The first book you’ve chosen is Yan-Kit So's Classic Food of China. But can you define what is the core cuisine of a country like China, which is so large and disparate?

People sometimes think that Chinese cuisine is the equivalent of French cuisine or something like that, but actually China is more a continent than a country. One of the main characteristics of Chinese food is that it is so varied and multi-faceted, which makes it an over-simplification to talk about Chinese cuisine. For example, Sichuan province, where I lived for some time and about whose cuisine I wrote my first book, is roughly the size of France. But there are certain cultural things that the different cuisines of China share.

How effectively does Yan-Kit So draw those out?

Yan-Kit So was a very clever, serious historian, and a sort of mentor to me when I first started writing about food. I actually ate at her house. I was very lucky to be invited to dinner. She was a brilliant cook, applying the same kind of academic rigour to her cooking as to her scholarship. She was a perfectionist. Her first book was a very clear, accessible introduction to Chinese cookery. In fact, before I even went to China I did my first Chinese cooking from that book. All her recipes work – she tested them thoroughly. It’s still in print, and there's a really nice mix of dishes from different regions.

Classic Food of China was really her great work, though. I think it was the last book she produced before she died, some years ago. It’s one of the few really well-researched historical and cultural Chinese cookery books. It has the most fantastic introduction, which talks about the history of Chinese food culture and introduces some of the classic texts of Chinese cuisine – an overview of different culinary regions, the way people thought and wrote about food, and celebrated festivals. But it also includes a collection of recipes from all over China, many of them with introductions that explain the history and some of the background.

So this was your grounding. But then you pursued your interest in more detail. Was it here that the second book, KC Chang's Food in Chinese Culture, came into its own?

This is more of an academic book, a collection of essays about food culture by leading China scholars which came out in 1981. It was probably the first book in English to bring serious academic scrutiny to Chinese food culture, and to use the scholarly techniques applied to other subjects to food, offering the views of different experts on different periods of Chinese history. There's so much information in it. KC Chang was an archaeologist, so he wrote the introduction and the chapter about ancient Chinese food customs. Then you've got chapters on all the other main dynastic periods, and one on modern China. It remains a key work, and if you want to become more deeply informed about the history of Chinese food it's a great place to start.

Is there a clear continuum in Chinese cooking from ancient traditions to contemporary styles, or do you have the same sort of thing as in Europe where large-scale dynastic change often shifted how the palate was defined?

It’s a real mixture. There are some things that are stunningly continuous in Chinese history. For example, there's a text from the third century BC called The Root of Tastes, written by a merchant called Lu Buwei. Lu records how the legendary chef Yi Yin lectured his king on cookery in the 16th century BC. The way Yi Yin describes the arts of flavour and the control of fire is something that's still applicable today. There's also a very famous archaeological site in Hunan province, the Mawangduitombs, which are one of the richest sources of information on Han dynasty eating habits. Not only did they contain a lot of bamboo strips inscribed with cooking techniques, the names of dishes and so on, but archaeologists also found a stash of actual food, as well as dining instruments and fabulous lacquer ware. Among the foods they found in the tombs were fermented black beans with ginger, and they look exactly the same as the ones you can buy in Chinatown today. So you have some culinary techniques that go back more than 2000 years, for example the use of fermented soy products to bring flavour to food.

But then you also have massive historical shifts. One of the key moments in this respect was the late Ming, early Qing dynasty, when you had the arrival of new world food that transformed cuisines all over the world. In the case of China, the arrival of potatoes and sweet potatoes via Portuguese traders was one of the reasons that the nation was able to grow, because these foodstuffs made possible the cultivation of mountainous regions. Similarly, the chilli was first seen in China in the 16th century when it arrived in the eastern ports with the Portuguese traders. Inhabitants of the eastern provinces didn't really develop a taste for it, but it found its way along the Yangtze to Hunan and Sichuan. It fitted in with the cosmologies of these regions, because there's the idea in Chinese medicine that when the climate is very damp you need to eat heating foods to redress the balance of the body. In the past the Hunanese and Sichuanese had used things like ginger and other herbs, but suddenly the chilli appeared and suited them perfectly.

But while the chilli is not indigenous, Sichuan pepper is?

Sichuan pepper is an ancient native Chinese spice. It's one of the spices they found in the Mawangdui tombs. The Chinese word for pepper, jiao, originally referred to Sichuan pepper. Black pepper is known as hu jiao, meaning barbarian (imported) pepper.

Was there ever a European influence on Chinese cuisine?

There's a legend about a Han dynasty Chinese envoy called Zhang Qian who is supposed to have brought sesame, coriander, alfalfa and other things from Europe along the silk road. There are clues in the Chinese language about which things came across the land routes because they are prefixed by “hu”,which referred to the barbarians of the northwest. Hence hu jiao. Carrot is hu luobo, literally “barbarian radish”. The Yuan dynasty was Mongol, the invaders from the north, so they ate mutton and dairy foods. In northern China you can still see the use of mutton, which the southern Chinese don’t like at all, and the appearance of a few dairy products in the everyday diet.