By Harold Wollin & Craig Peterson.
My chopsticks prod the chili-red maelstrom in yet another feeble attempt to gain purchase on a slippery dumpling. The morsel spins free and plops back into its fiery vat. I’m no Shaolin monk that can pluck mosquitoes out of the air, but I can use chopsticks. Here in China, I am a noob.
“You need help?” Jasmine grins gleefully. “I help you!”
Her chopsticks dart into the roiling liquid and snatch a quivering span of tripe. Twirling away the excess liquid, she places it into my bowl. Her chopsticks are wet barely an inch from the tip. Mine are slick with oil, and increasingly useless in my hands. Laughing, she summons one of the impeccably dressed servers, and demands a new set for me.
Like a Quixote without a Panza, I’m lost without Jasmine. Yesterday, she welcomed me to the Traffic Inn hostel, her English more fluid than fluent. Today she has agreed to be my guiding light on this culinary quest in Sichuan.
We are in an opulent, gilded restaurant to savour the essential Sichuan experience — hot pot. The centre of our table houses an impressive giant copper cauldron, brimming with what appears to be a lake of red oil, afloat with a log boom of chilies. A man arrives to ignite the powerful gas burners under the table. The chilies begin to dance as the surface rolls.
The servers present a magnificent array of plates, bowls, teapots, cups, colour-coded chopsticks and glasses on the table. Then, any free real estate is quickly taken up by a multitude of raw ingredients: beef slices, tripe, fatty, bacon-like yak brisket, white and dark pork meatballs, fish balls, goose intestines, tofu skin, beans, asparagus, bamboo shoots and bean sprouts. There are three obviously different dumplings, potato slices, another yam-like tuber, and at least four kinds of green leafy things that I can’t identify. I do though recognize enoki among the mushrooms. Gold brocade napkins are tied around our necks.
“Now we eat!” Jasmine gleefully pulls the top from an innocuous, but brightly-coloured pull-top can, and pours the contents into a bowl. She spoons in an impressive amount of crushed garlic, cilantro and dark vinegar. I follow suit. It is sesame oil.
“More oil?” I ask, looking askance at the thick red oil in the hot pot.
Jasmine shrugs, “Sesame oil — different taste!”
She describes the intensely savoury, rich and, yes, very oily broth.
“I’m no cook, but I know first you wake up chili and hwai jao* in a wok with oil and chili-bean paste. When oil is red, put soup and lots of ginger and the kind of spice you like. This place has best flavour, OK?”
Individually and with precision, she fires all the ingredients into the hot pot, announcing when each is ready to eat.
“You like tripe? Ready now!”
I take up my new chopsticks and draw something from the pot. I wedge the wad into my mouth. Turns out to be ginger, yet I chew with bovine determination until it is a fibrous mass and impossible to swallow. I pull the brocade napkin to my mouth.
“No!” Jasmine cries, dealing out leaves of tissue. “Use paper.”
I may be losing face, but I’m learning. First lesson: do not eat the flavouring ingredients. Next lesson: after tonguing, exploring and chewing to extract every bit of flavour, texture and food value out of an ingredient, it is acceptable to spit what’s left onto the table or floor. In this high-end restaurant, tissues and a small plate are provided, as the gold brocade napkin is just so much luxury lingerie.
Still wary of the slippery dumpling, I choose a less challenging meatball. After three tries I manage to snag one. Afraid to lose purchase, I skip the dip, and pop it smartly into my mouth, straight from its bath of boiling oil. Last lesson: the sesame oil dip cools the food. Several swigs of beer help but another flame flares up as my teeth crunch on something seed-like. It must be chili!
I’m on familiar ground now. My mouth is deliciously on fire, until a wasp-angry buzz awakens and my entire mouth fluoresces with a salty, citrus taste, and, thuddenly, my ho mowf gothes numb.
Oh, oh Toto. We’re not in Edmonton any more.
“Hwai jao!” Jasmine laughs, “You like?”
Yes. Despite red eyes and tears, I like. This tangy-numbing, fizzy-electric, mouth-buzz is Sichuan pepper, the most amazing thing that has ever happened on my palate. This sensation is not measurable on Scoville, and has nothing to do with the genus Capiscum or Piper Nigrum.
I drift back to the ‘70s and the Happy Garden** restaurant in Parkallen. Sui To’s little restaurant called me to my career with a siren song from far beyond my neighborhood. With a fiery promise of culinary possibility, it put chopsticks into my hands, and set me upon a quest that culminated here, almost 40 years later.
Today, in Chengdu, it begins again. With a bite into the authentic Sichuan, the gustatory mantra of my culinary journey takes on new meaning. With confidence, I grab my chopsticks and deftly pull a dumpling from the hotpot.
Harold Wollin, former proprietor of the Blue Chair Café, was once a cub journalist, and spent the early part of his career cooking on the high seas.
Craig Peterson, once a culinary protégé of Harold’s at the Highlands Golf Club, is now a professor of English Literature, U of A, Augustana Campus.
*Hwai jao (flower pepper): also known as huajiao, Sichuan pepper, Szechwan pepper or Szechuan pepper. The genus is part of the citrus family and not closely related to either black or chili pepper. It’s also known as the aromatic peppercorn, xiang-jiao-zi or qing-hua-jiao. Thanks Wikipedia!
**Sui To: Not only did Sui To’s Happy Garden make lifelong Sichuan pepperheads out of several generations of Edmontonians, we can thank him for the popularization of the green onion cake as an Edmonton festival staple. Sui To’s The Noodlemaker, closed a few years back, much to the dismay of said pepperheads, but he has opened the Green Onion Cake Man on 118 avenue.