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It is Saturday night in a restaurant in downtown Chengdu, and it feels as though I have never been away. A hotpot simmers in the centre of the table, steam rising from the sea of chillies on the surface of its broth. We all have red faces. My old friends Zhou Yu and Tao Ping are roaring with laughter, as usual, at my feeble jokes. The whole restaurant is buzzing with lively social energy (in Chinese, it is 're nao' -- as hot and noisy as a marketplace). Five years or so after I first lived in Chengdu, I am back yet again, this time for three months to continue work on my Sichuanese cookbook. I have returned to my grubby worker's flat, which a few European student friends and I have kept on, paying the peppercorn rent between us, taking it in turns to live there. And I have slipped effortlessly back into my usual routine of studying in the kitchens of restaurants, reading cookery books in teahouses, and dining out with friends. So, of course, now that my father has come to visit Chengdu for the second time, this time with my mother in tow, I have done the Sichuanese thing and invited them out for a hotpot supper.

Encouraged by Zhou Yu and Tao Ping, I have ticked the boxes on the order form myself, and our waitress has already stacked my chosen raw ingredients around the pot. There are rabbits' ears and goose intestines, bony little catfish, shivering sheets of ox tripe and throat cartilage, slices of luncheon meat, mushrooms of various kinds, and water spinach. I explain to my parents how to cook pieces of raw food in the broth and then dip them into the seasonings, and soon we are all tucking in. I am an assiduous host, and make sure that I give my mother and father lots of interesting things to eat.

It is only when I notice my father struggling with a rubbery goose intestine that I realise something is not quite right. He sits opposite me, a polite expression fixed on his face, crunching. Though the restaurant is noisy, I know perfectly well what is going on in his mouth. I can hear it in my mind's ear: the skid and squeak of teeth against rubberiness, the graunch of it, the sheer unpleasantness of it, for him. I realise he must be wondering, as I did half a decade before, what on earth the point is of eating these tasteless bits of rubbish, these old bicycle inner tubes. He must be wishing his horrible daughter had ordered something actually edible.

It will be the same with the tripe, the rabbits' ears and the ox throat cartilage. The rabbit kidneys and bony little fish won't be much better. Glancing at my mother, my heart sinks further, because I'm quite sure she isn't enjoying them either, though she too is chewing nobly. Couldn't I at least have ordered some lean beef fillet or slices of chicken for my poor parents? What induced me to inflict such a meal on them? The answer is painfully clear: goose intestines, and the whole rubbery array of Sichuanese offal delicacies have become utterly normal to me. Or not merely normal, actually. On this occasion, as on many others, I ordered the goose intestines because I positively wanted to eat them, and I remarked earlier to Zhou Yu (something of a goose-intestine expert) how lovely and crisp they were. Oh blimey.

It's all very well learning to cook in China, but it's equally important to learn how to eat. You can't just waltz into a Chinese restaurant and attempt to judge the food as you might a Michelin-starred restaurant in Paris. If you do, you'll find much of it rather disgusting. Chinese gastronomy is unlike European gastronomy: it has very different criteria for the appreciation of food. I think it took me years to fully understand this. In the beginning, although I ate with great gusto, I was able only to appreciate Chinese food that resonated, at least distantly, with my own experience. Though I prided myself on my early love of the spiciness of Sichuanese cuisine, for example, and even took to the local breakfast of rice porridge served with peanuts and spicy pickled vegetables, this kind of food was hardly a challenge for someone whose mother had always cooked regional Indian for the family, and slathered her food in harissa.

Yet in some senses, during those first two years in Chengdu, I was still eating as a European, because whole swathes of Chinese gastronomy remained inaccessible to me. I spent evenings politely munching my way through goose intestines and grappling with chicken's feet, but I can't say I really enjoyed them. The rubberiness, the bones and the crunchy cartilage seemed to me to be obstacles to pleasure, not the cause of it. I greeted the discovery of a clawed turtle's foot in my mouth or a bit of tripe in my rice bowl with resignation rather than relish. I ate them, of course, but it was as a favour to my friends and as a dare to myself; I would never have ordered them from a menu. Eating everything was, for me, a public declaration of intent to leave behind the treaty ports of the palate in which so many Westerners in China still lived, and venture into the gastronomic hinterland. But in my stomach of stomachs, I remained an observer, an anthropologist taking part in bizarre tribal rituals in order to learn rather than to belong.

Watching a Chinese person eat, say, a chicken's foot for the first time can be a nauseating experience. See that old woman, on a park bench, taking a spiced chicken's foot out of a paper bag. It looks like a human hand, almost, with its thin wrist and bony knuckles, but it has tight, scaly skin and long pointed toenails. The old woman puts it, feet first, into her mouth, and begins to gnaw. Her teeth, like a rodent's, strip off the skin. There is a slightly wet crunch as she bites through the cartilage of the knuckles. You can see her jaw moving as she chews them, making more little crunching noises. And then, after a while, she very delicately spits out the tiny bones and the toenails, which are perfectly clean.

The main problem was texture. Texture is the last frontier for Westerners learning to appreciate Chinese food. Cross it, and you're really inside. But the way there is a wild journey that will bring you face to face with your own worst prejudices, your childhood fears, perhaps even some Freudian paranoias. It will disgust you, disconcert you, and make your compatriots view you, at times, with a scarcely disguised revulsion. Think, for a moment, of the words we use to describe some of the textures most adored by Chinese gourmets: gristly, slithery, slimy, squelchy, crunchy, gloopy. For Westerners they evoke disturbing thoughts of bodily emissions, used handkerchiefs, abattoirs, squashed amphibians, wet feet in wellington boots, or the flinching shock of fingering a slug when you are picking lettuce. Did you shudder slightly while reading this paragraph? Be honest.

Aside from a few rather messy, tricky foods, like pork ribs and chicken wings, that have been enshrined as favourites by supermarkets and fast-food chains, the vast majority of Britons and Americans tend to prefer breasts and fillets that can be cut into neat pieces with a knife and fork. Fiddling around with a bony fowl's neck for the sake of a few wisps of silky meat, as the Chinese do, or working your way through a pile of small, husky melon seeds, seems like a crazy waste of time and effort.

Westerners with a particular interest in food have a much higher threshold for grapple than most people. You might find them scooping the luscious marrow out of ox bones at the St John restaurant in London's Smithfield, shucking oysters for dinner, or sucking the brains out of a langoustine's head. A willingness to tackle the more intricate ingredients has become a badge of honour, signifying the rejection of infantilised fast-food culture, with its dumbed-down eating rituals, bland tastes and pulpy textures. Such people have no difficulties with the middle ground of Chinese eating, and may enjoy, as the Chinese do, the struggles to extract and separate. Yet it takes several years of quite dedicated Chinese eating, in my experience, to begin to appreciate texture for itself. And that is what you must do if you wish to become a Chinese gourmet, because many of the grandest Chinese delicacies, not to mention many of the most exquisite pleasures of everyday Chinese eating, are essentially about texture.

My father classifies foods according to what he calls their 'grapple factor'. Whenever my mother cooks something that is complicated to eat, like quails, or sprats, he complains, to her exasperation, about the 'high grapple factor'. Although not everyone would be so fussy about quails, most Westerners are only willing to grapple with something if it is particularly delicious. Anyone in their right mind, surely, would agree that lobsters are worth a bit of a grapple, but shell-on prawns? It's a matter of opinion.

Take the sea cucumber, also known as bêche de mer or trepang. These warty, sluglike creatures spend their lives cruising the sea floor, hoovering up decaying organic material. When frightened or irritated, they shoot out sticky threads from their anuses to entangle would-be predators, or zap them with bits of digestive apparatus, which they can use as a missile and then regrow. Dried sea cucumbers are one of a pantheon of exotic dried foods that form the very pinnacle of Chinese banquet culture. In their raw state, they are dark-grey, wizened and hard, and look rather like fossilised turds. Preparing them is a laborious process. You have to salt-roast them in a wok until they are swollen and puckered, or char them black in a naked gas flame. Then you soak them in hot water until they are soft enough to be scraped clean, and slit them open along the belly to remove their viscera. What do you have after all this? Gristly, rubbery, sluggy things with a faintly unpleasant fishy taste. So you have to simmer them in stock with a little Chinese leek to remove the fishiness, and if you are a really good chef, you end up with… gristly, rubbery, sluggy things with no taste at all!

Of course, by the time you actually serve them, you will have added some extravagant seasonings. In Beijing I have eaten one of the most legendary northern delicacies, sea cucumber braised with Chinese leeks. It is made with spiny sea cucumber, which looks even less appetising than the smooth kind to a European eye. Each sea cucumber costs about 200 yuan: a tidy sum with which you could easily buy dinner for a family of four. It lies on your plate in a slick of dark sauce, glistening, inescapably phallic in appearance and covered in rows of playful little spikes. The accompanying sauce is delicious, of course, but the sea cucumber itself only makes sense in textural terms, with its squelchy rubberiness, that surprising hint of crispness in the bite.

Chinese chefs and gourmets talk often about kou gan, or 'mouthfeel'. Certain textures are especially prized. Cui, for example, denotes a particular quality of crispness that is found in fresh crunchy vegetables, blanched pig's kidneys, and goose intestines, not to mention sea cucumbers that have been properly cooked. Cui crispness offers resistance to the teeth, but finally yields, cleanly, with a pleasant snappy feeling. It is distinct from su, which is the dry, fragile, fall-apart crispness of deep-fried duck skin or taro dumplings. Some foods, like the skin of a barbecued suckling pig, can be described as su cui because they offer both types of crispness, simultaneously.

If you want to express the springy elasticity of a squid ball, you might refer to its tan xing, which also describes the bouncy aspect of that sea cucumber texture. (In Taiwan they call the same mouthfeel 'Q', or even, of foods that are very bouncy, 'QQ', in an unusual and inexplicable borrowing from the roman alphabet.) Nen is the tenderness of just-cooked fish or meat, or the fresh suppleness of very young pea shoots; hua the smooth slipperiness of 'velveted' slices of chicken. Another lovely texture word is shuang, which evokes a refreshing, bright, slippery, cool sensation in the mouth: one might use it for certain starch jellies soused in vinegar and chilli oil. Mouthfeel terms often stray over any notional border between the experiences of taste and texture: like ma, for the lip-tingling numbness of Sichuan pepper, or wei hou, 'the flavour is thick', suggesting a lingering, many-layered taste and aftertaste.

In the English language, with all its expressive beauty and startling diversity, it is hard to describe the appeal of a braised sea cucumber. Try as you might, you end up sounding comical, or revolting. A Chinese gourmet will distinguish between the bouncy gelatinous quality of sea cucumbers, the more sticky, slimy gelatinousness of reconstituted dried squid, and the chewy gelatinousness of reconstituted pig's foot tendons. In English, it all sounds like a dog's dinner.

The refined appreciation of food seems to be an eternal trait of Chinese culture. Two and a half millennia ago, Confucius was fussing over whether he was given the correct sauce for his meat. Not long afterwards, the poet Qu Yuan was describing food so good he hoped it would bring back the dead:

O soul, come back! Why should you go far away?

Some people have suggested that it was the experience of famine that drove the Chinese to seek gastronomic pleasure in unlikely places. The poor things, they invite us to think, so famished that they are driven to enjoy duck's tongues, insects and other rubbish! But you only have to watch a Chinese gourmet appreciating a duck's tongue or a caterpillar fungus (having paid through the nose for it in a glamorous restaurant) to understand that such an explanation is risible.

All your household have come to do you honour;

all kinds of good food are ready…

Bitter, salt, sour, hot and sweet: there are dishes of all flavours.

Ribs of the fattened ox cooked tender and succulent;

Geese cooked in sour sauce, casseroled duck, fried flesh of the great crane;

Sour and bitter blended in the soup of Wu;

Fried honey-cakes of rice flour and malt-sugar sweetmeats;

Braised chicken, seethed tortoise, high-seasoned, but not to spoil the taste;

Stewed turtle and roast kid, served up with yam sauce;

Jade-like wine, honey-flavoured, fills the winged cups…

Century after century, men of letters wrote essays and poems on the pleasures of eating, like Shu Xi, of the Jin Dynasty, who penned a rhapsody on pasta; and the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu, who waxed lyrical about the river fish of Sichuan. These famous epicures were far from unique: a passionate appreciation of food was respectable, even desirable, in the traditional scholar-gentleman. He might exercise his discernment in matters gastronomical as much as in the enjoyment of music, painting, poetry or calligraphy.

Chinese people are generally proud of their sophisticated and sensuous culinary culture. Unparallelled in the world, it is undoubtedly one of the glories of Chinese civilisation. Yet this pride is tinged with a certain sheepishness, because of the sneaking suspicion that Chinese epicureanism and general self-indulgence have been partly responsible for the country's 'backwardness' in relation to the modern West. In the early twentieth century, the exasperation of Chinese intellectuals at the smug self-satisfaction of traditional culture helped to trigger the first revolution against the old imperial order. Later, the Cultural Revolution saw a violent backlash against the 'Four Olds': old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. Even today, Chinese people often remark, with a snort, that while their ancestors invented gunpowder, they simply made it into firecrackers: it was Europeans who thought of using it in artillery, which they then pointed up the noses of the unsuspecting Chinese. Similarly, as one Xi'an taxi driver moaned to me, while the Chinese realised the power of steam as a force for cookery in the Stone Age, they left it to the British to invent the steam engine.

Would the Chinese have made more advances in biology if they had been content to sit patiently and scrutinise living creatures instead of eating them? Would they have produced more outstanding chemists if they hadn't been so preoccupied with the chemical reactions taking place in the wok? Perhaps it was the abysmal diet of the British, along with cold showers and the stiff upper lip, that enabled them to establish a global empire. And if the Chinese hadn't been so busy eating, maybe they would have got around to industrialising earlier, and colonialised the West before it colonised them.

Such anxieties aside, Chinese people continue to appreciate food with the passion and refinement of their ancestors. And as a European or an American, you can watch a Chinese gourmet negotiate the cartilage, gristle and rubbery flesh of a duck's tongue in two different ways. If you wish, you may stand on your European high horse and pity him for his perverse and desperate pleasures. 'The poor Chinaman! Scraping around on the farmyard floor for something to eat, just because he can't lay his hands on a nice fat steak!' Or you can look at him with a kind of slant-eyed envy: 'He's really enjoying that! And just think, if I could learn also to enjoy eating these obscurities, how interesting life might be…'

After the publication of my Sichuanese cookery book, my life in China changed dramatically. The faith my cooking school teachers and my professional mentors had placed in me was vindicated. For years they had been encouraging me in my work out of sheer kindness. Now I was able to give something back. Journalists were using my book as a way into writing features about Sichuanese cuisine; travellers from countries as far apart as the United States and Korea were arriving in Chengdu and using it as a guide. I was able to travel back to China more frequently myself, to research and write articles for international publications. Best of all, I found that talented Sichuanese chefs were queuing up to show me what they could do.

Early evening in a restaurant in one of Chengdu's last remaining old lanes, and I am doing some 'research', which means sitting down to yet another fabulous banquet. The chef, Yu Bo, sits opposite me, eyeing me in that deliberate, excited way in which you look at someone you are about to astound. I can't believe my luck. During my apprenticeship at the Sichuan cooking school, I dreamed of attending real Chinese banquets. I'd read about these forty-course extravaganzas. I knew they were happening around me, here and there. I could almost sniff their traces on the wind -- but they were out of the social reach of a young foreign student like me. Now, as a published food-writer, I am being invited out for banquets almost every night, and they don't get much better than they do at Yu Bo's.

Believe me, 'mouthfeel' adds an extra dimension to gastronomy. The Chinese know it, and make the most of it. Perhaps it's we in the West who should be pitied, because it's we who are missing out.

Yu Bo is my favourite culinary genius. Now in his late thirties, he's a gruffly spoken and awkward-looking man, but he works miracles in his kitchen. Born into a family of well-to-do workers, the elite class of the Maoist years, he failed a critical exam in his teens and was forced to spend five punishing years working in a factory canteen. Later, he managed to wangle a casual job in the Shufeng Garden, a well-respected Chengdu restaurant, where, by dint of sheer hard work and persistence, he was eventually promoted to the rank of chef. He went on to win gold and silver medals at national culinary contests, opened his own restaurant, and is now regarded as the enfant terrible of the Chengdu cooking scene. He has many imitators.

Yu Bo's style is a peculiar mix of the traditional and the radical. On the one hand, he is dedicated to reviving a grand style of banqueting that was lost to the ravages of communism. His restaurant evokes the atmosphere of pre-revolutionary China, when mandarins kept private chefs in their courtyard houses. The place consists just of six private rooms, furnished with traditional Chinese furniture and ceramics, which can seat a total of seventy guests. There is no menu: bespoke banquets are arranged to order. And before you eat, you may take tea in a wooden gazebo in the courtyard, listening to the twitter of caged songbirds and watching goldfish flit in the pond.

Strangely, Yu Bo describes himself as a 'man without culture' in that pejorative Chinese manner, although, in his own way, he is one of the most cultured people I've met in China. Notwithstanding his lack of formal education, he is devoted to the study of the Chinese culinary past. He pores over cookery books and pesters the old master-chefs for their secrets. 'I find it tragic that the Japanese have more respect for traditional Chinese culture than we do,' he says.

Despite this strain of aching nostalgia, other chefs tend to see Yu Bo as an eccentric mould-breaker. They accuse him of being too extreme and esoteric, and say his work is 'beautiful but impractical', out of touch with commercial demands. But Yu Bo doesn't care. He is cooking for the cognoscenti, not for the mass market.

I first met Yu Bo before my book was published, when he was running a catering operation on the ground floor of an indifferent Chengdu hotel; even then, his food was eye-opening. A few years later he fulfilled his ambition to open his own restaurant with his wife and business partner, Dai Shuang. It's called Yu's Family Kitchen, and it's spectacular.

This glittering kaleidoscope of delights is just the start of the feast, a tasting menu that encompasses twenty-five more dishes. Some are served on grand platters, like the rice-jelly with fresh abalone in a rumbustious chilli-bean sauce, and the tangle of dried squid with opened-out miniature peapods. Others, like the soymilk custard topped with glossy morsels of rabbit, come in tiny individual dishes. Yu Bo's longserving head waitress, Xiao Huang, explains every dish in detail as it is served.

On this particular evening we are offered a characteristic chequerboard of sixteen square porcelain dishes, each one containing a different, vegetarian starter. Together, they are a rainbow of colours and flavours. There are tiny, geometric shapes cut out of potato and dusted with a tickle of Sichuan pepper; preserved quail eggs scattered with chopped green chillies; spiced water bamboo; and delicately tied knots of bitter melon. The absence of meat and fish in such a spread is remarkable, but deliberate: 'Anyone can make a delicacy out of lobster or abalone,' says Yu Bo, 'but I like to show that it can be done with the most common ingredients.'

As I sit enjoying the rubbery texture of the duck gizzards, which have been smoked over tea and camphorwood in the traditional Sichuanese style, I think of my parents back in Oxford, and reflect on how, after more than five years of studying Chinese gastronomy, I am able to appreciate Yu Bo's food in a way that I would not once have been able to imagine. It violates no taboos for me: I am no more offended by the scaley strips of snake or the spicy snails than I would be by a fried egg. I relish the tenderness of the pig's-brain custard that is offered to me as an off-menu aside. But beyond that, I realise, my hard-won understanding of the cultural background to Yu Bo's cookery adds an extra layer of pleasure to eating in this marvellous restaurant.

There are no fancy gadgets in Yu Bo's kitchen, no centrifuges, dehydrators or liquid nitrogen. Almost all the work here is done with minimal equipment: Chinese cleavers, wooden blocks, steamers and woks. Yet in its wit and artistry, its delicious flavours and extraordinary presentation, his cooking recalls in many ways the most acclaimed haute cuisines of the West. Take, for example, the bing fen, a refined version of a Chongqing street snack. An icy, transparent jelly made from a kind of seed, simultaneously soft and crunchy, it is served in small crackle-glazed bowls and garnished with haw flakes, sultanas and nuts.

In every society, cutting-edge cooking is about much more than taste. Like any art, it is a kind of cultural dialogue, rich in references to its broader context. You cannot appreciate it completely without an understanding of the themes and traditions with which it plays. Take, for example, Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck restaurant in England. A dish such as his renowned sardines-on-toast ice cream may taste delicious, but its wit and novelty lies in the knowledge that ice cream is supposed to be a dessert, and that sardines on toast is a casual supper dish you don't expect to find in a top-class restaurant. His raw oyster with horseradish, passionfruit purée and lavender is exciting partly because of the extraordinary juxtaposition of ingredients. The familiar is shown in a different light.

Yu Bo's cooking is also intended to titillate not only the tastebuds, but the mind. As his banquet takes its course, we are served with an intriguing dish of fresh, ice-cold ox-foot tendons, glossed with a mustardy, sweet-sour sauce and topped with raw salmon roe. It is a stirring textural experience, the sensuous burst of the fish eggs married with the slick chewiness of the tendons. But it is also a clever commentary on Chinese culinary tradition, because ox tendons are usually a dried food, reconstituted and then braised with rich flavourings; and raw salmon roe are a novel, Japanese-influenced ingredient. You need to know this to understand what Yu Bo is doing: the pleasure of the dish lies as much in its inventiveness as in its tastes and textures.

Such subtleties are inevitably lost on the casual foreign visitor. Perhaps this is why the West so rarely gives Chinese cuisine the recognition it deserves. An English-speaking chef like Jereme Leung of the Whampoa Club in Shanghai may be able to explain to Westerners the thinking behind his food, and to promote understanding of the complexity of Chinese haute cuisine. But language difficulties and cultural barriers make it hard for others, like Yu Bo, to do likewise.

Yu Bo also reworks traditional Sichuanese supper dishes, transforming them into banquet foods. A crayfish concoction plays with the flavour themes of everyday twice-cooked pork. The sublime artisan-reared pork with garlic and dried longans, or 'dragon-eye' fruit, cooked for 24 hours until the meat is almost melted, is served with miniature Sichuanese flatbreads (I am reminded of Heston Blumenthal's miniature Lancashire hotpots). It is, in terms of Chinese gastronomy, fei er bu ni: richly fat without being greasy. And one of Yu Bo's classic side dishes never fails to thrill me: a blue-and-white china jar filled with what appear to be calligraphy brushes. In fact, the brushes at the ends of the bamboo stems are made from a fine flaky pastry with hair-like folds that conceal a minced beef filling. You dip one into a china inkdish of sauce, and then pop the 'brush' part into your mouth, leaving the bamboo stem on the plate.

The artistry of the finest Chinese cooking, with its subtle command of colour, aroma, taste and mouthfeel, still leaves me speechless with admiration. Those fugues on a single theme -- imagine, if you will, an entire banquet based on duck: wings, webbed feet, liver, gizzards, intestines, tongues, hearts, heads, skin and flesh, each part cooked according to its particular character! That combination of intellectual thrill with raw, sexy, sensual pleasure! Those smooth and bouncy and silky and chewy and crunchy and tender textures! Those games with hot and cold! Apply yourself to the study of Chinese gastronomic culture, and most particularly, to the understanding of texture, and whole worlds open up.

The only notable Western chef who gives due credit to Chinese gastronomy seems to be Ferran Adrià, the genius of El Bulli in northern Spain. He told the Financial Times journalist Nick Lander that he thought the most important political figure in cooking of the last half-century had been Mao Zedong: 'Everyone wants to know which country is producing the best food today,' he said. 'Some say Spain, others France, Italy or California. But these places are only competing for the top spot because Mao destroyed the preeminence of Chinese cooking by sending China's chefs to work in the fields and factories. If he hadn't done this, all the other countries and all the other chefs, myself included, would still be chasing the Chinese dragon.'

As for myself, I can't remember any one Eureka moment when I suddenly saw the point of pure texture in food. But by the time I was ready to inflict on my poor parents, quite thoughtlessly, the revolting experience of a goose-intestine hotpot, I must have been long gone. My English values, when it came to what was disgusting and what was not, had simply disappeared: not only had I crossed the boundary into Chinese gastronomic territory, I could barely even remember where it had lain. Now I compared gristly experiences with as much delicate consideration as I might have compared the bouquets of a couple of bottles of vintage Bordeaux.

Mao Zedong may have done his best to annihilate Chinese haute cuisine, but ancient habits die hard. Since the end of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese gastronomy has been recovering something of its old vivacity. And, as chefs like Yu Bo rediscover and recreate their culinary traditions, perhaps we will find ourselves chasing the Chinese dragon, after all.

If you are lucky enough to dine at El Bulli, you will find that in many ways Adrià's culinary explorations are proceeding along Chinese lines, with his cui seaweeds, his hua shuang exploding jelly 'olives', his su sesame-and-seaweed crackers, his endless playfulness with form and mouthfeel. Like the great Chinese chefs, he composes fugues on a single ingredient, playing with all the creative possibilities of pumpkin, coconut, or passion fruit. Dinner at El Bulli is a dance of tastes, textures, temperatures; to eat there is to eat with all the senses, as you do at a really fine Chinese banquet.

My investigations took me, inevitably, to the door of the undisputed 'King of Abalone', Ah Yat, a Cantonese chef who has become an abalone celebrity across Southeast Asia (the concept of an abalone celebrity is not bizarre from a Chinese standpoint). He also has something of a global reputation, as attested by his large collection of international medals and tributes, including a 'Highest Honour Award' from the French parliament in 1997. I was taken to his Forum restaurant in Causeway Bay by a rakish food writer who was an old chum of one of my mentors: let's just call him the Gentleman Gourmet.

But if there was no single moment of conversion to the pleasures of rubberiness, there were several small epiphanies along the way. One was in Hong Kong, where I did some one-off market research for an abalone farm. Dried abalone is, of course, one of the grandest Chinese banquet ingredients, like shark's fin and sea cucumber. The finest of these sought-after shellfish come from Japan, where they are dried by a secret and mysterious method: a single large, top-class Japanese abalone can fetch the equivalent of more than £500 in a smart Hong Kong restaurant.

'I haven't offered it to you in a sauce, or as a finished dish,' he tells me. 'I want you to have it on its own, so you can appreciate it for itself.'

We sit at our table, and the Abalone King brings me a single abalone, long-stewed in his secret-recipe stock, dark and waxy-looking, with the erotic contours of an oyster or a clam.

The Gentleman Gourmet is dressed in a three-piece suit, he carries a walking cane, and a rapier wit. He speaks in the rah-rah tones of a colonial Englishman, although he is Chinese-born. And he is so early-twentieth-century elegant that I almost expect to see spats if I cast my eyes to his feet.

With bated breath, I take it in my chopsticks, and raise it to my lips…

The abalone is soft and muscular at the same time, yielding and resistant, gently springy, with a subtle stickiness at the end of each bite that is entirely agreeable. When I first lived in China, I would have been underwhelmed by the experience of eating such a thing. It would have been just another encounter with a perplexing Chinese delicacy, and I would have murmured polite approval, while secretly wondering why on earth people would pay so much for something so tough and rubbery. But now, for the first time, I understand the serious, sensual appeal of the abalone, the elusive delights of its strong and tender bite. I feel lightheaded with pleasure.

Blushing, I take another bite.

The Gentleman Gourmet leans over the table towards me with a suggestive grin. 'We are all adults at this table, so I hope you'll forgive me if I speak frankly. It's just so hard to express the loveliness of that sensation. The only true comparison in my opinion' (here he lowers his voice to a whisper) 'is with gently biting your lover's hardened nipple. Something only a masterful lover will truly appreciate.'