Sichuan Food
Food Chain Radio Show #1208
Michael Olson, Author & Urban Farming Agriculturalist
The Food of Sichuan!
Guest: Fuchsia Dunlop, Author, The Food of Sichuan
Being a Montana boy, I was raised on meat and potatoes, with a side of something green. To spice things up, we had salt and pepper, and some tins of McCormick spices, but that was about it.
Michael Olson Food Chain Radio – Foods of Sichuan
But I did have a desire to see what was over the horizon, and somehow found myself studying Chinese language and literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
My Chinese language professor was a tall, very elegant woman– a refugee from Chairman Mao’s great Cultural Revolution by the name of Ching Yi Dougherty. Ching Yi introduced our class to a rather nondescript restaurant in downtown Santa Cruz called the New Riverside. “Though it’s owned by a big Japanese corporation,” she said, “it is one of the top seven Sichuan Chinese restaurants in the world!”
When my very well-traveled in-laws came to town for a visit, I thought I would show them how worldly I had become, and so invited them to dinner at the New Riverside. I asked the manager of the restaurant, who by then I had come to know quite well, to have the chef prepare something really memorable.
When the entrée arrived, it left the entire family speechless. There before us, on a huge platter, was a whole sea bass smothered in hot bean sauce.
Decades later, that whole fish in hot bean sauce still comes up during the table talk of our family get togethers. That a single dish could linger there in the family’s memory for decades leads us to ask…
Leave a comment below: What makes the foods of Sichuan so memorable?
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