Three blue-and-white plates hold mapo tofu glistening with red oil, twice-cooked pork, and kung pao chicken with peanuts and dried chilies, a wooden spoon lifts some tofu, and a small dish holds dried chilies and Sichuan pepper.
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Hebei CuisineSichuan Cuisine
One dish, one character
Introduction
The regional cooking of Sichuan and Chongqing, known for its wide range of flavour types.
Sichuan cuisine is the regional cooking of Sichuan and Chongqing, known for the range of its flavour types; a popular saying credits it with a style for every dish and a flavour for each of a hundred dishes. The Huayang Guo Zhi, written in the Eastern Jin by Chang Qu, says in its account of Shu that the people prize flavours and like pungent and fragrant tastes, an early characterisation of local taste. Chili came from the Americas and is generally thought to have entered Sichuan cooking gradually, where it joined Sichuan pepper to create the numbing and hot taste. Seasoning is grouped into flavour types such as numbing-hot, fish-fragrant, strange-flavour and sweet-and-sour. By locality, the cuisine is often divided into several styles, such as those of Chengdu, of Chongqing, and of Zigong and Neijiang in southern Sichuan. Representative dishes include mapo tofu, twice-cooked pork and kung pao chicken.