100 Documentaries → 9/100 || Exploring China: A Culinary Adventure - Episode 2
PRODUCER: BBC YEAR: 2012 WATCH: BBC | DailyMotion
OFFICIAL DESCRIPTION: “Chefs Ken Hom and Ching-He Huang undertake a culinary adventure across China, sampling its food, history, and culture.” - BBC
MY TAKE: [Catch up on Episode 1 + my series overview!]
In this installment, Ching-He Huang and Ken Hom head to Chengdu, further inland and the capital of Sichuan province. Sichuan food is arguably the most well-known form of Chinese food in the Western world, although its introductions and adaptations in America and the UK are very different, which I feel like this particular documentary really glossed over in terms of looking at when/how/why different areas of China have experienced large-scale emigration and ways that the treatment of Chinese immigrants affected the development of American “Chinese food” and British “Chinese food”. (Another documentary on my list, Foods of Chicago, covers this well with regard to America, if you’re curious. It’s why I noticed that this doc didn’t go into it even when Ching-He is talking about adapting the things they’re making or eating in China for the British kitchen.)
Anyhoo, the element of Sichuan cuisine that most makes it unique is the Sichuan peppercorn, or in Britishism the Sichuan flower pepper, which creates the “la” sensation of Sichuan ma la food -- “hot-numb,” or the contrast between hot chilies and the Sichuan peppercorns (which are not actually related to pepper? It’s actually a tiny tiny citrus?) that literally numbs the tongue and lips. It’s thought that it affects the nerves in some mildly neurological way, because it does cause a temporary activation in some nerves that normally are not sensitive to touch (from chewing, for example) or temperature (of the hot food itself). Growing up in the Midwest, where “Schezuan” food has neither actual chilies nor any semblance of ma la, this was super cool to learn about and to see.
As you can see in the gifs, this Westward move for Ching-He and Ken brings more exaggerated, more entrenched gender roles and expectations thereof for Ching-He when they visit the kitchen of a Chengu hotpot restaurant. When they visit a local home, Ken is invited to relax as a guest while Ching-He helps the daughter, mother, aunt, and grandmother to prepare an expansive meal; they separate so that Ken can visit a high-end restaurant kitchen while Ching-He does a second home stay with an organic pig farmer and his wife.
They reconvene just in time to end this installment by visiting Sichuan’s most famous residents... giant pandas! Who are hilarious and cute OF COURSE. But they just eat bamboo, no ma la for them. And no more massive, Westernized cities for Ching-He and Ken, either: episodes three and four bring them much further West into the parts of China that the Western world tends not to acknowledge at all, and where neither of them has cultural literacy...
REC?: Yes. Obviously food issues apply, and a blanket trigger warning for discussions of Mao and the effects of his brutality.
RATING:
