Pre-1492 Chinese Cuisine?

[pa_dutch]

As someone very interested in food history, I'm very curious about the effects of the Trans-Atlantic trade on local diets. There's certainly a lot of information available about what people in Europe and the Americas were eating prior to 1492, but it's much harder for me to contemplate Hunan and Sichuan cuisine before the additional of chili pepper. When I ask most Chinese friends, most take it for granted that capsaicum hasn't always been a feature of their diet.

So what did the eat before? Obviously Sichuan peppercorn and other peppercorns were around before, but those alone don't quite fill the void for chilis. It makes sense that many cultures in Asia adopted chili pepper as a way of masking the taste of old meat and vegetables, but why did they so readily and liberally adopt this ingredient, which actually causes pain when consumed, when many Westerners still have not accustomed to even mildly spicy food? Was there another "hot" ingredient in the cuisine before that chilis replaced the niche for?

 

[carlton_bach]

A lot of them, actually. Pepper, ginger, galingale and Sichuan pepper are all on the hot end of the spectrum. These flavours were quite popular (also in Europe, BTW. The blandness of upscale Western food is a modern phenomenon).

Chili is not a paradigm shift, it's the same, only more so. Some cuisines enthusiastically took to the 'more', others not so much.

 

[troublesome times]

You've already mentioned it, it's the Szechuan peppercorn. The hottest dish I've eaten was in Jamaica, apparently chili peppers are wide consumed in tropical regions.

 

[SvoHljott]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Chinese_cuisine

Tang Dynasty:

Tang court encouraged people not to eat beef (since the bull was a valuable draft animal), and from 831 to 833 Emperor Wenzong of Tang banned the slaughter of cattle on the grounds of his religious convictions to Buddhism. From the trade overseas and over land, the Chinese acquired golden peaches from Samarkand, date palms, pistachios, and figs from Persia, pine seeds and ginseng roots from Korea, and mangoes from Southeast Asia. In China, there was a great demand for sugar; during the reign of Harsha (r. 606–647) over North India, Indian envoys to Tang China brought two makers of sugar who successfully taught the Chinese how to cultivate sugarcane.

During the Tang, the many common foodstuffs and cooking ingredients in addition to those already listed were barley, garlic, salt, turnips, soybeans, pears, apricots, peaches, apples, pomegranates, jujubes, rhubarb, hazelnuts, pine nuts, chestnuts, walnuts, yams, taro, etc. The various meats that were consumed included pork, chicken, lamb (especially preferred in the north), sea otter, bear (which was hard to catch, but there were recipes for steamed, boiled, and marinated bear), and even Bactrian camels. In the south along the coast meat from seafood was by default the most common, as the Chinese enjoyed eating cooked jellyfish with cinnamon, Sichuan pepper, cardamom, and ginger, as well as oysters with wine, fried squid with ginger and vinegar, horseshoe crabs and red crabs, shrimp, and pufferfish, which the Chinese called 'river piglet'.

Song Dynasty:

the scholar Jacques Gernet, judging from the seasonings used, such as pepper, ginger, soya sauce, oil, salt, and vinegar, suggests that the cuisine of Hangzhou was not too different from the Chinese cuisine of today. Other additional seasonings and ingredients included walnuts, turnips, crushed Chinese cardamon kernels, fagara, olives, ginkgo nuts, citrus zest, and sesame oil.

highly spiced Sichuan cuisine

There were also some exotic foreign foods imported to China from abroad, including raisins, dates, Persian jujubes, and grape wine; rice wine was more common in China, a fact noted even by the 13th century Venetian traveler Marco Polo.

Besides wine, other beverages included pear juice, lychee fruit juice, honey and ginger drinks, tea, and pawpaw juice.

The main consumptionary diet of the lower classes remained rice, pork, and salted fish, while it is known from restaurant dinner menus that the upper classes did not eat dog meat. The rich are known to have consumed an array of different meats, such as chicken, shellfish, fallow deer, hares, partridge, pheasant, francolin, quail, fox, badger, clam, crab, and many others.

Hope some of that helps.

 

[pa_dutch]

So, food in southwestern China would have been somewhat similar to Indian food in its liberal use of powdered spices for flavor?

Interestingly, there's a popular dish here in Xinjiang called "dapanji" (大盘鸡， big plate chicken), which many people believe to be a dish invented by the long-established community of Chinese-speaking Hui Muslims, but according to some food historians, it was invented in modern times by a migrant chef from Sichuan using Sichuanese flavors and cooking techniques. It is not nearly as hot as true Sichuan food, and many Sichuanese I talk to don't regard it as such, but it does use chili and Sichuan peppercornsto give it a somewhat "ma la" flavor. The dish is essentially a chopped up chicken, bones and all, stir-fried and then simmered in a wok for a long time with green peppers, potatoes, onion, garlic, fresh ginger, and a mix of dried spices including chili, Sichuan peppercorn, cinnamon, star anise, smoked black cardamom pods, fennel, clove, black peppercorn, and dried orange peel (the exact mixes often vary).

Interestingly, it highly resembles a tradition dish from the neighboring region of Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan, called chicken karahi, which also uses a large rounded pan called a karahi that closely resembles a wok, and uses chicken chicken and green pepper stewed with various spices. It is a related to the popular British "balti," both in style and in origin, and a British food historian suggested it has distant influence from Sichuan.

The local food of the Uyghur people and other Xinjiang ethnic groups does not typically use a lot of dried spices the way South Asian and Han Chinese cuisine do, but they have a dish of stewed meat with dried spices that somewhat resembles both dapanji and chicken karahi which they call khorduk. Uyghur and northern Pakistanis use the same word, gosht, for meat.

It isn't clear whether dapanji, khorduk, and karahi are all directly related or not, but I'm very curious about the cross-border food influences. It is very obvious that laghman, the pulled-noodle dishes popular among Xinjiang ethnic groups and in other Central Asian countries, are directly related to Han and Hui Chinese la mian (also the linguistic etymology of Japanese ramen).

 

[Flocculencio]

Long pepper was also in vogue before chillies.