{"id":1225,"date":"2024-09-22T11:00:09","date_gmt":"2024-09-22T03:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kafeizha.com\/?p=1225"},"modified":"2024-09-22T11:00:09","modified_gmt":"2024-09-22T03:00:09","slug":"%e5%9b%9b%e5%b7%9d%e8%83%a1%e6%a4%92%e7%9a%84%e7%94%9f%e5%91%bd%e7%a1%ae%e8%ae%a4%e5%b1%9e%e6%80%a7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.tomjun.com\/?p=1225","title":{"rendered":"\u56db\u5ddd\u80e1\u6912\u7684\u751f\u547d\u786e\u8ba4\u5c5e\u6027"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u65b0\u95fb\u6765\u6e90\uff1a<\/b>www.nytimes.com
\u539f\u6587\u5730\u5740\uff1a<\/b>The Life-Affirming Properties of Sichuan Pepper<\/a><\/font>
\u65b0\u95fb\u65e5\u671f\uff1a<\/b>2024-09-18<\/p>\n

\u7136\u800c\uff0c\u8fd9\u53ea\u662f\u751f\u6d3b\u7ed9\u4e88\u6211\u4eec\u7684\u793c\u7269\u3002<\/p>\n

\u56db\u5ddd\u80e1\u6912\u5177\u6709\u751f\u547d\u786e\u8ba4\u6027\u5c5e\u6027\uff0c\u5728\u897f\u65b9\u4e16\u754c\u4e2d\uff0c\u4eba\u4eec\u957f\u671f\u672a\u80fd\u771f\u6b63\u7406\u89e3\u5176\u542b\u4e49\u3002\u76f4\u52302017\u5e74\uff0cZhao Yao\u548cGoh Lois\u5408\u5e76\u4e8650Hertz Tingly Foods\uff0c\u4e3b\u8981\u63d0\u4f9b\u9ad8\u54c1\u8d28\u7684\u56db\u5ddd\u80e1\u6912\u6cb9\u3002\u8d75\u8000\u8bf4\uff1a\u201c\u5982\u679c\u60a8\u4e0d\u719f\u6089\uff0c\u53ef\u80fd\u4f1a\u8ba4\u4e3a\u8fd9\u662f\u4e00\u79cd\u98df\u7269\u8fc7\u654f\u53cd\u5e94\u3002\u201d<\/p>\n

\u5728\u7f8e\u56fd\u5927\u90e8\u5206\u5730\u533a\u90fd\u6709\u5bf9 Sichuan \u80e1\u6912\u7684\u9700\u6c42\uff0c\u4f46\u4eba\u4eec\u901a\u5e38\u5c06\u5176\u4e0e\u201chot\u201d\uff08\u8fa3\uff09\u8054\u7cfb\u8d77\u6765\u3002<\/p>\n

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\n\u5728\u4e00\u4e2a\u57ce\u5e02\u91cc\uff0c\u6bcf\u5bb6\u9910\u5385\u90fd\u6709\u4e0d\u540c\u7248\u672c\u7684 Sichuan \u80e1\u6912\uff0c\u4ee5\u6ee1\u8db3\u4e0d\u540c\u7684\u5ba2\u6237\u9700\u6c42\u3002 <\/p>\n

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IT BEGINS WITH a hum. More precisely, you find yourself humming, only not of your own volition or making any sound. At first it\u2019s faint, little micro-oscillations along the edges of the tongue, as if your mouth were a rung bell. Then, depending on the purity of what you\u2019ve eaten and how much, it builds. People often describe the experience as numbing, but numbness is the loss of sensation, and this is the opposite: You are suddenly aware of your tongue\u2019s every pore, of this strange landscape that is the tongue, an entire world within you. If you have eaten enough, you feel your lips balloon, except they don\u2019t; nothing is happening that would be visible to the outside eye. If you speak, you\u2019ll lisp. It\u2019s as if you were being kissed by a horde of tiny bees. Such is the effect of ingesting liberal amounts of hydroxy-alpha sanshool, an alkylamide that, instead of binding to taste receptors \u2014 as do compounds that trigger the reactions we identify as sour, salty, bitter and sweet \u2014 activates nerves primed to detect physical touch. Hydroxy-alpha sanshool abounds in plants of the genus Zanthoxylum, most famously those indigenous to China whose fruits are known in Mandarin as hua jiao and in English as Sichuan pepper. Zanthoxylum species with differing concentrations of the alkylamide grow around the world. In Japan, Korea, Nepal and parts of Laos, Thailand, India and Indonesia, their dried husks may be used to give a dish fragrance and floral, woodsy or sunny-sour undertones, along with a gentle twinge. But only in the southwestern Chinese provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou are the plants exploited to their maximum potential and essential to the cuisine. (So distinctive and singular is the buzz of Sichuan food that the wholly unrelated but similarly stimulating South American herb jambu has been called Sichuan buttons.) Hua jiao is still something of a novelty in the West, its pleasures disorienting. As an ingredient, it has no real precedent in Western cooking. (Cloves, a key ingredient in many versions of chai and the perplexingly ubiquitous blend known as pumpkin spice, have the capacity to numb, but only in overwhelming, bitter quantities.) In 2020, Yao Zhao, a clean-energy consultant at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and a native of Chongqing, a Chinese city that until 1997 was part of Sichuan, started selling Sichuan pepper oils through 50Hertz Tingly Foods, a company he co-founded with Lois Goh. He quickly realized that his biggest marketing challenge was explaining the tingle, or \u201cma\u201d in Chinese. \u201cIf you\u2019re not used to it, you might think it\u2019s an allergy,\u201d he says. The chef Simone Tong, who was born in Chengdu, Sichuan\u2019s capital, ran the acclaimed Little Tong Noodle Shop in New York from 2017 to 2020, where diners sometimes expressed concern that they had food poisoning. \u201c\u200a\u2018Is this magic mushrooms?\u2019\u200a\u201d she remembers one asking. \u201cThey couldn\u2019t feel their tongues.\u201d (She now owns Zo\u00e9 Tong in Austin, Texas, with her husband and fellow chef, Matthew Hyland.) Travis Post, the chef of Plenty of Clouds in Seattle, which opened in 2018 featuring food from Sichuan and Yunnan, once had a panicked guest call the health department.The problem isn\u2019t lack of familiarity with Chinese food, which in the United States has attracted non-Chinese diners since the 1850s, when California Gold Rush miners in San Francisco bought cheap meal tickets at sprawling Chinese eating houses that could seat hundreds at once, as the historian Haiming Liu recounts in \u201cFrom Canton Restaurant to Panda Express\u201d (2015). Almost all early Chinese immigrants to the United States had roots in the southeastern coastal province of Guangdong \u2014 whose capital\u2019s name was Anglicized as Canton \u2014 and so for decades what most Americans knew as Chinese food was Cantonese, a cuisine that prizes subtlety over sensation. Immigration reform and the abolition of country of origin quotas in 1965 brought new arrivals from other regions of China with their own culinary traditions. But as Sichuan restaurants opened in major American cities, chefs had to contend with both wary Western palates and a government ban instituted in 1968 on importing hua jiao, which was suspected of harboring a disease fatal to domestic citrus crops. Until the early 2000s, the ban was hardly enforced, but the food writer Denise Landis reported a shortage of the spice in 2004 in The New York Times; U.S. Department of Agriculture inspectors had been confiscating stocks from grocery shelves, causing some Chinese shop owners to keep supplies hidden under the counter or to limit sales to Chinese-speaking customers. Even after the ban was lifted in 2005, restrictions remained: Before the spice could cross the border, it had to be blitzed at 140 degrees Fahrenheit to kill off bacteria, which sapped some of its scent and power. Much of the Sichuan pepper available in the United States in those years was old and low-grade, in any case, and \u201ccontributed nothing but gritty bitterness,\u201d says Taylor Holliday, who founded the Nashville-based online retailer the Mala Market with her daughter, Fongchong Havighurst. Then in 2017, when she was preparing to import the spice, she discovered that the rule about high heat had mysteriously vanished from U.S.D.A. guidelines. Is it coincidence that, with a barrier to potency gone and the good stuff finally accessible, more and more Americans are seeking out Sichuan pepper? Curiosity has surpassed fear. Both the Mala Market and 50Hertz offer unadulterated, full-force hua jiao. Corporate competitors are muscling in: Walmart stocks the spice online, not just the red variety, earthy and warm with a barky must, but the less common, brighter and more floral green. And the appeal of this once-illicit substance goes beyond the expansive appetites of big cities. Yes, it has appeared in a sauce on the $365 tasting menu at New York\u2019s Eleven Madison Park, but also in a sauce released nationally by McDonald\u2019s last fall (which, unlike the chain\u2019s 1998 Szechuan Sauce, concocted as a tie-in with the animated film \u201cMulan,\u201d actually included Sichuan pepper on the ingredients list). In 2019, it was featured at Panda Express in a glaze brushed over deep-fried hot chicken strips \u2014 a short-lived but wildly popular special that for many Americans may have been their first encounter with hua jiao, however scanty and mild. As in Sichuan itself, chefs, bakers, mixologists and baristas across the United States are experimenting with nontraditional uses for the spice, from an everything bagel dusted with crushed hua jiao at Sidedoor Bagel in Indianapolis to a Sichuan pepper-suffused kiwi tartlet at Mado Paris in Rock Hill, S.C., from the whole scarlet husks scattered over a block of ice in the punningly named Ma Garita at Sip & Guzzle in Manhattan to the hint of tremble in the froth atop a latte at Wasatch Roasting Company in Ogden, Utah. How do we learn to embrace the unknown? This is the conundrum: Everything outside the immediate borders of the body is, technically, not-us, which is to say, foreign and thus a possible danger \u2014 including what we put in our mouths, the very nourishment that keeps us alive. \u201cAll food is liable to defile,\u201d the Bulgarian French philosopher Julia Kristeva writes in \u201cPowers of Horror\u201d (1980). It would be reasonable, then, to confine ourselves only to food that furthers self-preservation. But those of us fortunate enough to have stable food sources don\u2019t eat merely to survive. To eat is to risk, and that is part of the lure. We want beyond what we need, be it the shudder of soul-wrenching sour, the crackle that ricochets in the skull or the feathery perforation of the slenderest needles tattooing the tongue. We want, sometimes, if only for a moment, to be not-us. HOW EASILY LANGUAGE leads us astray. Sichuan pepper isn\u2019t a pepper. No relation to either black pepper (genus Piper, family Piperaceae) or chile (genus Capsicum, family Solanaceae) \u2014 which in turn bear no relation to each other \u2014 it belongs to Rutaceae, the citrus family. Further, the part of the plant used in cooking is not the whole berry, as with black pepper, but the husk, with the seeds shaken out. Is the English name a matter of confusion or willful obfuscation? Black pepper, used in India for at least 3,000 years, was exalted as a luxury in the Roman Empire, \u201cbought by weight like gold or silver,\u201d as the historian Pliny the Elder chronicled in the first century A.D. The value of the spice had scarcely lessened by the time Christopher Columbus stumbled across chiles in the Caribbean in 1493, so it was likely a strategic decision to call the fierce chile \u201cpimiento,\u201d casting it as a masculine counterpart to \u2014 and commercial competitor for \u2014 black pepper\u2019s milder \u201cpimienta,\u201d as the French sociologist Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat notes in \u201cA History of Food\u201d (1987). (Piperine, in black pepper, and capsaicin, in chiles, are both alkaloids that trip the same touch receptors, although capsaicin is much stronger.)If the word \u201cpepper\u201d bears an aura of fiery heat \u2014 despite the lack thereof in the more humdrum, capsaicinless Capsicum cousins, bell peppers \u2014 how did it come to apply to the mysterious tickle-purr of hua jiao, which almost cools rather than sears? (Zhao likens it to Pop Rocks: \u201cIt doesn\u2019t hurt you or burn you. It\u2019s playful.\u201d) According to the American ethnobotanists Daniel F. Austin and Richard S. Felger, the spice remained mostly unknown to the West until the late 19th century, when the term \u201cSichuan pepper\u201d began to circulate. But its roots in China are ancient: Evidence gathered in what is today western Sichuan indicates that millet farmers in the area were using the plant as far back as 5,000 years ago. As the French linguist Guillaume Jacques and the Portuguese Danish environmental archaeologist and ethnobiologist Jade d\u2019Alpoim Guedes have detailed, in Middle Chinese, the spice was called tsjew, which later \u2014 independent of linguistic developments in the West \u2014 gave rise to the terms \u201chu jiao\u201d for black pepper, which had arrived in China by the third century, and \u201cla jiao\u201d or \u201cfan jiao\u201d for chile, which arrived in the 16th. Both \u201chu jiao\u201d and \u201cfan jiao\u201d are linguistic variations on \u201cbarbarian pepper,\u201d emphasizing their foreign origins, while Sichuan pepper was newly designated hua jiao, \u201cflower pepper,\u201d to distinguish it from these interlopers. So in China, too, a relationship was presumed among these three distinct spices.In this way words shift, drift, slip their moorings. Say the word \u201cspicy\u201d today and people think \u201chot.\u201d But in ancient Greek, spice or seasoning was \u201caroma,\u201d a substance that gave off a scent. In Late Latin, \u201cspecies\u201d was the term, denoting \u201cspecial wares.\u201d (Almost all the spices in the Western culinary canon come from plants with origins outside of Europe and, as a result, for centuries were costly imports reserved for the rich.) When the English term \u201cspice\u201d emerged around the 13th century, Columbus hadn\u2019t yet crossed the Atlantic and encountered the chile. Likewise in China: The British cookbook author and culinary scholar Fuchsia Dunlop, who was the first foreigner to enroll at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine, tells me that, long before the chile\u2019s arrival on the country\u2019s eastern coast in the 16th century, the word for \u201cspicy\u201d was \u201cxin,\u201d ranked alongside sour, salty, bitter and sweet in the classical system of flavors and applied to the likes of garlic, ginger and hua jiao. But as the American historian Brian R. Dott recounts in \u201cThe Chile Pepper in China\u201d (2020), the chile, although late to southwestern China \u2014 its first recorded appearance in Sichuan wasn\u2019t until 1749 \u2014 proved so cheap and easy to grow that it soon displaced hua jiao as a daily seasoning, \u201ceven shifting the very meaning of spicy.\u201d A new term was required, \u201cla,\u201d or \u201chot,\u201d giving rise to what would become a defining signature of Sichuan cuisine, the grand theater known as ma la: the marriage of Sichuan pepper, with its rippling electricity (ma), and the ferocious heat (la) of chiles, often deployed by the fistful. Still, it\u2019s only since the 1990s, Dunlop says, that truly extravagant dishes \u201cwith loads of oil and huge piles of chiles and Sichuan pepper\u201d have become popular in Sichuan Province and embraced as exemplars of its cuisine elsewhere in China, let alone the wider world. Until recently, such intense spicing was usually found in food \u201clower on the social scale,\u201d she says. \u201cPoorer people would\u2019ve been eating mostly staple grains and needed tasty things to send the rice down.\u201d You could count on the hot pot at a riverside shack to outscorch any refined city spot\u2019s. Now the longing for that sensation crosses class and state lines. Sichuan restaurants are among the most popular across China, including one (sadly now shuttered) that I dined at in Shanghai in the fall of 2019, where a few spoonfuls from a bowl crowded nearly rim to rim with dark husks left me sitting in stupefied silence for a good half-hour as a million little wings fluttered at my lips. Tong traces this thrill chasing to the Chinese economic reforms that started in 1978 and radically transformed the country. More money, she argues, brought a desire for excitement. Hua jiao \u201cis like a drug,\u201d she says. \u201cYou just eat it legally.\u201dGROWING UP IN Chengdu in the \u201980s and early \u201990s, Tong didn\u2019t love hua jiao. She got angry when her jaw went numb. \u201cThe whole meal was ruined,\u201d she says. \u201cI couldn\u2019t taste anything.\u201d She methodically picked each little husk off the plate. Only as an adult did she come around to it, although she still thinks the spice should be used judiciously. \u201cIt needs an orchestra,\u201d she says. \u201cIt can\u2019t just be the solo pianist.\u201d But while she packs toasted hua jiao into a pepper mill and cracks it over dishes as a finishing flourish, her husband, who isn\u2019t Chinese, pops the husks straight as a morning snack. (Her father is impressed.)Holliday, of the Mala Market, notes the spice\u2019s \u201cenigmatic citrusy back note.\u201d Chiles, too, have nuances \u2014 fruity, floral, musky \u2014 yet have been largely reduced in the Western imagination to the incendiaries that are celebrated and wielded as weapons on the YouTube series \u201cHot Ones.\u201d For decades, most Americans shunned chiles for their heat; now they embrace them precisely because of it \u2014 the more ferocious, the better. Do the new acolytes of hua jiao in the West perceive its flavor, or only its stinging effervescence? The ability to taste is an evolutionary advantage. As the flavor scientist Arielle Johnson outlines in \u201cFlavorama\u201d (2024), a longing for sweet leads us to sugars, quickly broken down into fuel; sour to vitamin C; salty to sodium ions, necessary as messengers in the nervous system. Bitter is a warning: This might be poison. Nevertheless, humans have learned to crave bitterness in dark chocolate and green tea, in the burnt bits scraped from the bottom of a pan. Johnson argues that spicy \u2014 technically not a taste, and defined in her terms by degrees of pain, that is, how much a particular chile will make one \u201challucinate the universe folding in on itself\u201d \u2014 exerts the same enticement as bitter, with its promise of teetering on the edge. Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, has framed the love of chiles as an example of what he calls benign masochism: exposing ourselves to negative experiences that, ideally, not only have no permanently damaging outcomes but are revealed to have no real capacity to harm us at all. Writing in 1980 with his student Deborah Schiller, he suggested that an initial aversion to chile \u201cis essential for the eventual liking.\u201d So, too, for hua jiao: What we recoil from as pain proves to be an illusion. The body reacts instinctively, reminding us of the helpless animal within; and then the mind defeats it. We are tricked, then illuminated, and we return for more, now in on the joke.Hua jiao is, in fact, a kind of drug. \u201cIt was considered a medicine before it was considered a spice,\u201d Dunlop says, and particularly suited for Sichuan\u2019s humid climate, as it\u2019s believed to banish what is referred to as dampness in Chinese medicine \u2014 the pooling and thickening of obstructed fluids inside the body that can bring on heaviness and torpor. (Because of its many seeds, the spice was \u201ca traditional symbol of fertility,\u201d Dunlop writes in her 2019 cookbook, \u201cThe Food of Sichuan.\u201d During the Han dynasty, from 206 B.C. to A.D. 220, it was ground up and mixed into the mud walls of quarters for imperial concubines, which came to be called pepper houses.)According to Zhao, a dentist in China might traditionally give a patient a handful of Sichuan pepper to ease suffering during surgery or from a toothache. \u201cMa\u201d is the root in the Chinese word for anesthesia, \u201cma zui\u201d \u2014 but also, historically, the name for cannabis (today \u201cda ma\u201d), itself long used as a painkiller in both the East and West; a Chinese compendium of pharmacological remedies, compiled during the later Han dynasty but attributed to the mythical Emperor Shennong from the 28th century B.C., cautions that \u201ctaking much of it may make one behold ghosts and frenetically run about.\u201d Is there a through line from numbness to communing with the spirit world? Since the first public demonstration of the use of ether in 1846, in the surgical amphitheater of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, anesthesia has promised revelation, as the journalist Dan Piepenbring recounted earlier this year in The Baffler. For early practitioners, the muting of feeling created an altered state, akin to the experience of modern-day dissociatives like ketamine, synthesized in the 1960s for use on the operating table and now more commonly taken in nightclubs \u2014 a \u201cgossamer untethering of body and brain,\u201d he writes, in which one\u2019s accustomed nervous responses were halted, allowing for a glimpse of \u201cnew textures beyond reality.\u201d Of course, hua jiao is merely a local anesthetic. It temporarily deadens mouth and jaw, but not beyond. Still, that prickling \u2014 which seems, so strangely, not to be caused by some external force but to come from within \u2014 can destabilize one\u2019s sense of reality. In a 2013 study conducted by neuroscientists at University College London, subjects likened the quivering induced by Sichuan pepper to mechanical vibrations operating at the frequency of 50 hertz (hence the name of Zhao\u2019s company). This is roughly equivalent to the deep bass throb of trance music \u2014 the nightclub again. When the tremors in the lips begin, there is a sense of slippage, the world momentarily gone off its hinges: \u201cThis is not how I am.\u201d OH, COME ON. We\u2019re just talking about food here. What is this ghost feeling then, this hallucinated trembling? Is a tingle so powerful? Consider the millions of YouTube videos dedicated to eliciting an Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, or A.S.M.R. Coined in 2010, the nonclinical term refers to the shiver from scalp to spine that certain people experience when exposed to the susurrus of soft, tiny gestures: whispers, the turning of a book\u2019s pages, a comb through hair, a key rasping in a lock. (Just mutter the word \u201csusurrus\u201d to yourself, way back in your throat, and see what happens.) This isn\u2019t always warm and fuzzy. A.S.M.R. can have the eeriness of hackles rising on the back of your neck, signaling danger, or the icy shot to the head known as brain freeze, after chugging a cold drink. On online forums, some have cited a passage from Virginia Woolf\u2019s novel \u201cMrs. Dalloway\u201d (1925) as a notable description of this phenomenon, in which the shellshocked Septimus Smith finds himself almost psychotically attuned to a nurse\u2019s voice, \u201cwhich rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke.\u201d This is not a simple arc of pain to pleasure. The chiles in Rozin\u2019s example of benign masochism don\u2019t just deliver a burn; the capsaicin prompts the release of endorphins. There\u2019s a payoff. No such chemical U-turn is known to take place with hydroxy-alpha sanshool. The fizz merely fades. Perhaps we are newly drawn to Sichuan pepper, then, not because we just want to feel something (as the phrase goes in the meme of the past few years) but because we seek the opposite, the momentary suspension of feeling: an altered state that allows us, by losing sensation, to perceive it \u2014 and by extension the world \u2014 anew, an \u201censtrangement\u201d akin to that described by the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky in \u201cArt, as Device\u201d in 1917 as the technique of art. Perhaps \u201cnumbing\u201d is entirely the wrong word. In Chinese, \u201cma\u201d also refers to pins and needles, the discomfort of an awkwardly placed limb. Colloquially, we speak of this as \u201cfalling asleep,\u201d but it\u2019s actually a reawakening: The pain comes because the nerves, compressed, have been restored to function. Synapses flare; messages fly. It\u2019s not the dying out of feeling but a return \u2014\u00a0a coming back to life. <\/p>\n

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