Food historians have pointed to the province’s hot and humid climate, the principles of Chinese medicine, the constraints of geography, and the exigencies of economics. Most recently neuropsychologists have uncovered a link between the chili pepper and risk-taking. The research is provocative because the Sichuan people have long been notorious for their rebellious spirit; some of the momentous events in modern Chinese political history can be traced back to Sichuan’s hot temper. [...]
The first mention of the chili pepper in the Chinese historical record appears in 1591, although historians have yet to arrive at a consensus as to exactly how it arrived in the Middle Kingdom. One school of thought believes the pepper came overland from India into western China via a northern route through Tibet or a southern route across Burma. But the first consistent references to chili peppers in local Chinese gazettes start in China’s eastern coastal regions and move gradually inland toward the West—reaching Hunan in 1684 and Sichuan in 1749—data points that support the argument that the chili pepper arrived by sea, possibly via Portuguese traders who had founded a colony near the southern Chinese coast on the island of Macao. [...]
The historian Robert Entenmann wrote his doctoral thesis at Harvard on the great migration. According to his calculations, there were only around 1 million residents left in Sichuan by 1680, but between 1667-1707, 1.7 million immigrants arrived. So at about exactly the same time that the chili pepper had made its way as far inland as Hunan, the Hunanese were moving en masse to Sichuan, driven by overpopulation in their home province and sheer economic necessity. [...]
Another, more provocative explanation for chili pepper popularity holds that its geographical distribution can be explained by its purported anti-microbial properties. In a 1998 paper published in the Quarterly Review of Biology, Cornell’s Paul Sherman and Jennifer Billing found a correlation between the mean temperature of a country (or region) and the number of spices called for in recipes representing the “traditional” cuisine of that region. The equation was simple: The hotter the temperature, the more spices consumed. Their theory: Spices performed an anti-microbial function especially useful in tropical or subtropical regions where meat was likely to go bad quickly.
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