Chili peppers first arrived in China in the late 16th century. It would be another half-century before the peppers began to be incorporated into local cuisine—not along the coast, where peppers were first imported, but in remote, impoverished Guizhou.https://t.co/doohHgJv0T
— Jonathan Cheng (@JChengWSJ) July 16, 2021
No garden photos to share — I assume y’all are either too busy working yours, or else (like me) frustrated by the insane weather. So here’s a semi-adjacent topic, since I know many of you gardeners are also chili-pepper fans. For Sixth Tone, scholar Cao Yu explains:
… Chili peppers first arrived in China in the late 16th century, when Portuguese and Dutch navigators brought peppers from the Americas to their coastal trading strongholds in Southeast Asia. From there, they were brought back to China by Chinese seamen who valued them not for their taste, but for their beauty.
It would be another half-century before the peppers began to be incorporated into local cuisine. Interestingly, this occurred not along the coast, where peppers were first imported, but inland, in the remote, impoverished province of Guizhou. There, ethnic minority communities began to use chili peppers as a way of adding flavor to their food. Guizhou didn’t have a single salt well, and the imperial government’s salt tax was staggeringly high. As a result, chili peppers became one of the few affordable condiments in the region. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the popularity of chili peppers gradually grew, until virtually all of the poor peasants in southwestern China became spice-eaters.
This endowed chili pepper consumption with distinct class connotations. The traditional gentry and imperial officials long resisted the popularity of chili peppers, believing that they were a coarse and unhealthy food. The negative image of chili peppers among China’s upper classes persisted even after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty and the founding of the Republic of China.
Later, during the Communist revolution, chili peppers’ association with the common people made them the subject of praise and political symbolism. Mao Zedong — who hailed from one of the poor inland regions that had embraced the pepper — was famous for his love of spice. Several early Communist bases were located in the inland mountainous areas of the south and manned by the poor peasants whose ancestors had embraced chili peppers all those years ago. To an extent, the pepper became a symbol of the spirit of the Communist Party of China itself: red, fiery, rebellious…
Beginning in the 1980s, the systems that prevented the free movement of people from place to place were gradually loosened. China urbanized rapidly. In the three decades from 1990 to 2020, the percentage of Chinese living in urban areas more than doubled, from roughly 26% to almost 64%. Once settled, they created a new urban migrant culinary culture…
The defining quality of China’s urban migrant cuisine is spice. For more than three decades, the provinces of Hunan, Sichuan, and Guizhou, all traditional bastions of pepper consumption, provided a significant proportion of the country’s migrant workforce. For them, spicy food not only evokes shared memories of their hometowns, but also reaffirms their working-class identities. Migrants from other regions, even those where spicy food is uncommon, have also embraced the practice of adding peppers to their meals, sometimes for quite practical reasons: Chilis can compensate for the unpleasant taste that comes from keeping food in the refrigerator, allowing poorer workers to enjoy decent culinary experiences at a low price…
As a result, chilis have become one of the focal ingredients in mainstream urban dining culture, not only in the ubiquitous hot pot restaurants and mala tang stands, but also in fast food joints, supermarkets, convenience stores, and even in international chains such as KFC, McDonald’s, and Pizza Hut. In cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou, this is happening despite the objections of locals. Now minorities in their own cities, longtime residents complain of local delicacies being squeezed out by “coarse” spicy fare from inland…
***********
What’s going on in your garden(s), this week? Where are your memories of past gardens? Send me photos!