Aug 23, 2017 · 1 min read
I had kung pao chicken in Chengdu. It’s a Sichuan dish. No Chinese restaurant I’ve eaten at in America makes it right. A few came close, but I’d never heard of Sichuan peppercorns until eating them in China and wondering what strange neurological disorder I’d just contracted. There may be a perfectly practical reason early Chinese immigrants made dishes the way they did — they had to work with what was available. There was no Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, or Asian Mart to get the right ingredients from. Sichuan peppercorns were 6,000 miles away and certainly not available with 2-day shipping. They had to improvise.
