The affair began one September day in 1993. My friend Zhou Yu invited me out to lunch on my very first visit to Chengdu, the capital of China's Sichuan Province. We ate in a modest restaurant near the bus station, a small place tiled in white like a bathroom, with a few tables and chairs and nothing on the walls. I can still remember every taste of that delicious meal. The preserved eggs, with their green-and-yellow yolks and amber whites, cut into segments and arranged around a pile of chopped green peppers like the petals of a flower. Cold chicken chunks, tossed in a piquant dressing of soy sauce, chilli oil and Sichuan pepper. A whole carp, braised in a sauce of chilli-bean paste laced with the heady fragrances of ginger, garlic and spring onions. And fish-fragrant aubergines, a dish which remains my personal favourite, the golden, buttery fried aubergines cooked in a deep red, spicy sauce with hints of sweet and sour. Later that afternoon, as we sat in a riverside teahouse sipping jasmine blossom tea as the sunlight danced through the leaves of sheltering trees, I realised I had fallen in love. I would have to return to Chengdu.
A year later it was my fond memories of eating in the city which brought me back to Chengdu. I was there ostensibly to study at the university but I had only to step outside the campus to be overwhelmed by the hubbub of Sichuanese life with its sprawling teahouses, bustling restaurants and vibrant lanes. Every morning I would be seduced anew by the scent of frying guo kuei, pinwheel pastries with a spicy pork filling and a scattering of toasty sesame seeds. A hundred yards or so from the door of my room, just beyond a side gate of the university, was a market overflowing with fresh and seasonal produce. Fish leapt and eels wriggled in tanks of water, ducks and chickens squawked in their pens. Vegetables and fruits were piled up in great bamboo trays: water spinach and bamboo shoots, garlic stems and bitter melons, seasonal treats like three-coloured amaranth leaves, loquats and 'spring shoots', the tender leaves of a local tree. One stall sold a dozen different types of beancurd; others displayed great sackfuls of glossy red chillies and pink Sichuan pepper, or enormous clay urns filled with rice wine.
From Shark's Fin Soup and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China
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