In my kitchen, three woks hang from the wall to the right of my stove. My shelves are overburdened with specialty Chinese ingredients, especially Sichuan ones—spicy pickled cabbage, home-made hot pepper oil, fermented black beans. Splayed out before me are my Sichuan bibles, “Mrs Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook,” Robert Delf’s “The Good Food of Szechwan,” and the newest arrival, Fuchsia Dunlop’s “Land of Plenty.”
Fuchsia is driving me a little crazy. The best Sichuanese vinegar, she writes, is “Baoning vinegar, made in Langzhong county... this is the favored vinegar for use in hot dishes.” Sichuanese cooks, she tells me, like “to use handmade local knives, which have slightly rounded blades and wooden handles... the best are said to be those made in Dazu, a town in eastern Sichuan that is also famous for its Buddhist carvings.” And she rhapsodizes about the “facing heaven” pepper most common in the markets of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, “a short, plump, lustrously red chile that is moderately hot and very fragrant.” I’ve been cooking Sichuan food for a long time, but Fuchsia is taunting me with my inadequacies. I’m beginning to think I’ll need to somehow find these things - here in California, of course -just in order to make a decent lunch. I haven’t spent 20 years cooking towards my spicy nirvana to get stopped by not having a handmade knife from Dazu.
I’ve been devoted to Sichuanese food ever since living in Taiwan for four years in the mid-80s. My first day there, two other Americans brought me to a crowded Sichuan restaurant tucked into an alley and ordered a table full of dishes. I took one look at the Mapo Doufu—”Pock-marked Grandmother’s Tofu”—and was dubious: Chunks of white stuff floating in a gooey broth with bits of ground pork, slivers of fungus called “tree ear,” and other, even less-identifiable objects. But it was not the time for quisling hesitation. I plowed in, and it was instantaneously clear that in my 22 years, I’d never had a culinary experience anything like this—explosive heat and a multiplicity of flavors and textures: the pungency of the garlic and ginger, the crunchiness of the water chestnuts, the suppleness of the tree ears.
Coming home, none of the restaurants I found could come close to duplicating that experience, and it wouldn’t be exaggerating to say that I spent a good part of the next 20 years trying to get to the point where I could reproduce that lunch for myself.
And so I read Fuchsia and gnash my teeth. Sure, I’ve got a great Hong Kong-made cleaver of my own, but how can I achieve my goal of complete authenticity without a knife made in Dazu, or vinegar from Baoning, or the exact variety of hot chile pepper most popular in Chengdu? Never mind that the cooks who made the dishes I ate in Taiwan in the 1980s had no Baoning vinegar either. My quest for getting to the real deal will brook no limits.
So I was thrilled to find that an Asian supermarket near me occasionally carries facing heaven peppers. Cooking with those chilies, Ifinally felt like I was putting a meal on the table that wouldn’t be out of place in Chengdu. Unimpeachable integrity!
And yet. And yet. The more I thought about it, my victory seemed a little premature, or even hollow. When I’m not stir-frying, I’m often writing about economics, about how we live in a world woven tight together by the threads of globalization. Sometimes I remind myself that this is not an entirely new thing. That pepper is itself was an interloper in China, as was the peanut oil I stir-fry it with—immigrants from the New World.
One of the more amazing stories of world culinary history is the speed with which the hot pepper (not to mention the peanut, the tomato, or the potato) spread from the Americas to the rest of the world after Columbus first encountered a mouthful of heat on the island of Hispaniola. Within 50-100 years, Spanish and Portuguese traders had spread the hot pepper to India and China and beyond. Everywhere, it seemed, it was welcomed with open arms, and no more so than in Sichuan.
How and exactly when the hot pepper got to the landlocked province of Sichuan is still unknown—across the Silk Road from India via Central Asia? Upriver from the coastal provinces? But the essential point is undeniable: The Sichuanese were eager to incorporate peppers into their cuisine. In “Land of Plenty” Fuchsia Dunlop notes that as early as the fifth century A.D. the Chinese historian Chang Qu observed that Sichuanese seemed particularly fond of “interesting flavors and hot-and-fragrant dishes.” In an email, Dunlop explained that in traditional Chinese medicinal terms, powerful flavors were believed helped to combat the unhealthy “dampening” brought about by Sichuan’s humid and sultry climate, which may provide an explanation for why the “barbarian pepper” was welcomed so readily.
China has not always been so open to foreign influence. In the late 18th century, the Qianlong Emperor rebuffed a request from King George III for trading privileges, noting that “as your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.” But by that point, once-strange chile peppers had been widely cultivated in Sichuan for at least a hundred years. Food scoffs at border guards. Promiscuous globalization is the rule, not the exception.
The longer I considered the peregrinations of the hot pepper, the more I wondered what exactly I was trying to capture in my quest for authenticity. In the end, was I just aspiring to be a slavish copy of some 16th century Chinese cook who was herself an inventor, an innovator, an experimenter? Wasn’t it possible that the truly authentic Sichuan cook might be the person most open to change and experimentation?
Dunlop agreed.“Sichuan has an extraordinarily vibrant culinary culture,” she said. “Local chefs and diners-out are curious and open-minded, and there is feverish competition among restaurants, so what we call ‘Sichuan cuisine’ is in a constant state of flux. Since I lived there in the mid-1990s, new food fashions have come and gone, new ingredients and seasonings have become available, and menus have evolved. So it makes no sense to be conservative about what constitutes ‘Sichuan cuisine.’“
Conservative?! In Berkeley?! What was I thinking?
Of course, I still want that Dazu knife and I’m considering figuring out a way to grow my own facing heaven peppers. But the next time I dig into my Mapo Doufu, I’m not going to bemoan the insufficient authenticity of any aspect of it. Instead, I’ll salute the open-mindedness of those experimenters from hundreds of years ago. My old hero used to be Mrs. Chiang, who showed me the way to Sichuan. But my new hero is that unknown Chinese cook who first tasted the exotic foreign pepper, set his mouth on fire, and saw unlimited possibility.
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