When she was 11, Dunlop says her dream was to become a cook, but she was laughed at by her teacher. She suppressed her dream until she came to Chengdu. Then, Dunlop studied cooking skills at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, becoming one of the first foreign students to learn Chinese cookery.

After her one-year visa in China ended, she managed to prolong her stay to study cookery for another six months. Apparently, the six-day study per week at the school was not enough, so she visited big and small streets in Chengdu to look for delicious food.

Since her teens, Dunlop kept a notebook wherever she went and wrote down the recipes of different dishes she tasted, just like her mother. She has so far used up 130 notebooks.

Returning to Britain in 2001, Dunlop completed her first book Sichuan Cookery, a cookbook called by Observer Food Monthly "one of the top 10 cookbooks of all time".

In 2003, Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking came out, followed by her third recipe book Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province.

After three cookbooks from Sichuan and Hunan, she still had more to say about her experience, so she published Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper. In the book, apart from Sichuan and Hunan, she loves Fujian province, where Dunlop gulped down a cup of baijiu (white liquor) mixed with the blood and bile of a wriggling snake, and Gansu province, where she spent a Spring Festival in the village of one of her Chinese classmates and witnessed the Northwest China way of remembering ancestors with food.

After years of exciting but exhausting travels, she discovered the cuisines of Yangzhou, Jiangsu province, where the Huaiyang cuisine represents the taste of Chinese literati.