The taste of Sichuanese today is far from that of Li Bai and Su Shi. Can Sichuan cuisine be called Sichuan cuisine without peppers introduced from Ming and Qing Dynasties? Sichuan cuisine boasts a history of more than two thousand years. But it's hard to say how much the Sichuan food we eat now has to do with the Sichuan food at that time. An ironclad proof is that at most more than 400 years ago, there were no peppers in Sichuan cuisine-how can it be called "Sichuan cuisine" without peppers?
The breakthrough point of old Sichuan cuisine and new Sichuan cuisine was in17th century. /kloc-in the 0/7th century, the Ming Dynasty spent the last forty years of internal troubles and foreign invasion. Among the peasants in the late Ming Dynasty, Sichuan was the last province where wars continued and the economy and people's livelihood were seriously damaged. Zhang established local political power in Sichuan. When he could no longer rule China, he implemented scorched earth in Sichuan. The appalling burning and destruction by Zhang and other troops made Chengdu Plain almost a wilderness. Demographers' research shows that the war has reduced the population of Sichuan from a few million at the peak to 600,000-800,000, while the number of old Sichuanese in Chengdu Plain in central Sichuan has been "more than one hundred".
Killing wiped out the population and cut off the inheritance of culture and even habits. In this process, the Sichuan cuisine culture centered on Chengdu suffered a devastating blow. But after the massacre, who is likely to pass on those exquisite and complicated recipes? After the Chengdu Plain Massacre, the ancient Sichuan people's habit of eating glutinous rice was only partially preserved in Yibin, Zigong and other places in southern Sichuan where Zhang's heroes rarely entered.
Zanthoxylum bungeanum, ginger and dogwood are the three most traditional spices in China, among which Zanthoxylum bungeanum is the most commonly used spice. According to the study of ancient recipes in recent years, about one-fifth of the food used pepper in more than 2,000 years before pepper entered China. Zanthoxylum bungeanum is widely planted in the upper, middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River and Yellow River in China. In the Tang Dynasty, when Zanthoxylum bungeanum was in its heyday, the proportion of food using Zanthoxylum bungeanum in recipes accounted for 37%.
Zanthoxylum bungeanum once occupied an unquestionable dominant position in spicy spices, and its food products were all over the country, and its importance in China's diet could not even be compared with today's peppers. However, since the late Ming Dynasty, the frequency of spicy seasoning in diet has been declining, and many dishes no longer use pepper as raw material.
/kloc-In the second half of the 6th century, pepper was introduced into China from overseas, but it was doomed that pepper could not have the same status as pepper. Pepper was first introduced to Zhejiang, but it was not until the seventh year of Jiaqing (1802) that Jiangsu Province, a neighboring country to the north of Zhejiang, recorded pepper in Taicang Fuzhi. After the Republic of China, peppers were planted in most areas of Jiangsu Province, while it was recorded in Guangdong Province in the south from the Qianlong period, but the taste of Cantonese people was always mediocre, and pepper cultivation was not very extensive during the Republic of China. According to the survey, in the 20th year of the Republic of China, only Zijin and Pingyuan counties in Guangdong Province had peppers in their vegetables.
However, although the spread from north to south was blocked, the persistence of spicy taste in the middle and upper reaches of the Yangtze River made the spread of pepper in China flow back to the west along the Yangtze River, forming a sub-center in Hunan. Peppers from Jiangxi, Guizhou, Hubei and Sichuan should all be imported from Hunan, and these areas also constitute the strongest spicy eating areas in China, so Sichuan people are not afraid of spicy food, Guizhou people are not afraid of spicy food, and Hunan people are afraid of spicy food.