麻和辣不一样 Má hé là bù yíyàng — Numbing Is Not Spicy

The numbing thing, and what Sichuan food actually is

Sichuan cooking is the most internationally famous of the Chinese regional cuisines and the most consistently misrepresented, because outside China it is usually reduced to heat. Heat is not the point. The point is 麻辣 — the combination of chilli burn with the numbing tingle of 花椒, Sichuan pepper, which is not a pepper at all but the husk of a prickly-ash berry and produces a sensation closer to a fizzing on the lips than to spice. That sensation has a name in Chinese and no ordinary name in English, which is why Alex spends this dialogue failing to describe it. A second thing worth knowing: chilli is not native. It arrived in China from the Americas via Portuguese and Spanish trade routes in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, so the cuisine as it now exists is at most four hundred years old, while 花椒 has been used for well over two thousand. The humid basin climate is usually given as the reason chilli took hold so thoroughly — the standard explanation being that it drives out damp, 去湿, in the same food logic that put ginger with the crab in lesson 62. The range is also much wider than the reputation. Sichuan has plenty of dishes that are neither numbing nor hot: 开水白菜, a cabbage in clear consommé, is a famous banquet dish precisely because it is delicate. 回锅肉, 宫保鸡丁, 麻婆豆腐 and 夫妻肺片 are the famous ones abroad; 内地 staples like 钟水饺, 担担面 and 冒菜 are what people actually eat. The other pillar is 泡菜 and 豆瓣酱 — fermentation. Pixian chilli bean paste is aged for years and is the base of an enormous share of the repertoire, which is why 林悦 is flying home with empty suitcases. Practical advice for a visitor with an ordinary tolerance. Order 微辣 and expect it to be hot anyway, because the scale is calibrated locally. Say 我不太能吃辣 rather than 我不吃辣, which closes off too much. Keep 米饭 and something starchy coming, and drink 豆浆 or a yoghurt drink rather than water or beer — capsaicin is oil-soluble and water simply spreads it. Tolerance does build, quite fast, and the 上瘾 in this dialogue is not a joke: a large number of people who arrive unable to eat Sichuan food leave preferring it. And do not be surprised at how much sweating is considered normal and even desirable. 出汗才对 is a real attitude: the meal is supposed to move you, and a table of people mopping their faces is a table enjoying itself.