Why does pepper become the first taste of Chinese people?

Three cooks/Wen Whether it is douban sauce or Laoganma, the Chinese people have become more and more inseparable from the spicy taste on their dinner tables, and China has become a veritable hot pepper country: the area of pepper cultivation ranks first in the world -- in China, the area of pepper cultivation is only second to the "national vegetable" Chinese cabbage -- the production of pepper ranks first in the world, and the consumption of pepper ranks first in the world, The number of people eating chilli is also the first in the world

But just 400 years ago, Chinese people didn't know what pepper was; 300 years ago, pepper was not included in the regular Sichuan cuisine menu. Even when pepper was first introduced into China, the Chinese did not regard it as food. With what did pepper conquer the Chinese taste buds in just two or three hundred years?

Pepper is one of the raw materials for Maya to make chocolate, and it has gone global from Mexico

Peppers originated in Mexico, where Maya people first discovered the edible value of peppers. They used cocoa as raw material, mixed with chilli, etc., to make the original chocolate, which Maya called "the delicacy of gods". Archaeologists found the remains of wild pepper in the cave of Tehuakan Canyon in Mexico, which shows that human beings first picked pepper about 8000 years ago, and planted pepper 6000 years ago.

Due to the isolation between the American continent and other continents, until the 15th century, chili peppers still dominated this continent. People from other continents have not tasted or even heard of them. Columbus landed on this continent in 1492. When Columbus found pepper, he thought it was the pepper that the European continent craved. He wrote in his diary: "There is a kind of red pepper here. The yield is very large, and it can be filled with 50 merchant ships every year. People here should let it go no matter what they eat, or they will not eat it. It is said that it is also good for health."

When Columbus brought the seeds of pepper back to Europe, the residents around the Mediterranean began to plant pepper, and soon liked the taste of pepper. Soon, pepper became the main force of global spice trade. It can be dried, stored and transported easily. This characteristic has made chili peppers spread all over the world. The Portuguese brought chili peppers when they established their first colony in southern India. Since then, chili peppers have spread all over southern India.

Peppers were introduced into China in the Ming Dynasty and were initially used as ornamental flowers

"Sweet, sour, bitter, hot and salty - all flavors are perfect" is a popular saying of Chinese people. However, "spicy" appears in Chinese life much later than other flavors.

One hundred years after Columbus brought pepper back to Europe, in the 16th century AD, Tang Xianzu, a dramatist of the Ming Dynasty, wrote the Peony Pavilion, which lists 38 kinds of flowers, one of which is "pepper flower". Neither Tang Xianzu nor other contemporary writers mentioned how to eat chilli. In China at that time, pepper was only used as a flower to appreciate, not as food.

How did chillies come to China? There are many explanations: some people think that hot peppers are imported from Japan; Some people think that hot peppers are imported from Vietnam; Others believe that it was spread from Malaysia to Guangzhou and then to the mainland; Others believe that Central Asian businessmen were introduced into the mainland through Xinjiang, Gansu and Shaanxi

ID: sanjiangfood searched the materials and found that, among these claims, those from Japan and Central Asia are not reliable, because the Chinese planted pepper earlier than the Japanese, and the history of growing pepper in Central Asia is only about 300 years, not much different from that of China. It is most likely that it was introduced into Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangdong and Guangxi by sea, and then spread in southwest China. Until today, many places in Sichuan still call pepper "sea pepper".

During the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, chili peppers became food. Guizhou people were the first to eat chili peppers

At the end of the Ming Dynasty, a natural disaster and war swept over most of China. When food was extremely scarce, chili peppers hit the stomach of Chinese people. According to records, the first people to eat chili was Guizhou, which was surrounded by mountains. Because of the extreme shortage of salt and vegetables, chili played the role of salt when "soil seedlings replaced salt" during the Kangxi period (1662-1722). By the Qianlong period (1736-1795), Guizhou had begun to eat a large number of peppers.

During the Jiaqing period (1796-1820), it was recorded that hot peppers had been "grown as vegetables" in Guizhou, Hunan, Sichuan, Jiangxi and other places. During the Daoguang period (1821-1850), the northern part of Guizhou was already "the food of every meal must be pepper". At the end of the Qing Dynasty, it was very popular in Guizhou to eat rice with corn, which was cooked with bean curd, and then soaked with salt and pepper. It is similar to the dip of Sichuan people who eat bean curd today.

Other provinces eat pepper later than Guizhou. It was not common to eat chili in Hunan during the Jiaqing period, but after Daoguang, people in Hunan also ate more chili. According to the Qing Dynasty's "Qing barnyard bills", people in Hunan and Hubei had become accustomed to spicy food at the end of the Qing Dynasty, and even soup had to be peppered.

The earliest record of Sichuan people eating chili was also in the Jiaqing period. From Daoguang to Tongzhi, people in Sichuan began to eat chili. At the end of the Guangxu period, in addition to being widely eaten by the people, chili peppers began to appear in classic recipes. According to Fu Chongju's "Chengdu Overview" in the late Qing Dynasty, there were 1328 kinds of dishes in Chengdu at that time. Pepper has become one of the main ingredients in Sichuan cuisine, especially the double cooked meat in Sichuan cuisine, which was officially recorded in written records.

The eating methods of pepper in different places are gradually different: Sichuan people are used to pepper with pepper, that is, spicy; Guizhou people often pickle and soak chilies until they become sour, which is called hot and sour; Hunan people eat the original taste of chili, which is called original spicy.

Why did Southwest China eat chili first? Hunger is the power of pepper expansion

Chinese people often think that the reason why southwest China likes to eat chili is that it is rainy and humid in southwest China. Eating more chili can dispel cold and dampness. This statement is not completely consistent with the fact that Gansu people live in dry regions, but they also regard chili as a human delicacy; In terms of spicy food, Shaanxi people are often no inferior to Southwest China.

Poverty may be the root of people's choice of pepper. According to records, rice and bacon were available only during festivals in Guizhou in the early years. Usually, only chili peppers were available for meals. More than half of the families could not afford salt, so they had to replace salt with chili peppers to change their diet.

Hunan has the same experience. According to the immigration history data, during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, the population of Hunan Province after the war and epidemic greatly reduced, and a large number of people moved from the coastal areas, and then it moved westward in the "Huguang Filling Sichuan". For immigrants, when they first arrived in Hunan, they mainly engaged in slope land reclamation and lived a hard life as "shantymen". Pepper is an excellent "food".

The father of Sichuan painter Chen Zhaidong is the owner of Sanyi Palace, a famous Sichuan Opera garden in Chengdu. Chen Zhaidong knew how to cook when he was young. In an interview with Sanlian Life Weekly, he said: "Spicy is actually popular from the bottom of society. For example, the reason why hot pot appeared in Chongqing was that Zigong sold a lot of salt during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression. Cattle had to transport the salt out of Zigong. Cattle were easily exhausted. The hide of cattle stayed in southern Sichuan, and the viscera were transported to the Chongqing wharf with the salt. At that time, the beef offal was already tasty and needed a lot of spices and pepper to cover the taste, so there was the beef offal hot pot. "

Zhang Jiren, the first director of the Hunan Vegetable Research Institute and a famous Chinese pepper expert, once made a survey in the 1970s and found that "the poorer the place, the more likely it is to eat spicy food, including Dongkou, Liuyang, Shuangfeng, Anren and other places." In the southern mountains of Liuyang, An old man once said to a reporter who went to the interview: "When the dishes were finished, we had to eat with rice. When people in the room mixed the first dish, they would mix the second because of the chili peppers.".

It has been twenty years since pepper conquered China

Although pepper was widely eaten in southwest China at the end of the Qing Dynasty, the acceptance of pepper was not high in China as a whole. In the Qing Dynasty, Beijing cuisine was authentic in Huaiyang cuisine and Shandong cuisine. Most of the officials, businessmen and Juzi who came to the capital came from rich areas in the south of the Yangtze River. They paid attention to catering manners and regarded eating spicy food as uncivilized and rude. They were the benchmark of fashion at that time, so the old Beijingers were quite contemptuous of spicy food.

Even in Chengdu, chilli is hard to get on some important occasions. Wu Yusheng, a famous chef of Sichuan cuisine who was born in 1913, began to cook for the important members of the Kuomintang party and government at the age of 20. Many dignitaries in Chengdu are proud to invite him to cook. During the Anti Japanese War, Wu Yusheng once cooked the home kitchen of He Yingqin and Song Ziwen. The Chiang Kai shek couple also liked his cooking. They fell in love with Wu Yusheng's braised beef head recipe, pig's head with bean dregs, boiled cabbage, etc. These are not spicy dishes in Sichuan cuisine.

"Rong Paradise" was an old name in Chengdu during the Republic of China and was known as the "authentic Sichuan cuisine". The boss Lan Guangjian was a famous chef who paid attention to reform. As early as the early 1930s, dozens of tables could be served at the same time in the hotel. The principle was to break up the original red tape of dining procedures, directly serve four side dishes, followed by eight main dishes, and then select dishes such as abalone and bird's nest, The proportion of spicy flavor is less than 30%.

The whole Chinese people ate spicy food after the 1980s. Fish flavored Shredded Pork and Kung Pao Chicken have become popular dishes in many areas where people do not eat spicy food. In Beijing, Luzhou Restaurant, Chongqing Hotel, Yibin Building... many Sichuan restaurants have become popular restaurants. Later, there appeared some dishes rare in Sichuan, such as boiled fish and spicy pot. Kung Pao chicken is hot on the meat, while boiled fish is hot in the oil. Spicy gradually becomes a national taste.

In 2010, the China Comprehensive Well off Research Center, in conjunction with the Media Research Laboratory of Tsinghua University, conducted a survey on the dietary status of Chinese people: Sichuan cuisine ranked first with 51.2% of the voting rate, followed by Northeast cuisine, Hunan cuisine, Shandong cuisine and Guangdong cuisine. Among various flavors, the most people like "spicy", accounting for 40.5%; The second is "sweet", 28.4%; Then "salty", 17.3%. 47.28% of people eat at least one meal of hot food every day, 23% eat it twice a day, and 18.78% eat it once a week.

Why do Chinese people like spicy food more and more?

The fact that pepper occupies the whole country has nothing to do with climate and economic factors. What is the reason why Chinese people can't live without chilli?

There is a saying that the spicy food area is just the province where the labor population flows out. After the reform and opening up, a large number of migrant workers brought their tastes to the east and infected the original urban residents. There is some truth in this statement, but it cannot be explained. As a province with large labor export, why did the tastes of Henan people and Anhui people not affect the whole country? It is also impossible to explain why Guizhou cuisine has far less influence than Sichuan cuisine, which is also a major labor export province in hot food regions?

Others believe that eating spicy food is related to a significantly faster pace of life. If you are eating fresh food, you have very high requirements for ingredients, while spicy food is not picky about ingredients, and the cost of spicy food is lower; Fresh food and spicy food have different cooking requirements. Although many spicy cuisines also need high cooking skills, there are also many fast food and malatang that can work with "zero skill"; For diners, fresh food may also need to be savored carefully, while spicy food often requires low attention and time costs.

In addition to the external environment, what is more important is the attraction of pepper itself to people. Peppers are rich in vitamin A and vitamin C. Capsaicin can activate the digestive system, promote saliva secretion and intestinal peristalsis, and make dry and astringent food taste more delicious. More importantly, pepper also plays a role as a flavor enhancer, especially in the diet structure of light food.

American psychologist Paul Rozin believes that the pain caused by pepper will promote the secretion of endogenous opioid peptides, and repeated exposure to pepper will release more of this chemical painkiller. This release, to a large extent, will bring pleasure to human beings.

Text | Green beans

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