Sichuan Food & Traditional Cuisine

Sichuan food is the most internationally recognised Chinese regional cuisine, and the thing that defines it is not simply chilli.

The signature is mala — numbing-hot — a combination of chilli heat with the tingling, lip-buzzing anaesthesia produced by Sichuan pepper, which is not a pepper at all but the husk of a citrus relative. The sensation it creates is genuinely physical, a vibration rather than a taste, and it changes how the chilli registers. Neither ingredient is native: chilli arrived from the Americas only in the seventeenth century, and the cuisine as we know it is younger than that.

Beyond mala, the cuisine is prized for its range of compound flavours — fish-fragrant, strange-flavour, sweet-and-sour, garlic paste — many of which contain no chilli at all. Sichuanese chefs talk about a hundred dishes with a hundred flavours.

The other foundations are fermented broad bean paste from Pixian, pickles, and the hotpot, which is a social form as much as a meal.

Mapo doufu is the dish to judge a Sichuan kitchen by: soft tofu in a fiery red sauce of fermented bean paste, minced beef, chilli and ground Sichuan pepper, finished so the numbing hits after the heat. Named for a pockmarked woman who ran the shop where it was invented in the nineteenth century.

Hotpot — a cauldron of chilli oil and Sichuan pepper simmering on the table into which diners dip everything from tripe and blood curd to greens and noodles. Chengdu and Chongqing argue about whose is better, and a meal lasts hours.

Dan dan mian, noodles with a sesame and chilli sauce, preserved vegetable and minced pork, originally carried through the streets on a shoulder pole.

Gong bao chicken, with peanuts and dried chilli, which is the ancestor of the dish served worldwide and considerably better than its descendants.

Yu xiang qie zi, fish-fragrant aubergine — no fish involved, but the sweet-sour-garlic-chilli seasoning used for fish.

Also: fuqi feipian, sliced beef and offal in chilli oil; zhong dumplings; and shuizhu dishes poached in chilli broth.

Hotpot is a social occasion, not a dish. Large tables, a divided pot if some of the party cannot take the heat, hours of ordering in waves, and a great deal of beer. It is how Sichuanese entertain, and being invited is the point.

Street food in Chengdu is excellent and specific: chuan chuan xiang skewers cooked in a communal broth and charged by the stick, cold noodles, and sweet-water noodles in a dark sweet-spicy sauce.

Markets sell the raw materials that make the cuisine: Pixian bean paste aged in vats, Sichuan pepper from Hanyuan, dozens of chilli varieties, and pickled vegetables by the barrel.

Teahouses serve snacks all afternoon, and the combination of tea, mahjong and small dishes is how an afternoon disappears.

Ordering: bu yao la asks for no chilli, though a Sichuan kitchen’s idea of mild is not universal. The numbing, rather than the heat, is what usually surprises first-timers.

Sichuan makes very little grape wine, but it is one of the most important baijiu regions in China, and baijiu is by volume the most-drunk spirit in the world.

Luzhou and Yibin in southern Sichuan are the heartland of nongxiang — strong-aroma — baijiu, distilled from sorghum and fermented in earthen pits. The pits are the key: they are used continuously for decades or centuries, accumulating microbial communities that define the flavour, and Luzhou Laojiao has pits in continuous use since 1573. Wuliangye from Yibin, made from five grains, is one of China’s two most prestigious baijiu brands.

Baijiu is drunk in small glasses at banquets, always with food, and always with a toast — ganbei means empty the glass and is meant literally.

Tea is the other drink, and Sichuan has grown it for two thousand years; Mengding on Mount Meng claims the earliest cultivated tea garden in the world.

In the Tibetan west, butter tea — churned with yak butter and salt — is the daily drink.