De Profundis, Berliner Emsemble, post-show Q&A

Notes from the post-show Q&A — Jens Harzer and Oliver Reese

Berliner Ensemble's De Profundis at The Coronet Theatre, London, October 2026. Edited notes from the audience discussion. Spoilers.

The production and its theatrical approach

  • The Berliner Ensemble and its heritage. Oliver Reese briefly explained the company's history, from Brecht's The Threepenny Opera premiering at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in 1928 to Brecht's establishment of the Berliner Ensemble after his return from exile. The company moved into the Schiffbauerdamm theatre in 1954, and Helene Weigel continued leading it after Brecht's death in 1956. Reese considers performing Brecht's works part of the theatre's continuing responsibility, although he said that Brecht was not a particular artistic influence on this production of De Profundis.

  • The scale and ambition of the production. The Coronet performance was approximately the 32nd since the production opened around a year earlier. In Berlin it plays in the Berliner Ensemble's main auditorium, seating around 700; it had also appeared at the Salzburg Festival. The production lasts approximately 110 minutes and is organised into seven chapters. Reese and Harzer deliberately resisted reducing the demanding text to a more conventionally comfortable running time. Reese described the evening as an experience that could bring both actor and audience close to mental exhaustion.

  • A deliberate refusal to impersonate Oscar Wilde. Harzer's starting principle was that he would not portray a recognisable historical image of Wilde. He wanted to remove familiar associations: Wilde as dandy, celebrated literary personality, author of Dorian Gray, or simply a figure defined by his sexuality. Reese recalled Harzer insisting at the first rehearsal that he would definitely not play Oscar Wilde. They were not making a biopic. Instead, Harzer wanted to approach the experience and emotional substance of the letter as personally as possible, allowing the words to generate a stage presence rather than reconstructing Wilde's appearance or mannerisms.

Language, acting and the rehearsal process

  • Language as the foundation of the performance. Both artists repeatedly stressed the extraordinary literary quality of De Profundis. Their adaptation used a recent German translation by the poet Mirko Bonné, which Reese thought much more successful in conveying Wilde's artistic language than earlier translations. He wanted Harzer to be able to speak, perform and almost sing the text, giving its literary qualities a physical presence. Their admiration for the writing drove the process. Reese recalled that Harzer repeatedly arrived at rehearsals having returned to the book and discovered additional sentences he wanted to include.

  • The act of beginning to speak. Harzer described the opening as a particularly important challenge. The letter begins with a man who has been isolated for a long time and must somehow begin to find words for his circumstances. Harzer saw his own theatrical situation as analogous: an actor alone in an enclosed space, attempting to open his mouth and begin speaking. Rather than demonstrate imprisonment or suffering through recognisable acting conventions, he wanted each performance to begin with a genuine attempt to find a personal relationship with the words. This helps explain the observed stillness, restraint and physical rootedness of the acting.

  • The box as both restriction and freedom. The performance takes place within a square playing area approximately 1.3 metres by 1.3 metres. Reese argued that what initially appears to imprison the actor actually creates extraordinary freedom. Within the space Harzer can lie down, climb, lean against the walls, paint, manipulate objects and discover new possibilities of movement. Concealed openings allow objects to appear almost magically. Reese described the set as an empty book or page on which the performance begins to write itself. He stressed that he had never thought of it simply as a realistic prison cell; one image he associated with it was the last human being in space.

  • Stillness, light, music and the physical score. The staging gradually emerged through experiment rather than from a completely predetermined visual concept. Harzer developed actions involving a bird, painting and physical interaction with the set. Reese worked with a composer who participated in rehearsals and developed music in response to what was happening. Reese wanted music with depth, spirituality and an almost eternal quality; he mentioned the organ music of Interstellar as a reference. Lighting, colours, music, silence and physical movement became ways of giving shape to the language and distinguishing the seven chapters.

  • The form emerged from the actor and the text. Reese described a highly collaborative process in which Harzer's energy, choices and developing performance helped determine where the production needed transitions, cuts, changes of light or shifts in musical texture. The microphone sequence was another discovery made during rehearsals. Reese said that the form was generated out of the text rather than imposed upon it. He also recalled the difficulty of returning after a summer break with only four days to prepare, requiring Harzer to re-enter an exceptionally demanding performance with considerable intensity.

  • The special relationship between director, actor and audience in a monologue. Reese has previously adapted works including Lolita, Günter Grass's The Tin Drum and Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. He explained that monologues create an unusually close director–actor relationship. An actor needs a partner: during rehearsal that partner is the director, while during performance it becomes the audience. However, De Profundis posed a particular problem because it has no straightforward narrative progression. Unlike The Tin Drum, which follows a recognisable life story, Wilde's letter inhabits one prolonged moment of isolation in which memory, accusation, grief and thought unfold.

Wilde's imprisonment, art and the impossibility of return

  • The tension between universal experience and historical specificity. An audience member challenged Harzer's suggestion that the emotional experience of the letter could equally have arisen from a heterosexual relationship. She argued that Wilde's homosexuality and its criminalisation were indispensable to understanding why the letter existed at all. Reese agreed with the historical importance of Wilde's persecution. He described Wilde's prosecution as an attack not only on an exposed public figure but on queer society more broadly. The exchange exposed a genuine tension in the production's approach: seeking a universal human predicament without erasing the particular injustice that produced it.

  • Wilde's imprisonment as the destruction of an artist. Reese stressed the severity of Wilde's punishment: isolation, compulsory labour, and restrictions on books and writing during much of his imprisonment. He saw this as an attack on Wilde's identity and ability to create art. Wilde emerged physically, socially and psychologically damaged, unable to resume his previous life in England, and died only a few years later. Reese found it especially moving that De Profundis, written as a personal letter, became a major literary work in its own right. The production's song and microphone sequence partly embodied the struggle to create something artistically meaningful from suffering.

  • The imagined future at the end of the letter. Reese described the final emergence from the box as expressing something utopian. Wilde imagines a possible life beyond imprisonment, perhaps somewhere like Bruges, and another chance of being together with Bosie. But Reese emphasised that this imagined renewal never materialised. Wilde's health, finances, reputation and artistic life had been devastated. The possibility of a new beginning exists within the text and performance, but the historical biography refuses an easy resolution.

Transformation, audience and the meaning of theatre

  • Harzer's principle that beginning and end must be different. Asked what effect or catharsis he wanted to create, Harzer described a principle important to him as an actor: the beginning and end must be different. He appears to have referenced the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Harzer related this to the final chapter, in which the performer wets or changes his hair, changes his clothes, adopts a more contemporary appearance and eventually emerges from the box. He described the character as becoming almost childlike, freer and in some respects a different person. The change is more than a change of costume: something has happened during the performance.

  • The ending as an invitation to respond. Harzer emphasised the final movement towards an imagined other person. After spending nearly two hours speaking Wilde's letter, the performer reaches towards the possibility of an answer: the other person has the freedom to respond imaginatively, just as Wilde has attempted to express himself. Yet Harzer also acknowledged the painful contradiction. This apparent opening or gift does not erase the historical destruction of Wilde's body, life and identity. The ending contains both a possibility of freedom and the knowledge that restoration was impossible.

  • The paradox of isolation and audience proximity. Harzer contrasted performing the production in Berlin's large auditorium with the intimacy of The Coronet. He found the smaller space somewhat easier because the physical distances were reduced. Yet he also explained that the box creates a kind of shell, giving him independence from the audience even while he feels their presence. The performer is simultaneously intensely exposed and profoundly alone. Reese particularly appreciated the purity of the production: essentially an actor, language, light and sound.

  • Rejecting a predetermined emotional impact. When an audience member asked what catharsis he hoped to produce, Harzer resisted offering a clear answer. He observed, with some scepticism, that many theatre artists are very good at explaining their intended effects and presenting those explanations to audiences. That was not his approach. His priority was not to communicate a predetermined message but to undergo something through the performance. The transformation between beginning and end mattered more than specifying what the audience should feel.

  • “Storytelling of the soul.” Harzer concluded by distinguishing the performance from an actor simply standing onstage and telling a story or recounting a novel. Such work might be enjoyable, but it was less interesting to him. Here, the task was to begin in an uncertain state, find the words and pass through the different psychological and emotional worlds of the letter. He described this as “storytelling of the soul”. Reese immediately embraced the phrase as an appropriate conclusion to the discussion.

The identification of the underlying passage in Remarks on Oedipus comes from subsequent research, not an explicit discussion of that essay during the Q&A.

Notes on Hölderlin after listening to Jens Harzer

Listened to Harzer post seeing him in De Profundis. He referred to Hölderlin. I was not aware, so these are notes produced for that exploration.

The Hölderlin text Jens Harzer was invoking is Anmerkungen zum Oedipus — “Remarks on Oedipus”. Hölderlin wrote it around 1803 and published it alongside his German translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King in 1804. It is short, dense and rather strange, but it contains one of the most influential theories of dramatic transformation in modern European thought. Cambridge University Press

Who Friedrich Hölderlin was

Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) was a German poet, translator and philosophical thinker. Today he is generally regarded as one of the greatest poets in the German language, although that status came substantially after his lifetime. He belongs historically around German Romanticism and German Idealism, but he does not fit neatly into either category. Poetry Foundation

His intellectual surroundings were extraordinary. At the Protestant seminary in Tübingen he studied theology alongside Hegel and Schelling; the three became close friends and participated in the intellectual ferment generated by Kant, the French Revolution and debates about religion and freedom. Modern scholarship increasingly treats Hölderlin not simply as “the poet who happened to know Hegel” but as someone whose ideas helped shape the development of both Schelling and Hegel. Cambridge University Press

He was trained for the ministry but did not want to become a pastor. Instead he worked mainly as a private tutor while writing. During a position with the wealthy Gontard family in Frankfurt he fell deeply in love with Susette Gontard, his employer’s wife. She became the “Diotima” of much of his poetry and of his novel Hyperion. Their enforced separation and her death in 1802 were profound events in his life. Goethe-Institut

His major works include the epistolary novel Hyperion, the unfinished tragedy The Death of Empedocles, extraordinary late poems and hymns such as Bread and Wine, Patmos, The Ister and Half of Life, and his radical translations of Sophocles’ Oedipus and Antigone. His poetry mixes Greek mythology and syntax with Christianity, nature, history, revolution, exile, loss and the problem of whether human beings can still experience the divine. Poetry Foundation

His life then took a tragic turn. By 1806 he was suffering a severe psychiatric breakdown and was institutionalised. From 1807 until his death in 1843 he lived in the famous tower in Tübingen under the care of a carpenter’s family. It is safer historically not to impose a confident modern diagnosis on him; the nature of his illness remains debated. For much of those decades he was regarded as essentially a ruined or mad poet. Poetry Foundation

The irony is that the twentieth century made him enormous.

What Remarks on Oedipus is actually arguing

The essay has three parts: first a theory of dramatic form; then a reading of particular moments in Oedipus; finally a much broader theory of tragedy, humanity, the gods and time. JSTOR

And the third section is where Harzer's remark comes from.

1. Art is not merely inspiration: it has a structure that can be learned

Hölderlin begins with a surprisingly technical idea.

Poetry ought to become more like a craft — mechane. Modern artists, he thinks, talk too readily about a work's “effect” or beauty without understanding the formal laws that produce it. A poet should understand the mechanics of form just as an ancient poet supposedly understood metre, structure and proportion. Cambridge University Press

This is already interesting for theatre. Hölderlin isn't saying:

Feel intensely and something beautiful will emerge.

He's closer to:

The intensity needs a form capable of containing it.

The uncontrollable and the controlled have to coexist.

That tension runs through the whole essay.

2. A tragedy has a rhythm — and that rhythm must be broken

This is perhaps Hölderlin's most famous formal insight.

Events in tragedy do not merely happen one after another. They acquire momentum. Images, discoveries, actions and emotions begin rushing towards catastrophe.

Hölderlin calls this movement “tragic transport.”

But if that movement simply continued accelerating, the spectator would be swept along without ever apprehending what was happening.

So tragedy requires an interruption.

His term is:

die Cäsur — the caesura.

He also calls it:

die gegenrhythmische Unterbrechung — the counter-rhythmic interruption.

The caesura interrupts the forward motion so that, briefly, we stop experiencing merely one event followed by anotherand perceive the event itself. ORA

That is a very modern theatrical idea.

Think of:

momentum → interruption → recognition → transformed momentum.

The interruption isn't outside the rhythm.

The interruption is part of the rhythm.

3. In Oedipus, Tiresias is the caesura

Hölderlin identifies the prophet Tiresias as performing this function.

Oedipus is racing towards knowledge. He wants the murderer of Laius found; every answer produces another question.

Then Tiresias appears.

His intervention does not solve the drama. Instead it changes its axis.

Before Tiresias, Oedipus is the brilliant king investigating a crime.

After Tiresias, the investigation increasingly becomes an investigation of Oedipus himself.

Formally, Hölderlin thinks Tiresias' appearance divides and balances the tragedy. Because Oedipus accelerates heavily towards its conclusion, the caesura occurs relatively early; in Antigone, whose rhythm is different, the corresponding interruption comes later. Rhuthmos

So the caesura is both:

dramatic structure

and

existential rupture.

4. Oedipus' tragedy is partly a tragedy of knowing too much

Hölderlin's interpretation of Oedipus is unusual.

Oedipus does not simply make a mistake because he lacks knowledge.

His characteristic danger is almost the opposite:

he cannot stop interpreting.

Hölderlin says that Oedipus interprets the oracle too infinitely. Instead of responding within ordinary civic limits, he pursues its meaning absolutely and relentlessly. dokumen.pub

This gives the tragedy a philosophical dimension.

Oedipus wants complete consciousness:

Who did it?
Why?
What happened?
Who am I?
What is the truth?

And he succeeds.

That is precisely what destroys him.

One modern account of Hölderlin's position nicely describes Oedipus' quest as an almost insane drive towards complete consciousness: philosophy's desire for absolute knowledge is fulfilled only at the price of the person seeking it. Cambridge Assets

That idea is very Hölderlin:

knowledge is necessary, but complete possession of reality may exceed what a human being can bear.

5. Tragedy occurs when human and divine come impossibly close

Here Hölderlin becomes much stranger.

He describes tragedy as a moment in which human beings and the divine become excessively joined.

The human being reaches beyond ordinary human limits.

But this cannot endure.

The excessive union has to be corrected by an equally radical separation.

One of his central formulations is essentially:

limitless union purifies itself through limitless separation. dokumen.pub

Oedipus therefore passes through something much larger than a reversal of fortune.

He begins as someone extraordinarily close to mastery:

king, solver of the Sphinx, protector of Thebes, interpreter of signs.

He ends as someone radically dispossessed:

blind, exiled, stripped of status, knowledge having destroyed the identity that sought it.

There is no easy return to equilibrium.

6. Then comes Hölderlin's extraordinary idea: God and man become “unfaithful” to one another

This is one of the hardest but most important parts of the essay.

At the extreme point of tragedy, Hölderlin says, human beings and the divine turn away from one another.

The human forgets himself because he is entirely caught in the moment.

God becomes, as it were, nothing but time.

They become “unfaithful” to one another.

Hölderlin does not mean moral infidelity.

He means that the old relationship between human and divine can no longer continue.

There is a rupture.

The world before the catastrophe and the world afterwards belong to different orders. Goldsmiths Research Online

And this brings us directly to Harzer.

7. “Beginning and end cannot rhyme”

Hölderlin then writes the line Harzer was remembering.

The essential formulation is:

“Anfang und Ende sich … schlechterdings nicht reimen läßt.”

Literally:

“Beginning and end can no longer rhyme with one another.”

And then Hölderlin says that because the human being must follow this “categorical reversal” — kategorische Umkehr —

afterwards he cannot be what he was at the beginning. Goldsmiths Research Online

This isn't simply character development.

It's much more radical.

Something happens in tragedy that breaks continuity.

You don't go:

A → B → C → A improved.

You go:

A → B → rupture → something that can no longer be A.

That is Hölderlin's categorical reversal.

What “categorical reversal” means

The word categorical carries some Kantian philosophical weight, although I would not reduce it to Kant's “categorical imperative.”

It means something closer to:

fundamental, unconditional, applying to the structure of experience itself.

The world has not merely changed within time.

Time itself seems to have turned.

There is a before and an after that cannot simply be reconciled.

Hence:

Beginning and end cannot rhyme.

Harzer's acting principle makes much more sense in this context

When Harzer said:

“There is one sentence for me as an actor very important. The beginning and the end, they have to be different. Said Hölderlin…”

he wasn't quoting a neat maxim like:

“A character should undergo an arc.”

He was invoking a much more radical conception of theatre.

The actor enters into a sequence of experiences.

At some point there is a caesura — an event, discovery, reversal, break.

And once the actor/person has genuinely passed through it:

he cannot simply be who he was before.

Hence the performance has to leave some trace in the body, voice, relation to space or consciousness of the figure.

That maps extraordinarily well onto the De Profundis performance you saw.

At the beginning:

contained → enclosed → scarcely moving → finding words → imprisoned

At the end:

washed → changed clothes → altered hair → almost childlike → standing → leaving the box → addressing Bosie/the other directly.

The visual transformation is not decorative.

It embodies Hölderlin's proposition:

The ending must not rhyme with the beginning.

Why Hölderlin matters beyond this one essay

His importance comes from several different directions.

As a poet

His late poetry radically stretched German syntax. Greek forms and sentence structures enter German; clauses become suspended; ordinary grammar is disrupted; gods, rivers, landscapes and historical time become almost physical presences.

This difficulty was initially taken as evidence of illness. It later became one reason modern poets revered him. Poetry Foundation notes his major influence on figures including Rilke and Paul Celan. Poetry Foundation

As a philosopher

His philosophical fragments helped alter the trajectory of German Idealism.

Against Fichte's attempt to ground philosophy in the self-conscious “I”, Hölderlin argued that subject and object must already presuppose a more fundamental unity — Being — which cannot itself simply become another object of consciousness.

This thinking influenced Schelling and helped shape the intellectual environment from which Hegel's philosophy emerged. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

That is a remarkable fact about him: a man remembered primarily as a poet helped shape the philosophical movement that produced Hegel.

As a theorist of art

His idea of the caesura became very influential.

The artwork is not simply harmonious.

Its truth may appear precisely when harmony breaks.

That becomes important later for Walter Benjamin, modernist aesthetics, critical theory and ideas of rupture and discontinuity. OUP Academic

For Heidegger

Hölderlin became absolutely central to Martin Heidegger.

From the 1930s onwards Heidegger repeatedly lectured on Hölderlin and increasingly treated poetry — particularly Hölderlin's poetry — as capable of revealing aspects of being that conceptual philosophy could not reach. Some accounts of Heidegger go as far as saying that much of his later philosophy becomes an extended engagement with Hölderlin. Cambridge University Press

This relationship is philosophically enormously important, although Heidegger's appropriation of Hölderlin — including national and historical claims about Germany — is itself something later scholars treat critically.

For twentieth-century poetry

The rediscovery of Hölderlin around the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly through Norbert von Hellingrath's editions, turned him from a marginal, supposedly mad Romantic into a central ancestor of modernism. Stefan George's circle, Benjamin, Heidegger and later Celan all engaged deeply with him. Cambridge University Press

The really distinctive Hölderlin idea

…to compress his worldview into one tension, it would be this:

Human beings long for unity — with nature, with another person, with society, with the divine, with themselves — yet mature existence requires us to endure separation rather than falsely abolish it.

You find different versions of that throughout his work:

unity / separation
home / exile
human / divine
Greece / modernity
nature / consciousness
love / loss
presence / absence
beginning / ending

And crucially, the answer is usually not simply to restore the lost first term.

Something must be passed through.

That is why the Hölderlin quotation works so well for Harzer:

You don't want the ending to restore the beginning.
The experience should have made restoration impossible.

….Harzer means by “storytelling of the soul.” The story isn't primarily the sequence of external facts. The story is the irreversible difference between the person who enters and the person who leaves. Goldsmiths Research Online

A carnival medal run

AutismAwareness. I made a mistake. I thought we could go from Westbourne Grove to Ladbroke Grove during the carnival.

We ended up at Westbourne Grove underground station because JP insisted that we could not go to Latimer Road. Latimer Road station was the better choice in every way except that one day many moons ago he had to get off there when he didn’t want to and so he bears an almost-phobic grudge.

Press of bodies. Half the people barely swaying with a stoned-eyed gaze. The other half begrudging our need to press through. JP his hands over his ears, releasing screechy yelps to compete with the carnival blare.

We are running our own Olympics. Hugging him from behind and slowly pushing him forward, creating gaps with our screeches. The minutes seems like hours as we make it past the sound system.  Now we have to wait for a bus to pass. The bus is out of place and JP must photograph this curiosity. Perhaps this is our medal. It feels like we are in a different world, playing a different game and dancing a tune few people hear.

Spectacular number of maths proofs and what that might mean

When proofs become abundant…OpenAI's 722 maths manuscripts, the argument over what counts as progress, and what this might mean beyond mathematics

These maths results seem pretty spectacular even if not all will be proved out. This event raises questions about the human endeavour in maths which I'm pretty unsure about (Terry Tao is worth reading here). Maths specifically has a language, Lean, which can help verify results, so it doesn't necessarily read across to all other human endeavours. Still, it seems to me to be a clear indicator... worth pondering.

This is what happened, what's important, the critiques, and what it might mean. (LLM assisted)

First: what actually happened?

This week OpenAI released an extraordinary quantity of mathematics in one go: 722 manuscripts, grouped into 372 families of related results, spanning number theory, geometry, theoretical computer science, analysis, probability, mathematical physics and much else. The work was produced mainly by an unreleased internal frontier model.

OpenAI says it posed roughly 4,000 research problems to the model. The retained results used, on average, compute equivalent to about three hours of ChatGPT Pro thinking each. There are important exceptions: the quasi-Riemann work and the CM Hodge result did not follow exactly the same procedure. OpenAI has also released ten abridged reasoning summaries and machine-checkable Lean formalizations for many of the papers.

The first thing to resist is the headline 'AI solved 722 open problems'. The 722 are manuscripts, not 722 independent discoveries. A family can contain a main theorem, a companion paper, consequences or a different proof. And the release deliberately contains work at different stages of verification. OpenAI itself says some unformalized results could have issues.

Even after applying that discount, the list is startling. Several of the claimed results concern questions that would normally deserve their own major announcement. Here they arrive as entries in a catalogue.

I am not going to pretend I can referee any of the deep proofs. What one can do already is separate three questions that are too easily collapsed into one. Is the stated result mathematically important? Is there a machine-checked formal proof of the central claim? And has the human mathematical community actually understood, stress-tested and accepted it? Those are different thresholds.

The findings that look most important

My provisional ranking is below. 'Importance' is the significance the result would have if it survives in essentially its advertised form. The last column describes the public checking I can see at the time of writing. Lean is powerful evidence, but it is not the same thing as expert community acceptance. For the unformalized blockbusters I would keep a large discount until specialists have gone through the papers.

Here’s a list:

Rank / Finding What it says / why it matters

Importance / Evidence today

1

Quasi-Riemann: zero-free half-plane Re(s) > 7/8

For the zeta function and all Dirichlet L-functions, no zeros in a fixed strip to the right of 7/8. This is qualitatively stronger than the classical zero-free regions that narrow with height.

5/5

Lean formalisation; zeta theorem independently replayed through Lean and a second Rust kernel. Human expert digestion still early.

2

Hilbert's tenth problem over Q

Claims there is no algorithm that can decide whether an arbitrary integer-coefficient polynomial has a rational solution. A famous open problem in logic and number theory.

5/5

Preprint claim; no central Lean formalisation located in the release catalogue. Needs serious expert scrutiny.

3

Rational Hodge conjecture for CM abelian varieties

Claims the Hodge conjecture in every codimension for all complex CM abelian varieties, with major Tate-conjecture consequences. A very substantial piece of a Millennium-problem landscape.

5/5

Preprint claim; produced by an exceptional workflow. No central Lean proof located in the catalogue.

4

Unique Games Conjecture

Would settle a central problem in theoretical computer science and pin down optimal hardness thresholds for many approximation problems, including Max-Cut.

5/5

Lean formalisation of the central gap reduction and several consequences. Independent expert review is only beginning.

5

Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer in low Selmer corank / density-one twists

Claims the full BSD leading-term formula in coranks 0 and 1 and, combined with another result, full BSD for a density-one set of quadratic twists of every elliptic curve over Q.

5/5

Headline manuscripts; I would treat this as unconfirmed pending specialist review.

6

Mahler conjectures

Sharp lower bounds for the volume product of a convex body and its polar, with equality cases. One of the central long-standing problems of convex geometry.

4.5/5

Lean formalisation covers the symmetric and general geometric inequalities and equality cases.

7

Free group factor isomorphism problem

Claims all interpolated free group factors with parameters greater than 1, including infinity, are isomorphic. A major operator-algebra problem.

4.5/5

Lean formalisation of the main isomorphism statement.

8

Matrix multiplication exponent <= 9/4

Pushes the asymptotic exponent for complex matrix multiplication to 2.25, a conspicuous improvement in one of algorithms' most famous quantitative races.

4.5/5

Lean formalisation of the 9/4 bound and related rectangular bounds.

9

Kadison's similarity conjecture

Settles a problem dating to the 1950s about bounded homomorphisms of C*-algebras and similarity to *-homomorphisms.

4.5/5

Lean formalisation of the central theorem and supporting uniform estimates.

10

Global solutions for 3-D relativistic Vlasov-Maxwell

Claims global existence and uniqueness for the one-species system for broad smooth data, without smallness or symmetry assumptions. A major nonlinear PDE / mathematical-physics result.

4.5/5

Lean formalisation of the global classical solution statement.

11

Banach's simple Lebesgue-spectrum problem

Constructs a smooth volume-preserving diffeomorphism of the three-torus with simple Lebesgue spectrum on the full mean-zero L2 space.

4/5

Lean formalisation of the central construction statement.

12

The irrationality exponent of pi is exactly 2

Shows pi cannot be approximated unusually well by rational numbers in the asymptotic sense measured by irrationality exponent. A long-standing Diophantine approximation problem.

4/5

Lean formalisation of the exact exponent-2 statement.

13

Catalan's constant is irrational

Settles the irrationality of the classical constant G = 1 - 1/9 + 1/25 - ... , a question going back to the nineteenth century.

4/5

Lean formalisation of the headline irrationality theorem.

The Riemann result is a useful case study

The Riemann hypothesis itself remains unsolved. It predicts that every non-trivial zero of the Riemann zeta function lies on the line Re(s) = 1/2. OpenAI's theorem puts a zero-free boundary at 7/8. That is much weaker than 1/2, and it would be silly to say the Riemann hypothesis is now a quarter solved. Mathematics does not work like a progress bar.

The reason mathematicians care is more structural. For more than a century, unconditional zero-free regions could be pushed slightly left of 1, but the safe strip becomes thinner as one moves higher. A fixed line strictly below 1 had remained out of reach. The OpenAI formalisation says 7/8 works uniformly for every Dirichlet L-function, as well as for zeta itself. It also gives a uniform logarithmic exclusion region for Landau-Siegel zeros.

This is one of the strongest parts of the release because the formal theorem matches the interesting headline closely. There is already an independent technical re-run: the zeta proof was compiled through Lean's kernel and then through an independently written Rust kernel called nanoda. Both accepted it. The proof closure runs to almost half a million lines of OpenAI modules.

There is a caveat worth keeping in view. That external check was carried out by Claude Code on one person's machine. It verified the formal artefact; it did not amount to a roomful of analytic number theorists reading the paper, finding the core idea and saying, yes, this changes the field. We have unusually strong evidence that a precise theorem has been formally derived. We are still at the start of understanding what happened mathematically.

Why Lean matters so much here

Maths has an advantage that most intellectual work does not have. A proof can, in principle, be translated into a formal language where every logical step is checked by a small trusted kernel. Lean is one of the leading systems for doing this.

That changes the economics of AI-generated work. A language model can hallucinate. A second language model can fail to notice the hallucination. A Lean kernel has a much narrower job: does this exact formal statement follow from these exact definitions and accepted axioms? If it does, the machine accepts the proof. If it does not, compilation fails.

This gives maths a plausible architecture for abundance: a high-volume generator on one side and a rigorous filter on the other. Terry Tao has used the image of a firehose that needs a filter. Mathematics is unusually well placed to build one.

Still, Lean does not settle everything people care about. It checks the statement you formalised. A famous conjecture can be subtly weakened in translation. Hypotheses can be stronger than advertised. The formal theorem may cover only one part of a natural-language paper. Formal correctness says nothing about novelty, importance, proper attribution, or whether a human can see the idea.

So I would put the verification ladder roughly like this: a natural-language AI manuscript is a candidate result; a matching Lean proof is much stronger; independent reproduction is stronger again; expert mathematical digestion remains another step. The top OpenAI results currently sit at different places on that ladder.

Why many mathematicians are unhappy

The interesting reaction has not been a simple defence of human jobs. A lot of the strongest critics accept that the capability is real. Their question is what happens to mathematics when proofs become much easier to produce than to understand.

1. A verification and attention debt

Seven hundred papers can be generated much faster than seven hundred papers can be responsibly checked. That creates an asymmetry. OpenAI gets the headline; the mathematical community inherits months or years of unpaid validation work.

The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence (AGMAI), an independent group hosted at the Institute for Advanced Study, described the release as an important event and then immediately added that publication was only the beginning. The work still has to be assessed, understood and incorporated into mathematical knowledge. That process cannot be automated away merely by making the PDF public.

There is also a practical curation problem. Which ten of the 372 families deserve a specialist's week? Which are incremental? Which accidentally rediscover something? Which contain a subtle mismatch between the paper and the formal statement? An abundance of candidate knowledge creates a new shortage of expert attention.

2. Tao: generation, verification and digestion

Terry Tao's framework is the most useful one I have found. He separates mathematical progress into generation, verification and digestion. Generation finds a proof. Verification establishes that it is correct. Digestion turns the proof into something the community understands: the key lemma, the reusable technique, the clean example, the connection to another field, eventually the version a graduate student can learn.

Historically these stages moved at roughly human speed. If it took six months to crack a problem, spending another month writing it properly was a manageable extra cost. AI can compress the first stage from months to hours while exposition may still take weeks. The ratio changes dramatically. Tao calls the resulting problem 'proof indigestion'. Each individual researcher can become more productive while the average quality of the total literature deteriorates, because raw output grows faster than careful explanation.

This is a subtle point. A correct theorem is still a correct theorem. Yet mathematics is more than a database of true statements. The proof has value because it gives people new mental equipment. If nobody understands the equipment, some of the value stays locked inside the artefact.

3. Famous problems were landmarks, training grounds and incentives

In September, a declaration initially signed by 25 Fields Medallists — including Tao, Peter Scholze, James Maynard, Martin Hairer, Maryna Viazovska, Manjul Bhargava and Pierre Deligne — argued that famous open problems have functioned as 'landmarks and lighthouses'. They give communities something hard to push against. The failed attempts generate techniques, conjectures, collaborations and trained mathematicians.

A benchmark culture can Goodhart that system. If AI companies optimise directly for the count and prestige of famous problems solved, the old proxy starts to break. A deep theorem used to be reasonably good evidence that deep thinking had happened around it. That relationship may no longer hold in the same way.

Tao pushes the thought further. Good open problems are, in one sense, a scarce educational resource. Once a machine publishes the solution, a young mathematician can still study the problem, but the untouched landscape has changed. Knowing that a long proof exists, and roughly where it goes, affects how you explore. Industrially sweeping through a curated list of open problems may therefore consume something that the field used to use for training and discovery.

4. Failure itself contains information

The Unique Games story makes this concrete. Dor Minzer and his students Yumou Fei and Shuo Wang had spent years on a closely related problem. When rumours spread that OpenAI had solved Unique Games, they rushed a 95-page manuscript online so that their contribution would not be swallowed by the coming announcement.

Minzer's description of their human process is telling. Several approaches failed. Those failures taught them which structures mattered and eventually helped them assemble a proof. His worry is that a system which jumps straight to the successful path removes much of that learning loop. A human who sees only the final route may know where the summit is without learning the mountain.

That does not make the AI proof worse as a proof. It may make the research process less fertile for the humans around it.

5. Credit, priority and provenance become messy

Mathematics has always built aggressively on earlier mathematics. The difference now is speed and opacity. A model has absorbed an enormous literature and can combine ideas across it. It may also finish a research programme that humans have pushed close to completion. Working out where the genuinely new idea enters can be hard even for specialists.

The worry is not merely philosophical. Careers depend on priority. In this release Daniel Litt noticed that one advertised result was a special case of a conjecture of his and followed from stronger work already under way by one of his students. The result can still be useful; it shows why '372 discoveries' is too clean a description.

The earlier Navier-Stokes episode also left some mathematicians angry about how AI labs handled credit and unpublished human work. Whatever one thinks of the disputed details, the episode increased the demand for careful prior-art searches, prompt provenance and slower claims about novelty.

6. Proprietary models create a two-tier science

AGMAI's sharpest recommendation came before this release: frontier labs should stop testing advanced mathematical problems on proprietary internal models that the mathematical community cannot access. Their worry is straightforward. The lab can explore thousands of questions with an instrument more capable than anything available in a university department. The people who formulated the questions then watch the answers arrive from outside their field's normal institutions.

OpenAI says it is working towards a responsible release of the model. That matters. A world where every serious mathematician has access to this kind of collaborator feels very different from a world where a few companies privately harvest the frontier and publish the outputs.

Access is also about compute. Even if the model becomes public, the ability to run thousands of long research attempts may be concentrated in rich institutions. Mathematics has historically been unusually cheap at the point of research: paper, pencil, library, blackboard. AI could make the frontier materially more capital-intensive.

7. Publication norms have not caught up

The ordinary norms of mathematics assume that authors understand their papers, can defend them in seminars, know the nearby literature and take responsibility for errors. An AI lab can now publish a proof that nobody at the lab fully understands in that traditional sense.

AGMAI therefore asked labs to do more than upload files: search for prior art, improve exposition, reveal the model, prompts and compute, document failed attempts, formalise where possible, use independent scholarly repositories, and fund the human work of understanding what has been released. It also asked that mathematical results not be treated primarily as model marketing.

OpenAI has moved part way. It released the papers, revision histories, substantial Lean material, ten reasoning summaries, aggregate compute information and a promise to fund workshops and programmes around understanding the results. The model remains closed, the full attempt history is absent, and GitHub is controlled by OpenAI rather than an independent mathematical repository. The current release feels more transparent than a press release and still some distance from a mature scientific publication system.

8. What happens to the next generation?

This may be the most important long-run concern. A mathematics PhD is simultaneously research and training. You learn judgement by being stuck, trying bad ideas, reading around them, proving small lemmas, explaining your work and discovering that your beautiful shortcut is wrong.

If a model can answer every well-specified technical question faster than the student, the temptation to skip those stages will be enormous. Some of that is healthy cognitive offloading. Nobody wants students to spend a career doing arithmetic that a calculator handles perfectly. The harder question is where the productive struggle ends and deskilling begins.

There is also an incentive problem. Why spend ten years becoming a world expert in a narrow area if a proprietary model may solve the flagship problem next Tuesday? Quanta's account of the Unique Games race captures the psychological effect rather well. Humans sleep, eat, teach and have moods. A trillion-dollar company does not have those constraints.

The positive case is also strong

There is a risk of romanticising scarcity. Maths was slow because it was hard. Some of that slowness was productive; some was simply slowness.

If an open question has resisted us for 80 years and a machine supplies a correct proof tomorrow, humanity knows something tomorrow that it did not know today. Cheap discovery does not make the discovery fake.

Tim Gowers, another Fields Medallist and a member of AGMAI, deliberately did not sign the September declaration. He agrees that mathematics faces a crisis and worries about credit, institutions and training. He is less persuaded that understanding must always be the primary goal with problem-solving as merely a proxy. Mathematics has long had different cultures: theory builders, problem solvers and people somewhere in between.

Gowers also makes a simple quantitative point. Suppose AI produces 1,000 important results and humans only manage to digest 200 of them. If the old world would have produced and digested 100, we are still ahead. There will be more undigested mathematics and more digested mathematics. That could be a pretty good bargain.

There is another upside: machines can search across fields whose literatures have become too large for any human. A result buried in ergodic theory may be exactly the missing tool in number theory. A model with broad recall and endless patience can test combinations no individual would have time to try.

Jeremy Avigad's optimistic version is that humans move up a level. Let the machine fill in more of the technical terrain. We ask harder questions, build better concepts, find simpler proofs, decide what is beautiful and important, and explore spaces that become visible only after today's frontier has moved.

Formalisation could also enable a genuinely new collaborative scale. Large proofs can be split into modules. Contributions can come from humans, AI systems, students and specialists who do not know one another personally, with formal checking supplying a common trust layer. Tao has called this direction 'big mathematics'. It looks less like a solitary genius at a blackboard and more like a large engineering or software project — with mathematicians still setting architecture and meaning.

And there is an appealing possibility that status itself shifts. If raw proof generation becomes cheap, perhaps more credit moves to the person who asks the best question, extracts the reusable idea, connects two fields, writes the explanation everyone remembers, or builds the formal library that lets everybody else work faster. Mathematics could end up valuing taste more explicitly.

What might this mean beyond maths?

This is where I would be careful and also where I think the release matters most.

Mathematics is unusually favourable territory for AI. The literature is formal and cumulative. Many answers are crisp. Most importantly, proof assistants provide a route to mechanical verification. There is no Lean kernel for 'this company has a durable moat', 'this patient will benefit from this treatment', 'this policy will increase social welfare' or 'this play is good'.

So maths probably moves earlier than many other areas. It may also give a cleaner signal of capability because we can separate fluent nonsense from verified output more effectively than elsewhere.

One comforting story about AI has been that routine work will automate while highly creative, abstract work requiring years of specialist training will remain human territory. Research mathematics is a fairly brutal test of that story. These systems are now producing candidate original research across unrelated fields, including work on problems that generations of exceptionally able humans knew about and could not settle.

If even a modest fraction of the strongest results survive, creativity and abstraction no longer look like reliable technological moats around human work.

The more interesting economic point may be that the bottleneck moves. For most of modern research, producing the new result was scarce. Peer review, publication and interpretation were arranged around that scarcity. If candidate discoveries become abundant, other things rise in value: verification, attention, experimental confirmation, explanation, taste, choice of problem, and trust.

That pattern should travel beyond maths even when formal proof does not. Software has tests and formal verification. Chips can be simulated. Chemistry and biology have assays, though often expensive ones. AI research systems will move fastest in fields where proposed answers can be rejected cheaply and reliably.

Fields with weak verification may actually face a nastier version of the problem. A firehose of bad mathematical proofs can eventually meet Lean. A firehose of plausible investment theses, policy arguments or psychological explanations can sound excellent and remain wrong for years.

That makes the maths story both reassuring and unsettling. Reassuring because we can see a route to rigorous checking. Unsettling because the underlying generator appears able to operate at a level of abstraction we were recently inclined to treat as distinctly human.

What happens to mathematicians?

Chess did not end after Deep Blue. People still run despite cars. Photography did not eliminate painting. These analogies are useful and incomplete. Professional chess is different from chess in 1996, and few people are paid to perform arithmetic by hand.

People will continue doing mathematics because understanding something beautiful is enjoyable. I am quite confident about that. The profession of research mathematician is a different question.

Universities and governments fund research partly because researchers produce new knowledge. If frontier models become cheaper and materially better at theorem production, funders will eventually notice. The strongest case for maintaining human mathematics may become less about beating the machines at their own benchmark and more about preserving a population capable of understanding, directing and challenging them.

That requires a pipeline. You cannot preserve expert judgement by keeping a handful of senior people around to read AI output. School pupils, undergraduates, PhDs and postdocs have to practise. They need hard problems and room to fail. We may end up having to protect some forms of inefficient human learning precisely because the efficient machine alternative is so good.

This sounds odd only because we are used to the process of producing mathematics and the process of producing mathematicians being the same activity. AI may separate them.

Where I might land, for now

A day after the release, certainty would be silly. Some manuscripts will probably fail. Some will turn out to be known in stronger form. Some formal statements will prove narrower than casual headlines suggest. Several of the most spectacular claims still lack the kind of verification that would make me comfortable calling them established mathematics.

The reverse error is also possible: concentrating so much on the process controversy that we miss the capability signal. The quasi-Riemann theorem has a matching Lean formalisation and has already survived a second-kernel replay. Unique Games, Mahler, the free-group-factor result, Kadison, Vlasov-Maxwell, matrix multiplication and several other striking claims have formal artefacts tied to their central statements. If even five or ten major results ultimately stand cleanly, this is an extraordinary research output.

And the number I keep returning to is not 722. It is roughly 4,000 questions in; hundreds of significant candidate result families out; average retained-result inference measured in hours. That is a different research production function.

Tao may be right that mathematics needs to defend the slow work of digestion, failure and human formation. Gowers may be right that abundance is still a good bargain and, in any case, hard to stop once these models diffuse. I suspect both views contain part of the answer.

The sensible response is probably to change what we reward. If proofs become abundant, reward understanding. If candidate discoveries become cheap, reward judgement. If machines can search the known landscape faster than us, reward the people who make better maps and ask better questions. Make the labs pay some of the cost of verification and exposition. Give researchers access to the tools.

I would also resist the urge to make this a morality play about humans versus AI. The more interesting question is what human intellectual life looks like when one of its hardest outputs becomes abundant.

Maths lets us see that question early because it has a language for checking the answer.

Worth pondering.

Sources and further reading

Note: this article reflects the public evidence available at the time of writing. The mathematical status of individual claims may change quickly as specialists review, reproduce, correct or reject them. The article was LLM assisted. 

Social, Medical and "administrative" models on autism and disability

Introduction: I had some musings (with LLMs) on the issues/strengths of medical and social models of disability, in particular autism. And thinking about, my own “model” which I called bureaucratic model, but might be better called administrative… and then synthesising this into interactive models which are discussed briefly… and some links end for further reading.

My question: For understanding autism, what does each model explain well, what does it obscure, and what framework best guides how we treat autistic people and design support?

My answer is that both the medical and social models capture something important, and either becomes misleading when treated as the whole story. And to ignore the administrative state is to ignore a whole other layer in terms of what is happening.

For autism in particular, one could use something close to an interactional model: disability arises from the interaction between a person's underlying characteristics, the demands of their environment and the support available to them.

This is also broadly where the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning has ended up. The WHO explicitly treats disability as arising from interactions between a health condition and personal and environmental factors rather than locating it entirely either within the individual or within society.

I would then add two further perspectives.

Neurodiversity asks a normative question: even where someone is different, should that difference actually be regarded as something that needs correcting?

And what I will call the administrative or bureaucratic model asks a different question again: how does a continuous, complicated set of human needs become legible to a government that has to decide who receives resources?

Together these give a more complete picture of autism than any one model alone.

2. The medical model

In a simple form:

A person has an impairment or disorder that produces limitations. The appropriate response is diagnosis, treatment, rehabilitation, education, care or some other intervention directed substantially at the individual.

Applied to autism, the causal story might look like:

neurodevelopmental differences → difficulties with communication, sensory processing, executive function, adaptive functioning, etc. → disability

Consider an autistic person who cannot reliably communicate pain, experiences severe sensory distress, cannot safely navigate roads alone, has major sleep problems, cannot manage money or food preparation independently, or requires substantial help with everyday living.

Those difficulties cannot plausibly all be explained away as discrimination or poor social design.

The medical model therefore has important strengths. It takes impairment seriously. It allows us to investigate causes and mechanisms. It legitimises treatment of problems that cause suffering. And it recognises the enormous heterogeneity contained within the autism diagnosis.

This is particularly important for autistic people with intellectual disability, epilepsy, severe communication difficulties or very high support needs.

A theory of autism that leaves little conceptual room for intrinsic impairment risks marginalising precisely the people who need the greatest amount of support.

But the medical model can also (and does also) go badly wrong.

It can turn difference into pathology merely because it departs from the statistical norm. It can make normalisation the objective rather than wellbeing. And it can locate every problem inside the autistic person even when the environment is generating much of the difficulty.

A child who cannot tolerate a noisy, chaotic classroom might be described as having poor emotional regulation.

But perhaps the classroom is an extraordinarily hostile sensory environment for that child.

Teaching the child to tolerate it better is one possible intervention. Changing the classroom is another.

And the fact that a behaviour is recognisably autistic does not itself tell us whether changing it would improve the person's life.

I tend to ask the question, can we bring the world closer to the person as an intervention? And also, how much of the challenge is situations in the world / society / environment rather than the person?


The classic social-model distinction is between impairment and disability.

Very roughly:

People have bodily or cognitive differences. Society disables them when environments, institutions and expectations are designed around people without those differences.

The influential British social-model tradition emerged from disability activism in the 1970s, particularly the work of the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation.

Applied to autism:

autistic characteristics + poorly matched social environment → disability

This produces a very different set of questions.

Instead of asking:

“How do we make this autistic child behave more normally?”

you might ask:

“What is it about this school, communication system or expectation that makes functioning unnecessarily difficult?”

That shift is genuinely powerful.

An autistic person may struggle enormously with an unstructured verbal meeting but function exceptionally well when information is written down beforehand.

Someone may be unable to work effectively in an open-plan office but perform extremely well remotely.

Someone who communicates unusually may have considerably more understanding than observers infer from their speech.

The social model consequently highlights reasonable adjustments, accessible environments, alternative communication, predictable routines, sensory accommodations, anti-discrimination and institutional redesign.

It also guards against an important conceptual mistake:

unusual ≠ undesirable ≠ pathological

Some (arguably many? can we argue all? ) autistic characteristics are simply differences.

Intense interests, preference for routine, unusual communication styles or reduced interest in conventional social rituals need not themselves be things that ought to be “fixed”.

4. Where the social model runs into trouble with autism

The criticism:

Some disability is intrinsic to impairment, rather than wholly socially produced.

Imagine the most autism-friendly society realistically possible.

There would still be autistic people who could not independently cross a road safely, communicate urgent medical needs, regulate overwhelming sensory experiences, manage money, prepare food or live without substantial assistance.

Changing society could reduce their disability enormously.

It would not abolish it.

This matters because an excessively strong version of the social model can inadvertently erase people with the greatest support needs.

Tom Shakespeare's influential criticism of the strong social model makes a related point: the sharp conceptual separation between bodily impairment and socially produced disability becomes difficult to maintain once we recognise that impairment itself can restrict people's lives. The social model remains an extremely useful corrective to medicalisation without necessarily being a complete causal account of disability.

Autism also creates a second problem for a purely environmental explanation: people's accommodation needs can conflict.

One autistic person requires silence; another constantly seeks sensory stimulation.

One needs rigid predictability; another finds routines oppressive.

One communicates best through writing; another cannot read.

There therefore isn't necessarily an “autism-friendly environment” analogous to installing a wheelchair ramp.

Autism involves multiple dimensions, and accommodations have to be individualised.

Where the medical model runs into trouble

The corresponding mistake is to treat observed difficulty as though it directly measures intrinsic impairment.

Conceptually:

Observed disability = individual characteristics × environmental demands

rather than simply:

Observed disability = severity of autism

The multiplication sign is metaphorical, but the interaction is the important point.

Suppose an autistic teenager functions badly in school but substantially better at home with one-to-one teaching, written instructions, predictable routines and breaks.

A crude medical interpretation might be:

severe autism causes educational dysfunction

A crude social interpretation might be:

conventional schooling creates the disability

The evidence may support something closer to:

There is a genuine neurodevelopmental difference whose disabling consequences vary dramatically depending upon the environment.

That is a much more useful causal model.

It also explains why the same person can appear profoundly impaired in one setting and strikingly capable in another.

This distinction between underlying capacity and realised performance is explicitly present in the WHO's ICF framework: what someone can do and what they actually do in their current environment are related but distinct outcomes.

6. Neurodiversity adds something different

I would distinguish the social model from neurodiversity, although they overlap.

Neurodiversity introduces an additional normative proposition:

variation in human cognition is not automatically pathology.

That seems broadly right.

But there are stronger and weaker versions.

The weaker claim seems strong to me:

Autistic traits should not be treated as deficits merely because they are atypical.

The stronger claim:

Autism is simply a difference rather than a disability or disorder

is much harder to sustain across the entire autistic population but could have a claim amongst some.

Autism is unusually heterogeneous.

Someone living independently, working successfully and mainly encountering difficulty because social conventions favour neurotypical communication has a very different relationship with autism from someone requiring lifelong continuous assistance.

Trying to force both experiences into either “disease” or “difference” throws information away.

Robert Chapman's work provides one of the more sophisticated philosophical versions of the neurodiversity argument. Rather than simply denying impairment, he argues for an ecological conception of mental functioning in which individual abilities have to be understood partly in relation to the wider social environment in which they operate.

A useful recent overview by Steven Kapp similarly argues that the neurodiversity movement and the medical model need not be simple opposites. In practice, neurodiversity proponents can support individual interventions that improve quality of life while rejecting normalisation as an end in itself.

That strikes me as a much stronger position than either “everything autistic should be treated” or “nothing autistic should be treated”.

7. A better causal model

Perhaps I would suggest an interaction model.

Intrinsic characteristics

Neurodevelopment, cognition, sensory processing, language, executive function, motor abilities, emotional regulation, intellectual ability and co-occurring conditions.

↓

Environment

Noise, complexity, predictability, communication style, social expectations, educational structure, employment practices and physical environment.

↓

Person-environment interaction

The demands placed upon this particular person relative to their capacities.

↓

Assistance and adaptation

Human support, assistive technology, education, treatment, environmental adjustments and social care.

↓

Outcomes

Independence, distress, relationships, learning, employment, safety, wellbeing and flourishing.

This gives us a much better practical question than:

“Is autism a disability or merely a difference?”

Ask instead:

“What is preventing this particular person from flourishing, and which lever is best changed?”

Sometimes the answer is the environment.

Sometimes it is skills or treatment.

Sometimes it is ongoing human support.

Sometimes there is nothing that needs changing at all.

Usually it is some combination.

8. An economic way of seeing the problem

There is also a useful resource-allocation perspective.

Suppose someone has difficulty doing X.

There are broadly three margins of adjustment:

Person → Environment → Assistance

You can invest resources in:

  1. changing the person's capabilities;

  2. changing the environment;

  3. providing another person or technology to bridge the gap.

The best combination depends on the particular difficulty.

If £500 of assistive technology removes a communication barrier, insisting on years of behavioural training could be both expensive and unnecessarily burdensome.

Conversely, if learning a particular skill substantially increases someone's future autonomy and can be learnt without excessive distress, saying “society should simply accommodate this” could deprive them of something valuable.

And sometimes neither adaptation is sufficient.

Society simply needs to provide care.

That last category gets insufficient attention in some versions of the social model.

Dependence on other humans is not necessarily a policy failure. (see my podcast conversation with disability activist David Ruebain on interdependence here)

Some people genuinely need substantial lifelong assistance.

The relevant comparison is not independence versus dependence as moral categories. It is which arrangement produces the best achievable life given the person's characteristics, preferences and resources.

9. The administrative or “bureaucratic” model

There is then another layer, particularly important in welfare states such as the UK.

Disability is not only a biological condition or a person-environment interaction.

It also becomes an administrative status.

Governments have finite budgets for education, social care, disability benefits, healthcare, supported housing and specialist services.

Human need, however, is continuous and multidimensional.

Government decisions often cannot be.

At some point an institution must decide:

eligible / not eligible

benefit / no benefit

additional educational provision / ordinary provision

funding / no funding

So the administrative causal chain looks something like:

underlying characteristics → functional difficulty → evidence and classification → administrative eligibility → resources

This is not primarily a theory of what disability is.

It is a theory of how governments make disability legible enough to allocate resources.

10. Why labels become valuable

A diagnosis therefore acquires an administrative function as well as a clinical one.

Government cannot directly observe someone's sensory overload, executive dysfunction, communication difficulties or need for supervision.

It has a problem of asymmetric information.

The person and family know far more about the difficulties than the state does.

But a state allocating scarce resources cannot simply accept every claim without evidence.

It therefore uses proxies:

  • diagnoses;

  • professional assessments;

  • functional tests;

  • reports;

  • administrative descriptors;

  • eligibility thresholds.

Diagnosis can therefore act partly as a signal.

It provides a shared vocabulary and external validation that the difficulty is persistent and recognisable.

Economically, one way of interpreting this is that diagnosis can reduce the transaction costs of demonstrating need.

That does not mean diagnosis is necessarily a formal prerequisite for support (at least in theory….)

But:

“A recognised diagnosis may make it easier to demonstrate and legitimise need within bureaucratic systems”

And many people report that without a diagnosis it is very hard to get support…

11. Bureaucracy changes behaviour

Once categories determine access to resources, people and institutions inevitably respond to those categories.

This generates several predictable effects.

Threshold effects. Two people with almost identical underlying needs may receive substantially different resources because one falls just above an eligibility boundary and the other just below.

Incentives to seek diagnosis. If a diagnosis helps obtain appropriate educational provision, accommodations or benefits, the private value of obtaining a diagnosis rises. This does not imply the diagnosis is false; it changes the incentive to identify and document an existing condition.

Professional gatekeeping. Clinicians, educational psychologists and other professionals become important partly because their assessments convert private experiences into evidence that institutions recognise.

Strategic presentation. Systems organised around demonstrating impairment naturally encourage applicants to explain what they cannot do rather than what they can.

Socioeconomic inequality. Families with more time, knowledge, money and confidence may be better able to commission assessments, obtain reports, understand bureaucratic language and appeal adverse decisions.

Path dependence. Once support is conditional upon demonstrating continuing impairment, families may reasonably worry that evidence of improvement could threaten the support partly responsible for that improvement.

None of this requires fraud or bad faith.

It follows from institutional incentives. There is a large literature on public choice theory and other literature that accounts for this… (basically: Once rules attach resources to categories, rational actors respond to the rules as well as to the underlying need the rules are trying to measure.) And these impact both the state actors and the non-state actors…

12. The paradox of the deficit narrative

This creates an uncomfortable tension between the social and administrative models.

The social model says:

Do not define disabled people by their deficits. Look at capabilities and change unnecessary environmental barriers.

The bureaucracy often says:

Explain precisely what this person cannot do, demonstrate that it is serious and persistent, and provide evidence. Otherwise we cannot justify allocating resources.

So families can find themselves having to construct what might be called an administrative deficit narrative.

To obtain the resources that allow someone to flourish, you first have to document everything that prevents them from flourishing.

This can feel dehumanising.

But it is important not to caricature the state either.

There is a genuine allocation problem.

Resources are finite. Need is not directly observable. Eligibility creates incentives. Some form of assessment is unavoidable.

The administrative model points to a more general phenomenon.

Human variation is continuous. Bureaucracy needs categories.

Governments cannot allocate £7,842.37 of educational support because someone's underlying level of need happens to sit at exactly 7.84237 on some objective scale.

There is no such perfect scale.

Instead institutions construct categories, measurements and thresholds.

Once those measurements determine resources, the measurements themselves acquire value.

This has something of a Goodhart's-law character.

A diagnosis begins partly as a way of describing or identifying need.

Once diagnosis or documented impairment becomes useful in accessing scarce resources, individuals and institutions have additional incentives to obtain and preserve the category.

It means the observed system is an equilibrium produced jointly by:

human characteristics + social environments + administrative rules + behavioural responses to those rules.

That is a richer explanation than either “the disability is entirely inside the person” or “society creates the disability”.

How to synthesise?

Weight the different models according to the question being asked. So you might get…

Why does this person process the world differently?
Medical and developmental science.

Why are they struggling so much in this particular setting?
Social and interactional models.

Should this unusual behaviour actually be changed?
Neurodiversity, wellbeing and the person's own preferences.

What adjustments should a school or employer make?
Primarily the social model.

Could medication, therapy, education or skills training improve life?
Medical and developmental approaches.

How much ongoing support does this person require?
Functional and interactional assessment.

Why do diagnostic categories sometimes become so important to families?
Administrative incentives and resource allocation.

What should ultimately be optimised?
Flourishing, wellbeing, autonomy, relationships, participation and safety.

So overall synthesis is:

Autism is a real neurodevelopmental difference that can produce intrinsic impairments, but whether and how severely those impairments become disabling depends substantially on the person's environment and available support. Society then overlays an administrative system that determines which of those needs become recognised and resourced.

The normative principle I would put above all of this is:

The objective should not be normality. It should be flourishing.

That resolves quite a lot.

If an autistic person's harmless repetitive behaviour makes other people uncomfortable, there is little reason to train it away merely to make them look normal.

If inability to communicate pain is causing suffering, improving communication is enormously valuable.

If school is producing distress because it demands a particular form of social interaction that isn't necessary for learning, change the school environment.

If learning a skill would genuinely expand someone's future choices, help them acquire it.

If someone cannot safely navigate independently despite every sensible environmental adjustment, recognise the impairment and provide support rather than pretending society alone created the disability.

And if someone requires lifelong human assistance, that does not make their life less valuable or represent a failure of inclusion.

(while easy to say, m and harder to put in practice)

For autism, therefore:

The medical model is descriptively necessary but normatively insufficient.

The social model is morally and institutionally corrective but descriptively incomplete.

Neurodiversity rightly challenges the assumption that difference itself requires correction, but cannot make severe impairment disappear by changing the language used to describe it.

The administrative model explains how genuine needs become categories, entitlements and resources, while also creating its own incentives and distortions.

A defensible position is consequently pluralist:

accept difference, accommodate difference, treat suffering where treatment helps, teach useful capabilities where worthwhile, provide technology or human assistance where it bridges limitations, and provide care where substantial limitations remain.

The relevant outcome….

how good a life they can actually have.

Further reading

For the original social-model argument, the short UPIAS Fundamental Principles of Disability is historically important and unusually direct. Read UPIAS, Fundamental Principles of Disability

For a serious critique of an overly strong social model, Tom Shakespeare's “The Social Model of Disability” is probably the most useful short counterweight. It preserves the social model's insights about barriers while challenging the claim that impairment itself contributes nothing to disability. Read Tom Shakespeare on the social model

For the interactional middle ground, the WHO's ICF is worth knowing because it formalises disability as an interaction between health conditions and contextual factors, rather than choosing either a purely medical or purely social account. WHO International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health

For a sophisticated neurodiversity argument focused on autism, Robert Chapman's “Neurodiversity and the Social Ecology of Mental Functions” develops the ecological case rather than simply asserting that autism is “difference not disability”. Read Chapman on neurodiversity and social ecology

And for a very concise recent attempt to reconcile neurodiversity with legitimate individual intervention, Steven Kapp's 2026 World Psychiatry piece is particularly useful. Read Kapp, The neurodiversity movement vs. the medical model of autism

Also:

There are several established models close to the interaction model, and they differ mainly in emphasis:

  • WHO International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF): probably the closest mainstream formulation (as mentioned above). Disability is a dynamic interaction between a health condition, personal factors and environmental factors. It explicitly tries to synthesise medical and social models rather than choose between them. World Health Organization

  • Nordic/relational model of disability: emphasises person–environment mismatch. Disability is contextual and situational rather than simply a fixed property of the individual.

  • Person–Environment Fit / Person–Environment–Occupation models: common in psychology and occupational therapy. Functioning depends on how well an individual's capabilities fit the demands of a particular task and environment. This gets especially close to our formulation of person × environment × task → realised functioning.

  • Capability approach (Sen/Nussbaum and later disability scholars): shifts the endpoint from “normal functioning” to what someone is genuinely able to be and do. That fits our idea that the objective should be flourishing rather than normality.

  • Disablement-process models: retain underlying pathology/impairment but explicitly model environmental and personal factors as modifying whether impairment becomes actual disability.

Fuchsia Dunlop: Five Tastes, Chinese Flavour and the Art of Balance

Food writer Fuchsia Dunlop returns to the podcast to discuss her new book, Five Tastes: The Magic of Flavour in the Chinese Kitchen, and what Chinese cooking can teach us about flavour, texture, balance and learning to trust our senses.

Fuchsia explains the Chinese idea of wèi (味), taste or flavour, and why the classical five tastes (sweet, sour, salty, bitter and pungent) are better understood as a cultural framework than a literal limit. We explore běnwèi (本味), the essential flavour of an ingredient; xiānwèi (鲜味), the fresh savoury quality we now call umami; and xiāngwèi (香味), fragrance and aroma. We also discuss how Chinese cooks use ginger, spring onion, Shaoxing wine and other seasonings to correct unwanted flavours while allowing good ingredients to speak for themselves.


A central idea is that balance often happens across an entire meal, not within every dish. A fiercely málà (麻辣), numbing-and-hot dish might sit alongside plain rice, vegetables and a light qīngdàn (清淡) broth. These quieter foods are not failed attempts at excitement: their role is to soothe, cleanse the palate and make the meal work as a whole. Fuchsia also explains Sichuanese guàiwèi (怪味), “strange flavour”, where multiple strong seasonings are combined so harmoniously that none dominates.


We move from taste to texture: slippery, crisp, chewy, glutinous and gelatinous pleasures that are often more central to Chinese eating than Western diners realise. Fuchsia recommends wood ear mushrooms as an accessible introduction, and jellyfish for the more adventurous.

The conversation also becomes practical: how to build a Chinese meal from what looks good at the market, why not to overcrowd a wok, the usefulness of cold dishes and flexible sauces, and how Chinese flavours can travel into roast potatoes, roast chicken and even a French-style vinaigrette. Fuchsia talks about fermented tofu, three decades of food research and around 170–180 notebooks of observations, recipes and conversations gathered across China.

We discuss why becoming a better cook means moving beyond timers and measurements towards smell, sight, sound and taste — knowing when garlic has lost its raw edge, or when hot oil is ready because ginger and spring onion immediately hiss.

We finish with overrated or underrated: hot pot, steaming, microwaves, air fryers and tasting menus; and with Fuchsia’s argument that Chinese cooking can be immensely sophisticated without being intimidating.

Key takeaways

  • Balance belongs to the meal. Strong, spicy dishes make more sense alongside plain rice, vegetables, soups and other quieter foods.

  • Good cooking starts with the ingredient. Běnwèi is about understanding and respecting its natural flavour, then deciding whether to reveal, correct or transform it.

  • Chinese flavour goes far beyond “the five tastes”. Umami, fragrance, numbness, texture and compound flavours all form part of a much richer culinary vocabulary.

  • Texture deserves as much attention as taste. Crisp, slippery, chewy, soft and gelatinous foods create contrast and prevent the palate becoming bored.

  • Recipes are training wheels for judgement. Smell, listen, look and taste rather than relying only on exact timings.

  • Chinese cooking can be very simple. A few useful seasonings and techniques open up a large repertoire of fast, healthy everyday food.

Fuchsia Dunlop in her own words

“They’re not meant to be stimulating and exciting. They’re meant to soothe you.”

On the purpose of qīngdàn, light and understated dishes within a balanced Chinese meal.

“Chinese cuisine is hugely complex and sophisticated… but it has… simple dishes that you can knock up in five minutes after work.”

On why people should not be intimidated by cooking Chinese food at home.

Contents

00:00 Welcome Fuchsia Dunlop
00:30 Five Tastes explained
03:53 Balance and layered flavour
06:44 Correcting off flavours
08:43 Fragrance and Maillard
11:34 Umami and xiānwèi
15:08 Harmony in sauces
18:05 Seasoning and salt
20:21 Showcase or transform
23:40 Qīngdàn and light broths
30:15 Texture as variety
34:31 Wood ear textures
35:29 Jellyfish crunch
36:29 Menu planning basics
38:33 Cold dishes and sauces
40:10 Roasts with Chinese flavours
41:37 Creating new recipes
43:16 Fermented tofu magic
45:14 Food, culture and field notes
49:55 Cooking by the senses
53:16 Overrated / underrated
59:37 Final advice and future projects

Transcript (AI-assited so mistakes possible)

Ben: Hey, everybody. I'm delighted to welcome Fuchsia Dunlop back to the podcast. Fuchsia is one of the finest food writers working today, and she's one of the most perceptive and engaging writers on Chinese food. Her new book is Five Tastes: The Magic of Flavour in the Chinese Kitchen, and I always come away from her work having learned something new about culture, history, and how to eat and cook better.

Fuchsia, welcome back.

Fuchsia: Thank you, Ben. It's lovely to be back.

Ben: When a Western cook says taste and a Chinese cook says wei, taste, are they actually talking about the same thing? Or within the Chinese idea, are we containing a whole philosophy of relationship, balance, and transformation that perhaps the English misses?

Fuchsia: I suppose it is slightly different because in one sense wei is talking about taste or flavour equivalent to the one that we talk about in English, except that the Chinese have five flavours or five tastes, whereas we have four. Chinese adding xin or la meaning pungent or spicy, to the, the Western sort of accepted four.

And beyond that, wei is a metaphor for all the flavours of the world and for the ple- like, if you say someone chases after the five flavours, the five tastes you mean that they're obsessed with good food. So flavour or taste becomes a metaphor for the pleasures of eating, of gastronomy, and also it ties in with the Chinese concepts of five, tying in across the cosmos.

So you have five directions, adding center to north, south, east, west. You have five colours, five phases or elements. So there's this whole system of fives. So I think there is a sort of metaphorical aspect which is perhaps deeper than it is in the Western four tastes.

Ben: So the five Chinese tastes are sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and pungent.

We can argue about that translation. And your book soon adds umami, numbness, fragrance, lightness, essential flavour, and we can go on. And then in Western cooking, as you hinted, in the sensory sciences we tend to talk about salt, sweet, bitter, sour, and we've added umami and sometimes mention of fat and acid.

And I think you alluded to this. So do you still think five tastes is the first right initial organizing idea because of the metaphorical way of thinking about this, that actually five is still quite a useful concept? Or is that perhaps a little bit misleading because it is a little bit more narrow and doesn't take into account some of the relational aspects of Chinese flavour?

Fuchsia: I don't think it's meant to be taken literally, really. So for example in the Western five tastes, now umami is largely considered to be an additional one because scientists have found that there are sensors in our brains and on our tongues that actually respond to umami in the same way that they respond to sweet and sour.

So it's always going to be a sort of classical, metaphorical, cultural concept of taste. But as you already mentioned there are various other flavour and taste terms in Chinese culinary arts and in Chinese gastronomy which are incredibly useful, both in the appreciation of food and to the home cook.

So I think it's not really a question about whether five tastes are limiting or not. It's an expression of the beauty of the Chinese arts of flavour for me, and that's why I chose it as the title of my book

Ben: Excellent. And if we go one more level deeper then on Chinese flavour, I had the impression from your writing within it that perhaps it's a little bit more relational than sort of English cooking concepts, in sense you have one taste correcting, one taste complementing.

When I read English or Western cookbooks, they tend to be a little bit more ingredient-centered. Do you think this is correct in terms of thinking about relational balance within flavour?

Fuchsia: I think that Chinese cooking is very technical and very thoughtful, and the Chinese have a very serious culinary culture in the way that the French do, with a whole vocabulary to express different processes and different concepts.

And I think that they are more abundant in these culinary concepts than we are perhaps in English because, the English, we borrow most of our culinary terms from French anyway. So in Chinese, yes, I would say that the idea of balance is at the heart of China- not just Chinese food, but also Chinese culture.

Yin and yang, and a good Chinese menu is always balanced, and there's an idea that if you have some dishes which are strongly flavoured, you should have some that are qingdan, which means very light and delicate. And then also as [Lin Yutang], that great interpreter of Chinese culture for the West in the early 20th century said, "Chinese cuisine is all about the art of mixture."

So typically you cut ingredients into small pieces and you combine them. So you don't have a steak. You cut up your piece of meat and you stir-fry it with a vegetable, perhaps with another ingredient. And so I suppose in flavour terms as well it's often about combinations of flavours. And I think particularly in Sichuan because Sichuan is the sort of home of flavour in China, you can argue, because the whole essence of Chinese cuisine is not just hot and spicy like the stereotype.

It's [fu kou wei], layered flavours. [Bai cai bai wei], 100 dishes, 100 different flavours. So in Sichuan, where I originally learned to cook in China you have all these combinations of flavours, not just sweet and sour, which of course is a sort of emblem of Chinese cuisine all over the world, but strange flavour, fish fragrant, all these different combinations which are meant to be balanced to create an exciting taste and, and in contrast and harmony with other dishes.

And as you said earlier, apart from the idea of actual- the flavours that you add to foods with seasonings. So sweet and sour, classic example of that. There are also all kinds of concepts for just the basics of handling ingredients and what ingredients have to offer. So the most fundamental perhaps is ben wei, the root taste or essential taste, and that's the sort of inherent natural taste of an ingredient.

And the job of the cook in Chinese conception is to honor the ben wei, the root taste of an ingredient, and to use the culinary arts to if there's anything slightly unpleasant about it, to correct that, and then to showcase this essential flavour. And so the idea of correcting flavours is a concept that you find not only in Chinese cuisine, but in many cuisines acro- across Asia and even the Arab world, that meaty and fishy ingredients sometimes have a sort of slightly unpleasant edge to their flavours.

And there are all these terms in China like [xing we]i, fishy taste [yi wei], off taste, some ... [shan wei], a muttony taste, which go back more than 2,000 years in  the Chinese kitchen. So the first thing you do with your ingredient is you think, "Are there any of these slightly off tastes, and what do I do to subdue them?"

And so this is why when you're cooking meat in Chinese cooking, you often add salt and Shaoxing wine, which is to refine away those unpleasant meaty tastes. Similar with crushed ginger and spring onion or scallion. And then with quite heavy meats like- sheep meat, which has this shan wei, this muttony taste, which is traditionally not prized, for the Chinese.

You often find sort of things like garlic and coriander and spices like star anise and Chinese cardamom, and all these are also about correcting these off tastes. And then the other one, I think you mentioned [xiang wei], fragrance. This is a beautiful Chinese culinary term, and I think the character originated from the character for millet.

But it's also associated with incense, and it's associated with the scent of sacrifices and burning things to create wonderful scents to send up to the spirits. And the Chinese use the word fragrant very widely in cooking, and it's often used to describe what Western cooks might call Maillard reaction.

So when you're toasting and browning things and creating these wonderful smells, Chinese would describe that as xiang wei. And some ingredients are particularly xiang, like duck, roast duck, that wonderful aroma. And also toasty things like scorched spring onion whites, that's very xiang. A lot of these concepts, they're not, they're not the five essential tastes, but they're all about how you use flavour in cooking.

And I think that for a foreigner to understand them, it's a way to up your cooking game, and also more deeply appreciate not only Chinese food, but any kind of food

Ben: Yes, my mom tends to insist on slices of ginger with fish because she'll talk about fishiness in her dialect.

And then perhaps even more extreme, when I've cooked my mom's liver and do it in, say, a little bit more English or Western styles, which tend to be plainer and get to the essence of liver, she essentially complains. She says, "There's this liver pungent, off flavour," and says "Why haven't you done anything with that?"

And she would cook it in a very different way, much more layered and flavoured and say that's how you should cook liver and your offal, and you've got this completely wrong," which I think's really interesting.

Fuchsia: Yeah, 'cause  with offal dishes in China, you find more Shaoxing wine and salt, and this idea of really cleaning up and refining the flavours.

So yeah. And I always say to people, if you want to, if you're not Chinese and you haven't come across these concepts and you want to understand what it's about, if you make a pork bone stock or broth, try making it with and without a bit of crushed ginger and spring onion.

And the one with the ginger and spring onion, the flavour is just brighter and cleaner and more beautiful. And also, if you blanch the bones first, which is the other thing that the Chinese cook would do to refine away these meaty tastes. It really is l- night and day.

Ben: My mom can always tell if I have or haven't used ginger in those types of broths.

It's ki- it's really, it's amazing 'cause one of my sons doesn't actually quite like ginger, so sometimes I do or don't. And my mom can always tell. She says "Oh, you've forgotten the ginger." So it's for those sorts of palates really obvious. I was wondering then, out of these Chinese flavour concepts, there's a couple of ideas I have.

What do you think is one of the hardest to translate into English or into the kind of Western style without losing something? And would you wanna highlight, perhaps the clusters of flavour concepts that someone is, coming into this should perhaps first understand? So we have the one with the pork broth, which I think's a really great idea.

But yeah, maybe the one which is hardest to translate and what are the ones we should think about first in terms of getting into this?

Fuchsia: Funnily enough, I think the hardest to translate is [xian wei], which is the Chinese for umami. And obviously now umami is becoming familiar, but we use the Japanese word because we don't have an equivalent.

And so I think that in the past, before umami gained currency as a word for these lovely savory tastes of nature, people just used savory, which was very inadequate because it's a beautiful, almost poetic term. In Chinese, the term xian wei originally meant fresh and then came to mean umami, but it still has a connotation of freshness and the beauty of natural ingredients.

And the Chinese character is made up of the sign for fish and the sign for sheep. Originally it was just three fish. But so it's full of cultural meaning. And I think,  umami is now completely embedded in the language of people who care about food in the West, but it's a bit of a shame that we don't recognize that the Chinese also have their own term, which is [xian wei].

So I think to grasp this as a concept is very useful. So again, your second question, because Chinese cooks talk all the timit for some time, possibly adding a bit of ginger, spring onion.

You might add a bit of cured ham, Jinhua ham, which the function is to magnify the [ ], the umami flavours. You might add that it's very useful when you have pale-tasting ingredients like some kind...

…pak choi, Chinese cabbage, winter melon. Trying to think of Western equivalents. But just very lightly flavoured ingredients. If you cook them with something umami, you make them very delicious. So Chinese cooks will often cook vegetables in lard traditionally, particularly in the countryside, or use a little bit of stock to give them umami tastes.

And the same function is performed by little bits of cured pork, which is something that you also find in Italian pasta dishes and Spanish dishes, the use of a little bit of cured pork for umami flavours. Dried shrimps, dried seafood. And if you're vegetarian, you can bring out umami flavours with things like soy sauce, some kind of preserved and pickled vegetables.

Soybeans, if you sprout them and boil them, you get lovely umami tastes. So I think that this, this sort of [ ], umami, is both the most difficult to translate and also one of the most useful in practical terms.

Ben: And what then distinguishes, do you think, a harmonious combination of flavours in a sauce or a dish, rather than a dish or a sauce which just has lots of ingredients thrown together and it somehow doesn't balance?

Is there a kind of concept or way of thinking about that?

Fuchsia: It's difficult to be very precise about it because it's about instinct and the taste of the cook really. But the best example is the delicious Sichuanese guaiwei sauce, strange flavour sauce, which I've included in the book as a sauce for all kinds of things.

Green beans is the main recipe, but also roasted vegetables, cold meats, all kinds of things. And the guaiwei sauce, the whole, the reason it has the name strange flavour is because it uses most of the key seasonings in the Sichuanese pantry all together. But they're meant to be blended so harmoniously, so nothing stands out individually and it doesn't jar.

So you've got the nuttiness of sesame paste, the fragrance of sesame oil, sugar sweetness, vinegar sourness and soy sauce for umami, but the whole point is that it's balanced.

But the other thing is that the concept of harmony also can be present across the whole menu. So if you have something that's very fiercely spicy, like a dish that's [mala] , numbing and hot with chili and Sichuan pepper, that on its own, I don't think you'd really describe that as harmonious.

But if that's one dish in the menu and you also have some, something that's a bit sweet and sour maybe, or a fish fragrant dish with a little bit of spiciness and a very gentle soup, then across the meal you can have a kind of harmony. And it's back to the idea that Chinese food is all about balance, and good Chinese food should not only be really delicious, but it should make you feel very [shifu], very comfortable and well.

Ben: We might come back to this idea that the individual dish might not need to be so balanced, but actually across the meal or across the whole setting that we could have a, a balance wi- within that. But I was quite intrigued as to your makeup of some of these sauces. So we could do it through a dish with a fragrant or strange flavour or maybe even in making a kind of English meat gravy.

But when something tastes wrong or tastes off, and maybe we'll also come to this, this is the experience of the cook when it comes through. Do you think the answer is usually to add another seasoning or to take something away or to start again? Or how should the home cook start thinking about, "Oh, this doesn't taste quite right," how are we balancing it within what we're cooking?

Fuchsia: It depends what it is. I think the key thing is salt. And that's the most important seasoning in a way, and almost every savory dish has salt in it, apart from some very, very gentle soups which might not be salted. And salting is tricky in the sense that it's partly a matter of personal taste and what you're used to.

But it's very much just about the judgment of the cook, and there's no rule on that. But of course it's better to go, you can always add salt later, but you can't really take it away. So if you oversalt a dish, then you have to either add more ingredients to dilute it, it becomes very complicated.

So the thing is to always add ingredients very gingerly. With something like a strange flavour sauce, it's a bit different because you could just, if you made that too salty, you could just dilute it with more sesame paste and a little water. So that's not a problem. And I actually find it really fun making a strange flavour sauce because it's like playing an or- directing an orchestra, conducting an orchestra, and then you just say "shall I bring up a little of this and a little of that?"

And it's just, it can be quite fun and different every time. I think I always en- encourage people to use their palates and use their tongues and use their noses and just judge what tastes good. And I should say that, as a recipe writer, I test the recipes very rigorously.

If I give you a sauce, I will have measured every teaspoon of soy sauce and vinegar, and I hope that means that you'll come up with something that is balanced and tasty. But my hope, at home when I'm cooking, I don't, for most of them, I don't use measurements. And anyway, it's quite fun if you're a home cook to make it, once you've got a grasp of the principles, to make it a little different every time.

Yeah.

Ben: Yeah, for sure. My mom never uses measurements like that, and so she always said, she has a phrase for it "Sometimes you just have to fing-fing, fang-fang," is what she literally tells me. I said, "That's actually not that helpful at this stage in the dish." But that's what we have to do. What I thought of one of the most important judgments in the book, or one of the ideas which comes through, is when to reveal an ingredient's essential flavour, and we've talked about this, I think, the Ben way, or when you transform it through a blended flavour.

And how do you think you might decide which approach to take? 'Cause you can showcase the natural ingredients, you can remove or rebalance these unnatural notes. And I think we mentioned, we can even create new composed flavourings through seasonings and different blendings. And I was interested in your ideas as to when you nudge one to the other, and they come out very clearly in the recipes which one is that.

But I'd be interested in your thoughts on those different ways of judging how to do flavour.

Fuchsia: The traditional Chinese view would be that if you have a perfect ingredient that is just lovely, and in season, and very fresh, that you don't want to mess about with it too much, and the job of the cook is just to show it off.

So that is why Cantonese seafood dishes, for example, are often very understated. So you might have a beautiful fresh fish, and you just steam it with a bit of ginger and maybe spring onion to harmonize the flavour, and finish it with a sizzle of hot oil, little bit of soy sauce. But you really don't need a heavy flavour.

And so I think the snobbish Chinese view is that people who add lots of flavours are very lowbrow. And so Sichuanese cooking has traditionally since it's been spicy, known as a spicy cuisine has been seen as popular but not posh and elevated. So the hearty, spicy cuisines, the traditional Chinese view is that those are the cuisines of people who didn't have very fine ingredients, and they would be eating- wanting something tasty to go with their staple food, maybe rice in the south.

And so they would add all these chilies and spicy seasonings to xiafan to make the rice go down. Whereas rich people and privileged people would have very fine ingredients, and they wouldn't need all these seasonings. And it's quite interesting that not only does that concept carry across cuisines, like the most prestigious cuisines are Cantonese and the cuisine of the Jiangnan region around Shanghai, which are very understated.

But even within regions, so in Sichuan, the working class, docker's food of Chongqing is crazy hot and spicy, and the more elegant food of the old Mandarin officials, for example, understated. So you have things like ji douhua, chicken tofu, which is chicken breast that's whi- pulverized to a sort of puree and then made into set like a kind

So it resembles tofu in a clear broth. That's a classic Sichuan dish, and there's no chili at all. So I would s- I'm not ... I think that good and elegant Sichuanese cooking can combine good ingredients and spicy seasonings as well. But in general the finer the ingredient, the less you want to do with it.

Ben: And in the book, or in your writings in general, you defend this quiet food, this kind of Qingdan food that is clear, gentle, and understated. And do you think in the very best meals then you need dishes or it's great to have dishes which might seem unexciting if eaten on their own? And it's interesting that within English or European traditions you have less of that.

Although, I do remember going to an Italian restaurant and at the end being served a very plain, but really to my mind, delicious consomme, which is the closest I had to the kind of Chinese tradition of that. So what do you think about this sort of gentle and understated food and where is that placed within a meal or within cooking traditions?

Fuchsia: Yeah. I think it's not just, I think you mentioned just then, very elevated meals. But it's not, even just everyday meals in China will normally include say in Sichuan, you might have spicy dishes. Almost always you have a very plain, under-seasoned light broth to cleanse the palate and to balance the spicy dishes.

You almost always have plain white rice, not even salted. So I think that this is, it's a bit of a it's a way in which Westerners often misunderstand Chinese food that a typical bunch of Westerners go to a Chinese restaurant and they just order the exciting dishes, and they order egg fried rice or fried noodles to go with the food, and they order they are much less likely to order, a very plain stir-fried vegetable or a light broth.

And this is a sort of misunderstanding of the whole purpose and the whole principle of Chinese cooking, which again, is balance and health and making you feel good. And so in a good Chinese menu, you always have understated dishes. And yeah, you can say they're boring, but that's the whole point.

They're not meant to be stimulating and exciting. They're meant to soothe you. They're meant to calm you. They're meant to balance the other dishes. And that's one of the lessons that I think it took me quite, quite a long time to learn with Chinese food, 'cause in the beginning, I always gravitated to the more exciting dishes on their own.

But now I just love the way a well-balanced Chinese menu makes you feel. And part of that is soup. I found a much greater appreciation and appetite for soup, and I love soup, and I want to have soup all the time. And that's something which is, you don't really find you don't really find in Western cooking, but almost every Chinese meal has a soup.

Even if you go to a street stall and get a plate of fried noodles for your lunch, there'll probably be a bowl of broth to cleanse the palate. If you have some noodles in northern China, you may be offered some mientang, noodle water. The broth from cooking the noodles to smooth the throat and cleanse the palate, and that's taken unseasoned.

Yeah, so I do. I think the way we translate qingdan into English is usually bland or insipid, which are pejorative words in English. They just sound uninteresting. But actually qingdan is a beautiful term. It's lovely. It just makes me feel calm thinking about it.

Ben: Yeah, we should rethink that, and that's to our earlier point that you're, we can balance something across the whole meal and the whole menu, and if you have a whole meal or just dishes which are just explosive, then you've lost the balance.

You've lost some of the interesting things and the tension. And I was reading this anecdote you had within the book or your writing around the, I think maybe it's the only place that I know, but in China, even in something which is a fast food place like a KFC, you might go in there for your greasy, "Oh my God, this is the only thing I can have at 2:00 AM fried chicken."

But they might also offer you some basic broth, maybe made from a stock cube or something, but something to balance that even within something like a KFC meal. So do you have that across many fast food places in China, and is essentially that part of this concept within balance within that?

Fuchsia: Yeah. Yeah, so there's actually, in my book, there's a, a, a sort of a homemade version of this rather lovely vegetable soup they have in KFC, and its freeze-dried vegetables in a light broth with wisps of egg.

And it is very lovely, and it makes a KFC meal in China much more healthy and balanced than it is in the West. But I think in, in, in many fast food restaurants you have the option of getting a set menu. And fast food, by fast food I don't just mean American fast food, food options in airports and stations and things and school dinners, and you often get a tray with a few different dishes, but almost always part of that will be a light soup. And I think this is an aspect of Chinese cuisine which is not reflected in Chinese restaurants in the West, because the sort of old-school British and American Chinese food, all the soups were what the Chinese would call a geng, like a thick stew soup.

So things like sweet corn and chicken, sweet corn and crabs, sour and hot soup, which are much more substantial and much more like dishes than a light broth. And those beautiful light broths, every Cantonese meal practically has a light broth, but they very rarely feature on Cantonese restaurant menus in the West, I think because your average Westerner probably thinks it's a bit boring and a bit watery.

Why should I spend money on a clear liquid, instead of some exciting fried chicken?

Ben: Yes, we don't quite get it, and it's the same for those vegetable dishes. There's fewer. In fact, in some of the Cantonese restaurants I go to, you often have to ask what's fresh vegetable and things?"

It's not necessarily put on the menu high up, because it's perhaps a little bit expensive for the Western view of, "Oh, these just should be a side dish on the thing," without understanding actually it's a really important part of the menu or the balanced dish, and I would put soups in that category as well I was thinking also the book concentrates a lot on flavour, but it does mention something that we spoke about last time as well, which is the importance of flavour and texture.

So I was interested in that. Are there any particular flavours that you think also naturally belong and pair with texture? And o- obviously, in the West, we are, I would say, a little bit behind in thinking about texture compared to the mouth feel that we think about in Asia. So how should we think about composing flavour and texture and, maybe some of the recipes or things that we could try out in the book as a kind of easy way into texture or texture and flavour?

Fuchsia: Yeah. I think so. In Chinese terms, a good meal is all about variety. So you typically have several separate dishes at a Chinese meal, and the whole point is that they're varied. So if you have one dish where you have, say, meat that's stewed in dark soy sauce, a red braised dish, then you might have something else that's bright green or pale in color.

So colors, flavours you want to have bold flavours and light flavours. You also want to have food that looks visually varied. So if you have one ingredient that's cut into chunks, maybe another will be cut into slivers or shreds. So there are all these different dimensions of variety, and the more variety in your menu, the lovelier the meal, and your palate doesn't get bored as you roam from dish to dish, and you try this, a bit of that, and a b- bit of this.

And texture is another dimension of that. It's partly related to how things are cut. So the feeling of a strandy, shredded ingredient in your mouth is different from biting into a cube of meat, for example. But also, there are h- there's a whole world of textures. And texture is an essential part of the appreciation of food for most Chinese people.

And the range of textures people enjoy is much wider than it is for most Westerners. So there are all these sorts of glutinous, sticky, huggy textures, very much enjoyed. Slithery, crisp, slimy, gristly. So here we're going into words which don't sound very nice in English, but denote textures that Chinese people love eating.

But all these add to the variety. So if you have a meal, for example, in which everything is soft and mushy in texture, that's not as exciting as if you have something that's soft and mushy, something that's succulent and a bit juicy, and something that's crisp, and something that's slithery.

Wet and dry, different mouth feels. Yes, and I ... I always encourage people who would like to appreciate Chinese food more to just play with texture. Just try putting things in your mouth and just considering them. Put aside all your prejudices. Put a bit, start chewing a chicken's foot and using your teeth and tongue to take away the little bits of skin and cartilage, and crunch the cartilage, and just try not to make any judgment.

Just experience it in a sensory way, and I think that's the way in to realizing that texture's this whole other dimension to be explored. So yes, in terms of flavour and texture, I think slippery, crisp things like jellyfish, wood ear mushrooms, particularly lovely with sour tastes. There's a sort of briskness, refreshing briskness to them.

And then deep-fried things, particularly nice with sort of spicy tastes, numbing and hot, mala. Very good combination. And yeah, so I've given some suggestions for where texture and flavour might relate together. But I think if you want to have a go at experiencing the kind of textures that are very essential to Chinese cooking, but less for Westerners, then one ingredient I would really encourage people to try is the dried wood ear mushrooms. You can buy them in any Chinese supermarket.

You just soak them in water for a while, and then rinse and blanch them, and then you can put them into salads and stir-fries. And it's an ingredient that has virtually no flavour. It's all about the texture. But it has that quality that Chinese people love, which is that it's smooth and slippery, but a bit crisp at the same time.

I c- I think of these as edible oxymorons, contradictory textures. But it's just a mushroom. It's not some bit of offal. So I don't think most people have a problem with that. So that's a really good ingredient to try. And in the book I have a dish which I've called Italian wood ear mushroom salad because I made a version...

So n- the, there's also a version which is the typical Chinese one where you use rice vinegar, and garlic, and sesame oil, and chili. But I've done one with olive oil, and wine vinegar, and parsley which I made up for fun one day, and it was really delicious. So I put that in the book. But there again, you have the slippery texture, and the briskness of vinegar, and the sharpness of garlic, and it's quite an invigorating dish.

The other ingredient that's really fun to play around with is jellyfish. 'Cause if you haven't had jellyfish before, it sounds a bit scary and extreme. But actually jellyfish is just, it's just pure texture. It's the kind of jellyfish that you can buy in packets ready to eat in most Chinese supermarkets, it's just sheets of transparent slipperiness with a little crispness.

And there's one, one of my favorite recipes in the book is a white radish daikon salad. So delicious, so Chinese. But I often add some shredded jellyfish to that, and that just adds another lovely dimension of texture that goes very nicely with the crispness of the radish

Ben: That sounds all lovely.

So the dried mushrooms, jellyfish if you want to try textures, and pairing them with all of these flavours where something, the variety, is giving us the loveliness as well as the flavours. So putting this all together, perhaps inspired by your book or other recipe ideas that you have, say I am returning from an English farmer's market or a supermarket, say, we can decide what it is, but perhaps I have a fish or some chicken or whatever's on best special offer, and I have some classic things, tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, aubergines, mushrooms, eggs, and the like, and I have the basic Chinese store cupboard, rice, tofu or however and perhaps we're gonna cook this tonight or on the weekend.

How would you think about maybe turning some of that into a dinner for four or six people? How should we go about deciding, and then what are the kinda couple of recipes or whatever that you might suggest for me?

Fuchsia: So the first thing is that traditionally with a Chinese menu, you'll have about the same number of dishes as people.

So if you're cooking for four or six people, four or six dishes. But if that's too much, I don't think you have to be conventional about it. You could just make four dishes for six people, but scale up quantities. The important thing to remember is that don't try and scale up quantities for stir-fry dishes, 'cause the whole point is you have a sort of limited amount of ingredients that you chase around a hot wok and they get hot very fast.

And particularly with a domestic cooker, if you double up or triple up, it's not going to work. It's going to lose that heat and speed that's essential to a stir-fry. So if you want to scale up dishes, then make stews or cold dishes, which you can make as much as you like. The other thing is that with Chinese ideas, you can often make several differences.

So whereas a Western cook might put everything together in a stew and then have a salad on the side, in China you're more likely to separate ingredients and group them and then have several different dishes. But I, this is what I do every weekend. I go to the farmer's market and come back with things and think what to do with them.

So I would say I always recommend including some cold dishes because they can be sensationally different, d- sensationally delicious, and you can make them in advance, so they really lessen the load of cooking for a bunch of people. And some of them are very nice for a day or two in the fridge as well.

So we've already mentioned the strange flavour sauce, and that's one of my standbys, 'cause it's so delicious. And so the main recipe is those sorts of fresh green beans which are, when they're in season, just top and tail them, boil them, refresh them in cold water, and then when you're ready, cover them in fish fragrant sauce and some toasted sesame seeds.

Delicious. You can use the same sauce with roasted cauliflower, really nice with cold chicken, with cold noodles, all kinds of things. There's another sauce that I invented in this book which is so delicious. So it's basically a French vinaigrette, but I added some Chinese fermented tofu, which gives it this wonderful creaminess and umami depth. The main recipe in the book is a version of the French leek vinaigrette, you know, leeks.

But I also serve it just as a salad dressing with lettuce. Crazy delicious. And it's also really nice just over sliced tomatoes, in half an avocado, on practically anything. So that's another sauce, and I would just see what vegetables I've got- come back with. And then you can also do Western cooking with Chinese flavours.

So for example one of the recipes in the book is for chicken joints, which are marinated in Sichuanese chili bean paste and other spicy seasonings, and then simply roasted in an oven, which is not really a Chinese home cooking method, but very delicious, very easy to make. M- marinated in advance and roasted it.

And also, as an English person, of course, I was brought up on potatoes, and I love potatoes, and roast potatoes especially. But I've got a really delicious recipe for roast potatoes tossed with all kinds of exciting spices, a bit mala, a bit of cumin, and herbs. It was really delicious. Yeah, but I think the main thing is just decide how many dishes you want to make realistically.

Minimize stir-frying if you're cooking for a group at home. And then just, yeah, think of different sauces and what they might go with. I've put... With all the recipes, some of them, there is a main recipe, but I've put suggestions for other ingredients, and the whole purpose with this book really was to encourage people to think in terms of flavours and then to be very playful and flexible about actually how to apply them.

Ben: Yeah, you have some really wonderful ideas in that. If, and if I recall correctly, there was a, a, a potato rice type of dish that I wanted to try out, or there was one where you're mixing two starches, which I hadn't come across. And I was thinking in terms of, I, I guess this is under personal creativity, but when you think about creating a new recipe or some new ideas, how does that come about?

There's gonna be a bit of everything, but is it, an ingredient, a remembered dish, this flavour template that we have, technique, a, a curiosity, and how does it come about? And maybe you could highlight a dish or two in the book through that. I s- I seem to recall this potato rice dish, but I mean that.

Now and how do we think about starting when you're creating new recipes?

Fuchsia: Oh. I'm just someone who thinks about food all the time. So sometimes I would literally, while writing this book, I would just wake up in the morning and think, "Let's try this. Wouldn't that be great?" Sometimes it's provoked by ingredients, so going to the market and thinking, "What can I do with kohlrabi, which would be really nice?"

And there's a recipe in the book where I've done a kohlrabi salad with spring onion oil, which is a Shanghainese thing that they normally or more commonly do with a daikon white radish, but I've done it with kohlrabi. So sometimes it was just seeing what's available. And also there's a carrot salad- And carrot is used in Chinese cooking, but usually as a supplementary ingredient for its nice color.

It's rarely the main ingredient. But I've got a carrot salad there which has a spicy Szechuanese sauce, and that was actually an idea that my sister-in-law gave me because I'd made a lovely... What did I make? I made one salad, maybe with the daikon radish, for a family party, and she said, "Wouldn't this be nice with carrots?"

And so I tried it with carrot, and it was great. So yes, and sometimes it's just one ingredient that I think is incredibly underappreciated in the West is fermented tofu, right? So this is tofu that has been allowed to grow a coat of mold, and then tossed with salt and alcohol and sometimes spices, and then cured.

And it's a bit like a blue cheese. It's rather like Roquefort in its salty intensity. But it has this amazing salty, rich umami flavour and a creamy texture. And at a time when people are wanting to make more plant-based foods that satisfy the sensory requirements of people who normally eat meat, dairy fermented tofu is just this magic ingredient.

It just adds a richness, a creaminess to vegetable dishes, stir-fries and, as I mentioned, vinaigrette dressing, which is a non-conventional application. So with that, I think I was thinking a lot about the fermented tofu and what can I do with it, and I started adding it to other dishes and ingredients that I had never seen in China, but I just thought, "Let's try it and see if it works."

And it's quite fun. So this book, because some of my books have been, like I did, a Szechuanese cookbook, and that was all about really trying to faithfully reflect the way people cook in Szechuan. And I wanted to take myself out of the equation and just report on food from Sichuan. This book is more personal.

This is just having fun and experimenting.

Ben: That really comes across. And now I've remembered it. It's smothered rice with pork and potatoes, so it's not quite rice potatoes. And I think you also mentioned within it, you could, you do it, you could try pancetta as some of that lard we mentioned, and you can add fried porcini, in mushroom season, which would not be a classical Chinese ingredient, obviously an Italian ingredient.

So that really comes through. And I think another thing I really love about your writing is that your recipes and food all tend to always recall, one of your travels or a particular person and a place, but then it travels with you and to us through that into some expression of whatever you're thinking.

And I'm interested in how much of a recipe is intertwined with particular people and places and how that travels. And maybe over the years of Chinese food or thinking about food, what has perhaps changed for you, maybe not maybe the most, but changed over that time in terms of what you pay attention to or your palate or some of the influences of people in place and how much does that influence when you're thinking about recipes or the recipes that you bring to people?

Fuchsia: The whole purpose of all my work is to try to encourage readers to appreciate not only the food, but the culture, and the place, and the people who make it. And I've been lucky to have met... I've had many adventures and met many fantastic people in China, some of them very good friends, some of them just chance acquaintances who've shared a recipe with me.

And so it's very much part of my research, and it's very much part of, yeah of the recipes. When I'm in China, I just meet people all the time. I talk to them about food. I write down everything, not just recipes, but also observations, what things that people tell me. Sometimes recipes, oral recipes, explained by a taxi driver during a short journey, and sometimes I've been in the kitchen with someone, watching them cook.

But all that is part of trying to, yeah, in- introduce people to the culture as I've met it as well. And yeah, and for me, there are some recipes when I make them. I think of particular people and places, and that's part of the pleasure of cooking. And so again, in this book, it's a sort of funny mixture because some of the recipes are, directly my attempts to recreate someone, something someone showed me or fed me in China and that, you'll hear about the place or the person.

And others, I just made up i- in London. So it's a mixture. But yeah, I think in terms of my method, for many years I've been writing everything down, and I think that I learnt quite early on that the more I recorded in the field, the more I would appreciate it later. So I write everything down, and when I'm writing an article or writing a book, I have 170 or 80 notebooks full of my notes and things from 30 years of work.

And so this is all very useful. And I suppose what's changed is just that now I'm a much more experienced cook. Sometimes I taste something delicious and I don't really need someone to explain the whole method. I just need to ask one or two key questions, and then I'll be able to have a go at recreating it myself.

So yeah, and sometimes I'll just grasp what the recipe is about w- without ev- just from eating something. So I think that the process of recreating recipes... 'Cause 'cause I don't really use written recipes for my books. It's not like someone in China gives me a piece of paper with a recipe.

As you mentioned with your own mother, so many people cook intuitively, and they don't measure things. So what I do is I taste something and write down my observations about the dish, or I watch someone in their kitchen and I write down my own approximations of how much of something. And then, the process of researching the book and writing the recipes is actually trying to re-engineer the recipe in my own kitchen.

But I... it's got easier with experience.

Ben: That really comes through in your writing as well, when you've observed people in their own kitchen. 'Cause there is this, Chinese cooks talk about this art of fire and timing, and my mom always goes on and on about how you hear or how you smell or how you see something.

And I'm often, "I have to come and watch you because I can't, I'm not quite even enough experienced to do that." And I know you've been around and looked at particular techniques, and in fact, there's Chinese characters, I'm sure, which are specific to these kinds of techniques or regions which don't necessarily even translate onto that.

So I was intrigued, what should a cook, maybe starting out, or even one fully formed in the home, be thinking about how to incorporate smelling, hearing, and seeing and all of that into your practice as to that's the kind of art? And I often liken this to a carpenter.

So you can- see a carpenter's spreadsheet, and maybe you can even watch them on YouTube. But there's nothing like being with a carpenter or trying to actually make something yourself. There's this whole other gap of knowledge which just seemed to be a kind of learnt or lived experience, and I was wondering about your thoughts on the importance of that.

Fuchsia: Yeah, very important, and I always do incorporate it in my recipes. So I don't believe that it's helpful to say heat some oil, add the garlic, and cook it for 20 seconds, and then add this. Because 20 seconds, what does that mean? It depends on how thick the wok is, how hot the flame is, how much garlic you...

There are all these different variables and if you just do it for exactly 20 seconds in different conditions, you'll get a different result. It's much better to, to tell people, cook it until you can smell the garlic losing its raw edge of flavour and becoming very mellow and aromatic but not changing color.

So if you give readers s- sort of observations about what they should be looking out for and smelling, and in some cases hearing then I think that's much more useful for actually learning to judge. And of course, you get better at it with experience. But that's part of the fun and the satisfaction of cooking.

With the ear thing, I would say a classic method is when you steam a fish. A very beautiful Cantonese technique is then you steam your fish and then you strew over some very finely shredded ginger and spring onions. And then you heat some oil, and you pour it over. And what you want to do is have the oil so hot that as soon as you put a drop on the ginger and spring onions, they s- they hiss and sizzle, and a jet of steam comes up, and a lovely smell.

And if you don't heat the oil hot enough, then it just ends up feeling greasy, and the ginger and spring onions will be raw. You won't have woken up to their flavours. And so you do need to get the oil hot enough, and the only way to know that it's hot enough is to get that sizzle. And so you can either have an old scrap of spring onion and just dip it in the oil, and w- as soon as it enters, if it goes shh, then you know the oil's hot enough, you pour it over your fish.

Or you can, use a ladle to drop a few drops onto your fish, and you want that immediate violent hiss. Yeah it is part of the fun of cooking, and I do try to guide people to how they should be observing what's going on in the pot.

Ben: That reminds me of hearing someone who does a lot of deep-frying and how they can tell by the sound of the batter and how low the batter drops u- up and down what the temperature and how they do, and then which ingredient they should do for which thing because different ingredients have different things with...

And that's all done by sight, sound, and however.

Great. I thought I'd do a little section of overrated, underrated, or correctly rated, and then we'll finish up with a couple of final questions. So I was wondering, overrated, underrated, or correctly rated nowadays hot pots

Fuchsia: Overrated.

I'm not a big fan of hot pot. Hot pot is a really fun way to eat, but I just, I just think that there's a tendency to have what I call the hot pot-ification of Chinese communities abroad, because hot pot is a much easier business to do than a restaurant with wok cooking, because you just need a master broth, and you need some workers to slice up ingredients.

You don't really need cooks. While I think hot pot is great fun once in a while, I think if all Chinese restaurants turn into hot pot restaurants, that would be a terrible tragedy.

Ben: Yes. I see another hot pot restaurant in London, I'm always a little bit sad. It's like, "Oh, it could have been something else, not that, that."

Great. Steaming as a technique. Overrated, underrated?

Fuchsia: Underrated in the West. In China, it's correctly rated, 'cause everyone- Yeah ... steams everything all the time. But I think that in the West, you may think of steaming dumplings or, at best, a fish. But you can steam all kinds of things, and you can even...

I don't have a microwave, so when I want to reheat leftovers, I put them in little dishes on a sort of metal grill in my wok and steam them with a lid. Yeah. Chinese microwave. Yeah.

Ben: Yes. So w- when I was at university, which is really my age, like a long time ago, over two decades my peers just thought I was crazy to steam a fish.

But I said "I steam a fish in this throwaway wok. You can, you only need a ring." We only had two electric rings, and it cooks so quickly that it's faster than all of these other dishes that you're trying to do. By the time you've cooked your pasta and even done your sauce, I'm equal, and that.

So steaming, definitely underrated. And you take away- And also- Go on ...

Fuchsia: One other thing about steaming is that it's very clean. If you're cooking with oil, there's a certain amount of mess. Steaming is just beautifully clean. You don't make any mess at all, and it's a really lovely way of cooking fresh ingredients.

Ben: Yes, and that's another thing, 'cause you didn't set off the possible alarm if you were doing- ... that. So it was- Yes ... they would say "This is crazy." I was like, "No, this is actually really simple," dorm cooking. So it did win me a lot of friends, but initially, they thought it was very crazy to steam, steam fish.

And in those days, fish was also quite cheap. So this is over two decades ago, at least where we got it from our own farmers market. In any case you stole my next underrated, overrated but I'll still ask it anyway, which was microwaves, underrated or overrated?

Fuchsia: I haven't much experience of them, so I'm not really sure.

But I would say my limited knowledge of them, a bit overrated as a cooking item. Okay for- Yeah ... heating things up, but I really like using traditional methods for flavour.

Ben: Sure. Air fryers, overrated, underrated? Do you have an air fryer? I guess you don't have a microwave, so you probably don't have an air fryer as microwaves.

Fuchsia: No, I'm the wrong person to ask because I'm not a gadget person.

Ben: Yeah. I simply

Fuchsia: like my Chinese knife, chopping board. That's it.

Ben: Yeah. And when, I, this got, I got this from your last book, but when in domestic Chinese households, when did ovens actually start appearing? Because if you go back in history, this, steaming because if you wanted roast meats, you'd probably go around to the roast meat place rather than do it in your own home.

So I don't know whether the air fryer is just one of our sort of expressions with that. But yeah, ro- roasting in ovens was actually relatively new in domestic Chinese households.

Fuchsia: Yeah, when I was a student in China in the '90s, nobody had ovens at home. They just weren't part of the thing. You just cooked, over, over gas really.

And yeah, so I think now that baking has become a sort of lifestyle hobby thing. Yeah. And so you do have fitted kitchens now, and you have ovens, and you have people baking for fun baking Western cakes and things. Yeah. Yeah, very recent to be part of domestic cooking.

Ben: Great. And then the last one on this tasting menu, overrated or underrated?

Fuchsia: I don't think they're either overrated or underrated. I think they're food as a form of art and performance and experience, which is absolutely fantastic once in a while with an accomplished chef showing you what they can do. But it's also a sort of intensive and quite exhausting way of eating.

So it's just not normal... it would certainly be overrated for an everyday way of eating. Yeah. But for a special treat, I think tasting menus can be fabulous.

Ben: Sure. Overrated every day, underrated if you've never never been to one and you're into food.

Fuchsia: Yeah. W- when I was younger, I remember when I was privileged to have my first experience of tasting menus with great chefs, it was an absolutely glorious experience, like going to some great opera.

And I think that I have had enough now that I wouldn't, I don't have a great compulsion to taste tasting menus, but for an experience they can be incredible

Ben: Yes, I think I was the same. Particularly I hadn't realized all of these extra pieces that you get with something like that, which is even the shape of your dish or how they've decided to present it and the order and all of these other things, which essentially is a, it's a cultural expression like you have in art or in theater and the like.

Which you, again, probably wouldn't do every day. But as this form of cultural expression in any food culture, actually, I think it's really fascinating to see, particularly with someone who has an expressional way that they're doing it in terms of their art.

Fuchsia: Yeah. And I think people sometimes, they're very, there's a tendency to pass judgment on things as if it's either/or, and it's not. The best thing to do is to eat more simply for most of your life and occasionally have a tasting menu. Yeah. And that's very, it's very simple to have both, really.

Ben: Yeah. And it goes both ways in terms of you shouldn't ignore street food either.

You probably shouldn't eat street food every day either. But to ignore snacking or snacks or street food again, I think would be y- yeah would make, lessen your food and life experience, for sure. Great. So the final last couple of questions would be any particular current projects or curiosities that you're working on?

Obviously, there'll be a lot of work around the launch of your new book, but anything else that you're working on that you'd like to share?

Fuchsia: Oh Chinese food has become a lifelong project, and so I've got various things that I'm working on at the moment, different regions, trying to deepen my knowledge and thinking about the next book.

Ben: Yeah. Great. And perhaps we can end on any open thoughts you have or advice, perhaps advice for an ordinary home cook. I say ordinary, but just someone cooking at home. Or perhaps you have some thoughts about what it is to be a food writer today. But any final thoughts that you'd like to share on your food writing?

Fuchsia: I think one thing is that people sometimes find Chinese cooking intimidating, and they think you need a lot of special equipment and special ingredients, and you really don't. Chinese cuisine is hugely complex and sophisticated, but it has everything from very complex and labor-intensive banquet cooking to simple dishes that you can knock up in five minutes after work.

And Chinese food, also contrary to the traditional Western stereotype, can be fantastically healthy and life-enhancing. So I think I would just encourage people to just give it a go. Buy a couple of seasonings, have a go and you'll find it I can almost guarantee life-enhancing and delicious and fun.

Ben: Excellent. So with that, I'll remind listeners that her new book is Five Tastes: The Magic of flavour in the Chinese Kitchen. And with that, Fuchsia, thank you very much.

Fuchsia: Thank you.