Review | Book review: a gentle cook’s tour of Yunnan by WildChina’s Zhang Mei
The travel company founder takes a culinary tour of the place she grew up in, cooking and eating and collecting recipes, but her book comes most alive when she shares her bittersweet memories
by Zhang Mei
Penguin Viking
Culinary-themed journeys have emerged as a distinct sub-genre of travel writing in recent years. A lucrative spin-off from the celebrity chef and cookbook craze, these narratives marry terrain with tastings as intrepid foodies munch their way across everywhere from central Asia to South America, striving to explain the countries and their peoples through food.
The ingredients tend to be the same, a twist of history, a soupçon of cultural references, a sprinkling of description of the places visited – but in this genre recipes are always more important than maps. The formula rarely changes, whether the book takes the macho approach seen in Anthony Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines (2001), in which anything and everything is eaten, or the mix of gastronomy and travel is more refined, as in The Land Where Lemons Grow: The Story of Italy and its Citrus Fruit (2014), by Helena Attlee.
Zhang Mei’s Travels Through Dali: with a leg of hamfalls very much into the genteel category of culinary exploration: there is no scorpion stew or grasshopper goulash to be endured. Instead, Zhang has a simple goal. She sets out from her hometown of Dali, in Yunnan province, with a giant leg of cured local ham, to visit the villages and towns of the surrounding area and get to know the people she meets while cooking dishes using her travelling companion.
By her own admission, Zhang is not a professional writer. Instead, she is best known in China and beyond as the founder and chief executive of WildChina, an upmarket adventure travel company often cited as one of the world’s best. Her company’s success has made Zhang an international figure who speaks regularly on how she made the journey from a hole-in-the-wall office in a Beijing hutong to the head of a globally recognised operation.