The Chilli from the Americas

The chilli, Capsicum annuum, is a plant of the Americas and reached China only after the Columbian exchange, carried by Portuguese and Spanish shipping in the sixteenth century and arriving by sea along the coast and by overland routes from the south and south-west. Fuchsia Dunlop, in Land of Plenty, sets the dish's Sichuan story against this late arrival: the province's cooking is older than the chilli, and the pungency that now defines it was first the work of other plants. The chilli was taken up most fully in the inland provinces of Sichuan, Guizhou, Hunan and Yunnan, in a basin and uplands far from the trading ports where it first landed.

Before the chilli, the heat in Chinese food came from Sichuan pepper (Zanthoxylum bungeanum), ginger, mustard and the wild pepper known as zhuyu, the last now little used. Dunlop records in Land of Plenty that the chilli is generally held to have entered Sichuan cooking only in the course of the Qing dynasty, and that it was at first a plant of the garden before it became a staple of the kitchen. Its adoption was gradual, and there is no single date on which the cuisine can be said to have changed. What can be said is that the cooks of the region found in it something that suited their damp climate and their habit of layering flavours, and that they did not abandon the older numbing pepper but set the two side by side. The result was the vocabulary that Dunlop describes under the term of flavour types: the numbing-and-hot, the fish-fragrant, the home-style hot and the rest, each a balance of chilli with Sichuan pepper, vinegar, sugar, garlic, ginger and spring onion. The chilli took several forms in that kitchen. It was used fresh, dried whole, ground to flakes, and above all fermented with broad beans and salt into doubanjiang, the paste on which much of the province's cooking depends, of which the Pixian product is the registered example. Pickled chillies, steeped in brine in earthenware jars, give the sharp, sour heat of the fish-fragrant sauce. Each form behaves differently in the wok, and the cook's skill lies in choosing among them: dried chillies are fried briefly in oil until they darken and perfume it, while the paste is fried slowly until the oil turns red. Dunlop is careful to separate the cooking of the province from the caricature of it. Heat is a part of the cuisine and not its whole, and many Sichuan dishes carry no chilli at all. A banquet there may include sweet, sour, savoury and mild dishes, and the hot ones are balanced by them. The neighbouring province of Hunan also took the chilli to heart, with a more direct, fresh and sour pungency, often from chopped fresh or pickled chillies, and it too has its own long habit of eating them. That two regions with such different results grew from the same plant shows how thoroughly the chilli was absorbed and remade by local taste. The tradition that accounts for this welcome is a regional one and is stated by Dunlop with some restraint. In the humid south-west, Chinese dietary tradition counts chilli a warming food, and it is eaten in that understanding, particularly in the wetter seasons. This is a belief of the table, held by the cooks and diners who use it, and it is recorded here as such. What the history supports is simpler: a foreign plant arrived late, was taken up by cooks with a developed sense of balance, and within a few generations became so much a part of the region's cooking that the older cuisine is now remembered through it.

At the Sichuan table the chilli is meant to be tasted in company with other flavours and not alone: the heat is set against numbness, sourness, sweetness and the savour of fermented beans. A meal is arranged so that hot dishes are relieved by plain rice, mild vegetables and soups, and Dunlop describes the aim as variety and balance across the whole spread. In Hunan the fresh, sour heat is often eaten with rice in the same way, and the tradition that counts chilli warming explains why it is served so freely in damp weather.