Chapter 10 Add a little chili to American Mark Miller

Add a little chili to American Mark Miller American Mark Miller is an interesting person. He was born in a French-Canadian family in what he called a semi-Puritan culture. He didn’t know that there are many flavors in the world. , "It is impolite to discuss food at any time. If you ask, what seasoning makes some dishes so special? Or, why is a steak so fragrant? Why are fried chicken wings always so desirable? You get The answer must be hemming and hawing."This traditional psychology may be based on Socrates, Plato’s contempt for taste, including the Bible. In Plato’s eyes, only vision and hearing are objective. Taste, like touch, needs to touch “things” to be perceived, so it is lost. objectivity.

The Puritans have nothing to do with delicious food. Their way of life has been around for a long time, rigid and boring, and you cannot subvert it. Food is to provide energy for life, protein or carbohydrates. You can measure the calories for a day to eat, just like assessing a day How many miles you run and how much gas you put in your car, the taste seems superfluous, or never existed, until Mark Miller was eight or nine years old, when he first had delicious curry meat at a friend's house, It suddenly awakened the sense of taste. The situation of Mark Miller is not only the case in North America, perhaps as long as we pay attention, the same situation as Mark Miller is not uncommon in China. Some people have not awakened their sense of taste in their lives, and eating is just a life-sustaining activity. Because we are alive, we have to eat and noodles, which makes people lose a lot of delicious pleasure in life.Since creation has given people a sense of taste, all kinds of tastes in the world and the cooking techniques that our ancestors tried and invented in the long history are all a rich cultural heritage left to us, such as Zhou Dynasty's "alcohol cooking", the kind of rice with meat sauce tasted by the emperor, we can also try it ourselves today.

Mark Miller changed the course of his life when his sense of taste was awakened, and he wrote an important book that, philosophers or other scholars, would consider a pamphlet , but it is quite interesting, from which we can see the American way of doing research.Mark Miller wrote the book "Chili: The Miracle Fruit That Ignites the Taste". The impetus for writing this book may be traced back to the time when he accidentally ate curry meat in his childhood, which awakened his sense of taste. After studying anthropology, the next step is to travel around the world and get to know all kinds of peppers.

Mark Miller was the first to know peppers in South America. Peppers were originally a kind of nightshade berry that grew in the mountains of Chile. Later, they were moved to Mexico for planting and domestication, and then spread from South America to North Africa, then into Europe, and then into Asia.This is a relatively common view, and there are several theories about the route of its introduction to China. One is from the Middle East through the northwest, the other is from the southwest through the Strait of Malacca by sea, and the other is from Shanghai to China.Then, the theory of chili pepper outsiders was also strongly opposed by the local theory. Opponents refuted it with the theory of continental plate drift. They believed that the geographical climate and latitude of Yunnan were comparable to that of South America. It turns out that before the plate drifted, that is, before the Pacific Ocean, the continent was As a whole, in this way, it is impossible for Yunnan to have no chili peppers, and botanists just discovered wild rice peppers in Yunnan. Based on this, the local chili peppers believe that chili peppers are from China, not imported from overseas.But, just as other plants have brought in seeds, someone may have dropped the seeds and made it grow in the forest.In short, there has been no debate on whether chili peppers were introduced from overseas or were originally found in China. Scholars have only consulted historical documents. There has never been a record of chili peppers before the Ming Dynasty. Although chili peppers have always been regarded as national peppers in China, it is Authentic Chinese products, people in Sichuan, Hunan, Guizhou and other provinces are all staunch chili advocates, however, they have no evidence to prove that the authentic origin of chili is in China.

It is a pity that although Mark Miller wrote the widely spread book "Pepper: The Miracle Fruit That Ignites the Taste", he did not write that he has been to Sichuan, China. that shines with life.They can completely avoid meat for a week, but if there is no chili for three days, their sense of taste will fade to a bird.Sometimes I feel very strange, why do we think that foreigners, especially Westerners, don't eat chili?Maybe it's because the Germans and the British eat less chili.But now people in these countries are also popular to eat chili, and use chili to lose weight.

I think it is emotionally unacceptable to know that chili peppers are not domestically produced because of the love of chili peppers in China.However, it is true. The earliest record about pepper in China is "Zunsheng Eight Notes" (1591) written by Gao Lian in the Ming Dynasty. considerable".According to this record, it is generally believed that pepper was introduced into China in the late Ming Dynasty.Wild peppers were domesticated into domestic peppers in Mexico. Mark Miller believes that there are two ways for peppers to spread. One is that birds bring pepper seeds to the north, and the other is that commercial trade exchanges bring peppers out of South America.

Chili peppers have become widely popular in China, which Mark Miller has not described.In China, there are 100 million people who eat chili peppers in Sichuan and Chongqing alone. In the Yangtze River chili belt, there are at least people who eat chili peppers in Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, and Anhui provinces, and people from other provinces. People also began to eat chili.In Beijing, spicy crayfish has always been popular, and pepper cuisines such as Sichuan, Hunan, Hubei, Guizhou, and Jiangxi are also becoming more and more prosperous.China seems to lack pepper experts like Mark Miller, so there is no official history of the distribution of peppers. Due to the serious cross-pollination of peppers, it is impossible to verify how many kinds of peppers there are, and because of the long-term shortage and economic troubles , China's agriculture has always focused on high yields, which has always been a disaster for peppers. Seed experts from all over the country are responsible for cultivating high-yield peppers, reducing the planting area of ​​high-quality peppers with thin skins in the south... But even so, there are many types of peppers in China, and each has its own place .Bell peppers from Guangdong, thread peppers from Northwest China, Sanjiao peppers from Yunnan, and sea peppers from Sichuan are all very famous.

Regarding the spicy food in Sichuan, it has always been amazing, and it will change when you talk about spicy food. So why are Sichuan people so good at eating spicy food?How did they invent the spicy and spicy food?According to legend, before the motor boats, there were trackers on the Yangtze River. These trackers have traveled all over the waterways of Sichuan. They trek along the cold and damp river all the year round. A crockpot cooks food, the food is mixed, there are grains, wild vegetables, and fish and shrimps from the beach, and then pepper and Sichuan pepper (pepper) are thrown into it, and the canned food is boiled, and the body is burning after eating. It is beneficial to the fiber drawing industry to sweat all over and continue to draw and sail.When the trackers arrived at various docks, they spread this spicy eating method, and later entered restaurants, and evolved into hot pot and Malatang.Sichuan's hot and spicy eating method has spread throughout the country, and now it is the world. It can be said that wherever there are people, there are Sichuan-style restaurants.

Dong Zhujun deserves to be the first person to spread the taste of Sichuan!In the 1920s, she opened the Jin Jiang Hotel in Shanghai to introduce Sichuan flavor.Afterwards, Chongqing became the accompanying capital during the Anti-Japanese War, and the central bureaucrats and the rich and famous from all over the world also poured into Chongqing and the rear of Sichuan, tasted the hot Sichuan spicy in the fire, and carried forward the spicy spicy by the way. Spicy is the pinnacle of taste!In addition to the chili belt in the Yangtze River, there is also a hot pepper belt along the Yellow River in Henan, and the hot and spicy mutton soup is a delicious dish of that spicy belt.But spicy, after all, is not as widely spread as chili, especially the fresh and spicy smell of green chili, which is hard to refuse.The south is light and the north is salty, the east is sweet and the west is spicy, and the vast western region is also a hot spot for chili.In China, in addition to the hot peppers grown in greenhouses for people to taste the deliciousness of fresh peppers all year round, there is also Hainan province that grows peppers all year round, which keeps Chinese people's lives spicy.

I'm sure Mark Miller didn't omit Chinese chili on purpose, he mentions Sichuan spicy beef in his text, which is of course a delicacy.Mark Miller’s description of Asian peppers mentioned Thailand and South Korea many times. These two pepper countries are neighboring countries of China. However, compared with China’s pepper production, it is just a drop in the bucket. The peppers produced in China every year are shipped to these two countries. I believe that these two countries will be covered with a thick layer.In my opinion, even though South Korea’s pickled peppers are very good, they are not as good as the real Sichuan pickled peppers. The dry and spicy aroma of Sichuan boiled fish and the fresh and spicy smell of fish-flavored shredded pork are also unmatched. Chongqing’s Maoxuewang, It is comparable to manly peppers in South America.

In the vast rural areas of China, farmers like to string red peppers and hang them under the eaves to dry. The houses with white walls and black tiles hang a few strings of red peppers, which is the image of the homeland in the poem. Heart rises, warm and pleasant.However, it is far from enough to just know the peppers in China. To understand the peppers in the world and the pepper cultures all over the world, reading Mark Miller's book is a good choice. The statement, especially the chili peppers in North and South America.It seems that he has a special liking for the peppers of the Caribbean Sea. He lives in New Mexico, USA, where peppers are suitable for growing. He also has a fascination for the peppers of Havana, but it is unmatched. Mark Miller says: Peppers come in many commercial forms: fresh, dried, frozen, canned and ground.At Coyote Cafe we ​​use about 20 different fresh peppers including Anaheim, Ash, New Mexico (green and red), Farmers, Mountain, Jalapeno Jalapa, Habanero, Thai, Hungarian Cherry and Allspice.We also used the same amount of dried chiles, mostly in the seasoning sauce.The varieties we use most frequently are capsicum, smoked jalapeños, bell peppers, tree peppers, mulattos, guajillos, pequins, and New Mexican red peppers. ("Pepper: The Miracle Fruit That Ignites the Taste" by American Mark Miller)