Fuchsia Dunlop

Chilli con carnage: the red hot pepper and communism

He who can’t endure chilli is also unable to fight, declared Mao, ensuring the spice’s revolutionary symbolism throughout China

The Chinese flag made from chillies and corn cobs. Credit: Alamy

These days it is as hard to imagine Sichuanese food without chillies as it is to imagine Italian food without tomatoes. Both ingredients were among the New World crops that transformed culinary cultures across the globe after Christopher Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of the Americas in 1492. The chilli first appeared in China sometime in the late 16th century. Within 50 years it was rapidly gaining popularity and by the late 19th century it was ubiquitous in many parts of the country. Brian R. Dott has scoured Chinese and other sources to find out how and why this foreign spice conquered Chinese palates. He examines the chilli’s progress in China from multiple perspectives: culinary, medical, literary, aesthetic, economic and cultural.

Particularly fascinating is what he reveals of the informal and piecemeal way in which the chilli entered the country. Some New World crops, such as maize and sweet potatoes, were calorific foods that could not only feed a population in times of famine but enabled the cultivation of marginal lands unsuitable for rice and wheat, so they attracted the attention of governing elites; others, such as tobacco, became valuable cash crops. By contrast, the chilli, which grew so readily and prolifically in kitchen gardens that it was ‘essentially free’, was useful neither for filling people’s bellies nor traders’ coffers: it was simply tasty.

Dott’s research suggests that no one deliberately imported chillies to China. They were probably introduced by the multi-ethnic crews transporting goods from south-east Asia to the eastern Chinese coast, who used the spice to season their meals on board. Once arrived, chillies sped through China via unofficial networks, farmer to farmer, as they were seized on by the lower social classes as a welcome accompaniment to their typically bland and starchy diets. They were adopted with particular zeal by people in Sichuan, Hunan and other south-western provinces, but also became an essential condiment in southern Shaanxi and across the north- west of China.

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