Why Revolutionaries Love Spicy Food: How the Chili Pepper Got to China | Hacker News Reader

Why Revolutionaries Love Spicy Food: How the Chili Pepper Got to China

nautil.us

78 pointshecubus38 comments

This is an interesting piece. I can certainly believe the connection between enjoying spiciness and thrill-seeking. Eating really spicy food is a form of culinary masochism after all.

I have two little pieces of information to add.

On Mao's culinary idiosyncrasies: He was famous for his love of red-braised pork belly. And today, there are many "Mao restaurants" in China which specialize in the Hunanese-style red-braised pork belly recipe he preferred, which distinctively uses caramelized sugar instead of soy sauce to achieve the dark brown color.

On the connotations of 辣妹子 ("spicy girl"): The "spicy" implies not only a "spicy" temper and "spicy" tongue, but also "spicy" looks. Sichuanese and Hunanese girls are known for being very attractive.

As a lover of Chinese food I can attest that Hunanese is spicy as fuck.

>Eating really spicy food is a form of culinary masochism after all.

Not if you like it.

But historically, and before the refrigerator, it was also a good way to make long preserved food taste less bad, and also a way to preserve food (as spicies contain antibiotics).

http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/4983/does-spicy-...

>>Eating really spicy food is a form of culinary masochism after all.

>Not if you like it.

Masochism means pleasure from pain.

Well, those who like it don't approach it as "pain", but as a strong nice feeling on the tongue, that is the point is not some pain (painful is how it feels to those who can't take it), but the taste.

It's not like they would just as well overly acidic food (which would also be "pain" on the tongue) or overly hot (in temperature) food, etc, as "masochists".

It's the taste of the spice, not the pain.

The taste of spice is pain. Capsaicin triggers your tongue's pain receptors, not its olfactory receptors.

Love for pain is learned. Think of what you would learn from both of the examples you cited.

Although many spices have antimicrobial properties, the idea they were used as a preservative is a myth. Just look at leftovers: My extra spicy kung pao goes bad just as fast as my roomate's sweet and sour. Salt, acidity, and fermentation are both much more effective and well known in ancient times.

Source: A Taste of Conquest by Michael Krondl discusses the historic uses of spices in great deal.

On the flip side, how ketchup got from Asia to America:

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/12/02/248195661/...

http://languageoffood.blogspot.com/2009/09/ketchup.html

Spices get around; I guess people try not to be bland and boring.

This is very interesting because Indian food is spicy (with actual spices as opposed to being chilli hot) because the hot and humid climates meant food spoiled easy. Spices and oil were a way to make sure food didn't go bad ... Or disguise the rotten flavor in food.

China is fundamentally a cold country - they would not have evolved their culinary history in the same way.

The Sichuan area of China gets ungodly hot during summer. Up to 40C isn't uncommon.

Why didn't hecubus(OP) take the title or headline?

"How the chili pepper got to China" is a relatively small part of the article.

I don't know why HN doesn't just autofill the title from the submitted URL - it would clear up a lot of these types of problem. Heck, could even parse out appropriate metadata / http headers to determine date for all those old news stories that need a year in parentheses.

> just autofill the title from the submitted URL

This is a case of Jerry Weinberg's dictum that when you hear the word "just" in software development, replace it with "have a lot of trouble".

It's one of those ideas that seems like it would work until you look into it. In reality it doesn't come close to working, because many web pages have titles that violate the HN guidelines, include junk, or are meaningless. There's no substitute for editorial judgment.

Also good luck reliably even finding the title in all the horrible kinds of html floating around out there.

/html/head/title/text() should work for the vast majority of pages out there. Those that it doesn't work for, never mind - you don't lose anything wrt the current system by not being able to prefill.

You could also look for meta tags and social media (facebook, twitter, etc) tags, and probably build a decent profile for most sites[0]. It can be done fairly reliably, and would work well for any site that actually cares about its social media presence, but the end result is still no better for low quality titles and linkbait. To guarantee quality, HN would have to either send all submissions through a mod queue or have an interstitial preview page to let the user add or edit metadata before submission. That, functionally, is just a more complication version of looking at the article and pasting in the title.

[0]shameless plug of my own work: https://github.com/kennethrapp/embedbug

Of course; I need to get into the habit of using "just" far less than I do! But even if some titles are less than perfect, a lot will be absolutely fine, and almost anything is better than a blank headline. I.e. prefill, but retain the ability to edit the headline.

Ok, we added the main title to the subtitle above.

I feel like I'm missing something - this article seems to conflate capsacin and zanthoxylum (Sichuan). The latter is native to China, the former a New World import. The article mentions this briefly but doesn't really tie together the connection between the Sichuan and its impact on an appreciation for spiciness.

Or how they transitioned so quickly from Hunan (red chili pepper dominates) to Sichuan (more competition, old-world ma peppercorn is just as important, maybe even more so, as new world la chili pepper).

I dont think the two are conflated. Sichuan is used as an example as its cuisine is known for a lot of chili. Sichuan also uses sichuan pepper a lot (which is noted in the article).

Yes, the article correctly points out that Sichuan pepper is native to Sichuan and that the people have been using it as spice well before the arrival of the chili pepper:

>To counteract the soggy weather, the Sichuanese have historically spiked their diet with warming foods like garlic, ginger, and Sichuan pepper (a spice unrelated to the hot pepper that creates a numbing sensation on the tongue). When the chili pepper arrived, the Sichuanese plugged it seamlessly into their preexisting palate. 

I can't tell if palate is a typo/autocorrect or a clever wordplay. Not a native speaker here.

Native speaker here - it's just the word we use for people's tastes. I don;t see any possible wordplay here, but I might have missed it

Palette would be the word usually used in this case. As in, an artist's palette.

Palate would be wordplay or typo as parent suggested.

>>Native speaker here - it's just the word we use for people's tastes.

>Palette would be the word usually used in this case. As in, an artist's palette.

No, it wouldn't.

From the Google built-in dictionary, palate (with 1 "t"):

"2. a person's ability to distinguish between and appreciate different flavours."

And from Webster: 2. the sense of taste

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/palate

Also: https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/palate-p...

From Merriam Webster:

"(2) : a comparable range, quality, or use of available elements <a rich palette of tones and timbres> <a palette of flavors>"

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/palette

A "palate" means a gourmand's ability to distinguish complex flavors.

A "palette", when used in culinary writing, is a common analogy between a chef's selection of spices and an artist's choice of color.

In this case they are talking about the available selection of spices used in Sichuanese cooking. Not the Sichuanese people's ability to taste spicy food.

Examples:

New York Times - "In a single block you can find a dozen different chilies in a Mexican grocery, an artist's palette of spices in an Indian market, and restaurants, endless restaurants."

Huffington Post - "These can include smoked or unsmoked bacon, juniper berries, mustard, beef stock, brown sugar, white sugar, flour for thickening, bread for thickening, pain d’épices (a sort of gingerbread but with a more colorful palette of spices), thyme, and, very occasionally, garlic."

New York Times - "It takes a starring role in prahok ktis, with ground chicken and the national spice palette of galangal, ginger and lemon grass, served with vegetables to dip ($17.95). "

Business Insider - "Thankfully, wine stoppers exist, and can help you save your Pinot for later without ruining its flavor palette."

Scientific American - "Due to heat processing, the flavor palette now includes a malty, burnt note from 2-methyl-butanal, along with much more pyridine odor and furfural, a sugar decomposition product smelling of grain and sawdust."

Forbes - "That translates well to the Italian-contemporary flavor palette at Culina. The very lengthy new menu ranges from delicate crudo and vegetarian ..."

>In this case they are talking about the available selection of spices used in Sichuanese cooking. Not the Sichuanese people's ability to taste spicy food.

I read it as being about adding this particular flavor to their accepted tastes, i.e. embracing the new taste -- not about merely adding the spice to the variety/assortment of spices they use (which was a given as the parent was already talking about that).

Conclusion: even native speakers can't tell if typo, pun or dead metaphor. I wish I could turn back time, make an edit to the article, ask again, compare results.

Coldtea and elthran are right imo. The phrase reads simply to me. No typo pun or metaphor. If 'palette' was used id read it as misspelling.

> "If 'palette' was used id read it as misspelling."

Thank goodness we finally have an authority on the subject to tell us what to believe.

>The latter is native to China, the former a New World import.

From the article: "For years culinary detectives have been on the chili pepper’s trail, trying to figure out how a New World import became so firmly rooted in Sichuan, a landlocked province on the southwestern frontier of China".

I don't think I had seen "Sichuan" before. Turns out Szechwan and Szechuan are antiquated romanizations of Sichuan.

Looks like that spelling took over around 1980

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Sichuan%2CSzec...

"Sichuan" is how the name is romanized using Pinyin, which is now more or less the standard romanization for Mandarin. "Szechuan" is from the older Wade-Giles system, and I think "Szechwan" is just a variation. The rise of the "Sichuan" spelling on your graph roughly corresponds to the rise of Pinyin.

Which corresponds with the PRC's recognition as the legitimate government of China by the UN in 1971 and the US in 1979.

In Taiwan, the old Wade-Giles system is still used.

off topic a bit -- but i noticed a lot of nautil.us links on HN the last year - is the subscription worth it ?

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