It is uncomplicated to forget China is more of a continent than a place: its huge territory encompasses deserts and rainforests, significant mountains and fertile plains, salt lakes and rolling grasslands. The Sichuan region, like the metropolitan areas of Chongqing and Chengdu, has its own dialect, unique teahouse society and an superb culinary custom.
The most famed characteristic of Sichuanese delicacies is its fieriness, derived from the liberal use of purple chillies. Dried in the sunlight, blood-pink and lustrous, or pickled vibrant scarlet in salt and wine, chillies are at the heart of the region’s cooking. They are utilised inventively in a lot of regional dishes. Sizzled in oil, they give the ‘scorched chilli flavour’ that is the base of gong bao chicken and innumerable vegetable stir-fries mixed with Sichuan pepper, they are used in intensely strong ‘numbing-and-hot’ dishes. And while spice could possibly be the cuisine’s most unique taste, the most salient attribute of Sichuanese cookery is in fact its audacious mixtures of different flavours: sweet-and-bitter ‘lychee flavour’, sensitive ‘fragrant-boozy flavour’ and refreshing, light-weight ‘ginger juice flavour’, for instance.
Sichuan pepper is one of the most historic Chinese spices. It has a heady aroma that carries hints of wooden and citrus peel, and generates a numbing influence on the mouth. The style and fragrance are incomparable, and most people succumb promptly to its fragrant charms. Just one folks clarification for its common use in Sichuanese cookery is that its numbing outcomes allow for the intake of far more chillies than would normally be humanly feasible. An edited extract from The Food items of Sichuan, posted by Bloomsbury (RRP: £30).