sauce. Food along the Silk Road, it’s very related to Uzbek food or even Turkic food, tandoor baked flatbreads. There’s Afghan influence, and these are all parts of the central Asian world rather than the Chinese world. So we don’t know.

J: And I’m not in any position to say because I’ve never been to Beijing.

N: There’s Uyghur food in Beijing. In that sense, there are all these little restaurants with traditional foods, and invented things. So within china, absolutely, there’s an influence. But beyond, not really.

J: But there’s also just a ton of stuff we don’t understand. I remember long ago, 1985 or 1986, we’re walking down the street in Lhasa. We didn’t know much, but we knew enough to say, you know, those women are Hmong. And they’re selling seeds! You’ve come, what, 2500 miles, and how on earth did you do it, to sell seeds? We went to Bali when our kids were little because we’d always wanted to go to Bali, and it was really beautiful and interesting, but we thought we’re not that keen to ever go back. And we thought why, and we realized that we really like large landmasses because we love that cross exchange. It’s not just now there are Hmong women there. It’s the past two thousand years. People use their feet, they walk, and there’s all this cross fertilization, all the time.

N: Even when people seem very isolated, we know, in fact, that there’s certain mysterious trade, for historical reasons and other reasons we don’t understand.

Is there anything you’ve found in your travels that you’ve just had to leave out because there is no corollary for the North American reader? Or something that is just so unpalatable?

J: Yeah, even in this.

N: These are very simple recipes, and temperate climate food, so it’s the easiest to adapt.

J: But up in Altai I had this sort of slow-simmered dish with onions and tomatoes and green peppers and then they had these blocks of transparent, I think it’s a mung-bean paste, sort of like a glass noodle, but it’s thick and square. It’s without taste, but it absorbs flavours. And it was a very lovely texture. But I can’t make it from scratch, and we can’t buy it. It’s something that would be very good to have.

N: So that’s one kind of limitation. Another would be things that we’ve seen in Xining, coming out after the mosque day, and there’s guys grilling little skewers of lamb heart, tongue, liver, whatever. And we’re not going to put that in the book, because we’re not out to outrage, or say, “Hey, are you man enough to skewer a lamb heart?” It’s something that somebody could put on a menu in New York and do very well with at a certain kind of restaurant. But in this book, we’re just trying to encourage people to take on home cooking that’s feasible. We don’t need to create extra challenges.

What would your recommendations be for a traveler who wants to see an authentic food experience?

N: Go to a small place.

J: Just go to China. It’s pretty great that way, because there’s not much in between. If you go to any of these areas, the problem is getting yourself there. But once you’re there…there’s nothing else.

N: And hang around. Don’t rush. Why not spend three or four or five days going to the same noodle place, to learn more and about different places you could go?

J: And China’s different from other places in the area. In China today, there are very few international travelers, and most are there on a group tour. So if anybody does the independent travel thing and goes to one of these areas we’re talking about, you’re really not going to find much geared toward the typical traveler.

N: And it’s lovely. There’s nothing to filter out.

Tags: cuisine, culture, five questions, international, interview, minorities, What's on CCTV?

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Posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 11:27 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.