Sichuan Cuisine and Snacks

   Sichuan cuisine has enjoyed a worldwide reputation.  The Song to Shudu written by Yang Xiong, a well-known scholar in the Western Han Dynasty(206BC-24AD) included the account of the Sichuan food, which emerged 1,000 years old.  Dufu, the great Tang poet(712-770) enjoyed the Sichuan wine and dishes .  He said, “The Sichuan wine and dishes are extremely tasty; fish in local rivers is greatly delicious.” Since the Ming and Qing Dynasties many officials and officers came to Sichuan for business work or trips.  Their entourage cooks brought in with them their different cooking styles that gradually merged into the Sichuan cuisine.  The merge and absorption of different cooking styles greatly promoted the development of the local cooking.  Besides, Sichuan chefs had a catch-cry that drew attention to the diversity of Sichuan cooking styles, a fine art perfected through the centuries.  Literally a hundred dished contain a hundred flavors.

  People often think that numbness, spicing and hotness are the feature of the Sichuan cuisine.  The emphasize extremities of the spicy taste.   The art in Chengdu is better represented.  The main reason is that the local Chinese feel that spices are necessary in hotter, damper climates to stimulate the appetite.  This is one of the explanations given for the development of the particularly hot cuisine of Sichuan.  However, not all of the Sichuan food is spicy-hot, with dishes making your forehead drip or your eye-balls pop out or tongue searing.  Although some dishes are highly spiced, peppery hot and oily, many dishes are toned down for tourists with palettes for the other 30 flavorings.   For examples, suanla wei is a tasty fish-flavored sauce, drewing heavily on vinegar; yuxiang wei is soy sauce and mashed garlic and ginger; mala wei is numbingly spicy sauce that is often prepared with bean curd; yanxan wei is a “smoked flavour”sauce that is used with smoked duck.  When cooking, Sichuan chefs paste, fermented black beans, as we;; as scallions, ginger, garlic, wine and soy flavors, with one armory main flavor designed above the others.  The Sichuan cuisine consists of 3 to 4 thousand recipes, of which several hundred ones are popular.  High quality, the cooking ways and availability of ingredients enable visitors to find something to suit their tastes in a banquet, outstanding lunches, or dinners, or snacks.  Some well-known Sichuan dishes are described below:

Guoha roupian:  Guoba refers to the crispy bits of rice that get stuck to the bottom of the rice pot.  Guoba is put on a hot plate in stack, and then a service person prodceeds to baptize the rice with the steam and sizzle has cleared, leaving the mirage on the table.  Delicious!  Soupy additions are meat and vegetables, which soften the rice to a crunchy texture.

Zhangcha yazi:  Sichuan Duck Smoked with Camellia and Camphor Leaves.  Local ducks are soaked in glutinous rice juice mixed with salt, Chinese prickly ash, and peppers.  Then the soaked ducks are removed out of the juice.  They are smoked with camellia and camphor leaves until the ducks’ skin become brown.  The final step is to steam or deeply fry the brown ducks, which smell good and taste tender.

Gongbao jiding:  Spicy Chicken Fried with Peanuts.  It is a well-known dish, which is served by almost all the local restaurants.  The main ingredients consist of chicken chest meat, dry peppercorns and peanuts.  A cook puts the chest meat in diced size, peppercorns and other necessary ingredients into hot oil to fry.  As the dish is ready, peanuts are added.  It is said that a man whose name was Ding Gongbao from Guizhou province invented this dish.  When he served as a governor of Sichuan Province during the Qing Dynasty, his cook often cooked the fried chicken with dry red pepper.  Ding enjoyed this dish very much and he worked with his cook to further improve the quality of the spread in Sichuan and local people named the dish after Ding Gongbao.

Mapo Doufu:Mapo refers to a lady with a pockmarked face.  Doufu means bean-curd.  Mapo Doufu is one of the common dishes in Sichuan, characterized by the use of many spices and liberal application of pimiento of bean curd, with garlic, mined beef, salted soybean, all prepared in a chilly sauce.  It is said that a lady with a pockmarked face set up shop with her husband near a bridge in Chengdu a century ago.  The lady served itinerant peddlers and boatmen with her red-hot stew bean-curd when they passed by.  Gradually her customers named her bean-curd as Mapo Bean-Curd.

  There are some other tasty and delicious dished listed below, and their names do not fall short of it:

Koudai doufu: Pocket Bean-Curd, cubes of stuffed bean-Curd.

Huiguorou: Twice-cooked Pork, boiled, then fried.

Snacks

Sichuan cuisine includes a number of famous snack dishes, specialties originated from xiao chi or finger food.  The snack dishes cost you next to nothing.  The offerings run through the whole vocabulary.  A few of the more renowned snack dishes are listed here below:

laitangyuan: Lai Rice-Dumpling

This dish was invented in 1894 by a vendor whose name was Lai Yuanxin.  Lai started off as a street stall vendor, and his rice dumpling had a delicate visual appeal and tasted sweet.  Later, Lai set up his own shop and local people named the rice-dumpling after Lai.  Traditionally, four dumplings are in a soup with a side dish of sesame sauce.  Each dumpling has a different sweet stuffing inside and it should be dipped in the sugar sesame sauce before devouring.

Dandan mian : Dan-dan Noodles

It is a kind of hot-spiced noodles in soup favored with a sauce containing dried shrimp, shredded preserved vegetables, peanuts, sesame seeds, chili oil, vinegar and garlic.  Dandan refers to shoulder poles.  In the earliest time a noodle peddler shouldered his pole with two baskets at the either side while walking along streets.  The baskets contained his noodles and sauce.  He sold his noodles for the convenience of passers-by.   His noodles cost almost nothing and gradually local people called it Dandan Noodle.

Fuqifeipian, Slices of Beef and Assorted Entails of Oxen

Fuqi refers to a husband and his wife.  It is said that a husband and his wife, whose name was Guo Chaohua, invented this dish.  People named it Husband and Wife’s Slices of Beef and Assorted Entrails of Oxen.  Usually, Sichuan chefs slice cooked beef and some oxen entrails on the plate

There are some other tasty and delicious dishes listed below, and their names do not fall short of it:

Longcaoshou: a Wonton-Like Dumoling by the name of chaoshou

Zhong shuijiao: Water Dumplings in Hot Chilly Oil

Dengying liurou: Lampshade Beef leaves cooked sealed cellophane pouches

Yue erba: Leaf-Cakes wrapped in leaves of banana

Zengzhuyuanzi: Pearl Dumplings, sweet stuffed dumplings with grains of rice Outside

Bangbang ji: Bang-Bang Chicken, a dish of cold chicken shreds topped with a spicy sesame paste sauce

Jisiliangmian: Cold Noodles with Chicken Shreds

Bolishaomai: Glassy Shaomai, dumplings with meat fillings

Sichuan Hotpot

    It is said that the hotpot originated in Chongqing cilty. In 1920s., there were several oxen slaughterhouses located in the northern side of the Yangste River in Chongqing.  The slaughterhouses often sold Oxen entrails in cheap price to vendors cleaned the entrails and cut them into small pieces and other sauce. The vendors sold the stewed entrails in soup to boatmen, laborers and peddlers. It was cheap and tasty. However, the sliced oxen entrails in soup could only be eaten while it is hot. As weather changed and wind blew from the river, the soup soon became cool and the entrails didn’t taste good. Later, some boatmen set up a big wok full of hot, spiced oil. They skewed sliced entrails and eat them hot as the entrails were ready in the wok. This way of hotpot eating gradually spread far and wide in Sichuan Province, and at the present time, it has been introduced into main restaurants as an important part of Sichuan cuisine.

In Chengdu there are many sidewalk hotpot operations and exquisite hotpot restaurants. In the center of the table stands a big wok full of hot, spiced oil or hot rich soup (hotpot for wimps) alluring passers-by to sit down. Around the wok are placed a dozen plates of paper-thin slices of raw meat and other ingredients, and the customers pick up skewers of raw ingredients and make a do-it-yourself. Like other Sichuan food not all of the hotpot is spicy-hot, with skewered food making your forehead drip or tongue searing. The development of the particular hotpot cuisine has been toned down for tourists with other flavorings such as sour vegetables and fish sauce, mutton soup, beer and duck flavor and hot pepper chicken soup. In winter or summer the skewered items tend to be almost the same with a variety of meat, seafood and rich vegetables.