A bright light on the culinary road to Damascus
If you’ve eaten with me, you might be aware that I’m not a big one for chili heat. I don’t mind it, but you won’t find me chopping up the Scotch Bonnets for a mole or ladling out the chili oil in a Chinese restaurant.
If you’d suggested that I would cook something that involved 3 tablespoons full of chili oil, complete with the sludge of seeds from the bottom of the jar, in a dish for two people I would have thought you had gone mad. If you had then suggested that I’d love the resulting dish with a passion that made me want to rush off and blog about it…
It all started 4 years ago when I read an article in The Observer by Fuchsia Dunlop about her time in Sichuan Province and how she became the first Western woman to study at the Chengdu School of Cookery, and how she ended up writing a book about Sichuan Cookery. It was a fabulous article, beautifully written and it set my mouth watering as I read it. “I should get that book when it comes out” I thought, and promptly forgot about it.
A few weeks ago, browsing in the Newcastle branch of Borders, I came across the paperback edition and grabbed it, took it home and read it in short order. Wow. So many Western books about Chinese food (and probably other foreign foods, I only really “know” about Chinese food) are full of compromises, on ingredients, recipe choice, cooking methods… I don’t want to learn how to make westernised restaurant standards like day glo sweet and sour pork, or chop suey. I want to know how to make Siu Yuk, or the fabulous ‘Braised Belly Pork with Sweet Preserved Vegetables’ they do at Mangos, or the amazing ‘fried blood’ I once ate with Jon Singer1 at a hole in the wall Chinese Restaurant in Washington DC’s Chinatown.
Sichuan Food definitely goes in the ‘authentic’ section of your cookery bookshelf. Heck, it took me about a month to get the store cupboard stocked with basic ingredients and I’m still trying to find a source for dried sky facing chilies and Sichuan pickled chilies, but tonight I finally cooked something from it. I went for ‘Cold Chicken Slices in a Hot and Numbing Sauce’. The thing was simplicity itself: Boil the chicken (at least free range, in our case organic), for half an hour, cover it in cold water for a couple of hours to cool down, slice the meat from one side, stick it in a bowl with some sliced spring onions, sprinkle a teaspoon of ground roast sichuan pepper over it, pour on a sauce made from the aforementioned 3 tablespoons of (home made) chili oil + sludge, sweetened soy sauce and a splash of sesame oil, mix it up and serve with rice.
It was fabulous. I confess that I was prepared to find it inedibly hot, but wow. The combination of flavours and the amazing tingly ‘numbing’ sensation from the sichuan pepper took away the burn and let you savour the tastes and textures. I’d probably eat an old boot if you chopped it up small and covered it with this sauce. But on top quality chicken… I know what I’m doing next time we have leftovers from a roast bird.
I dunno what I’m doing next from this book, but I’m delighted to report that on first showing it’s at least as good to cook from as it is to read. Definitely one for the shelf in the kitchen with Nigel, Hugh, Elizabeth and Fergus. I just wish I’d had the sense to remember to buy it in hardback.
1 If you ever meet Jon, for heaven’s sake don’t play the “I’ve eaten weirder Chinese food than you” game. I actually managed to outweird him on the Japanese stakes, but I reckon we probably managed a Chinese tie by having the fried blood…
