Why go to the source
Sichuan cooking is usually explained through its heat. The ingredient that actually holds it together is not hot at all: it is a fermented paste of broad beans and chilies, made in one district of Chengdu's north-west since the early nineteenth century, and no serious Sichuan kitchen - here or abroad - cooks without it. It is known as the soul of Sichuan cuisine. This day goes to where it is made.
How it started
The story begins with the great seventeenth-century resettlement of Sichuan. A migrant from Fujian, on the road into the province, ran out of food in the rain and found his travelling broad beans had gone mouldy. He dried them on a ridge, mixed them with fresh chilies, and ate them; the result was better than anything he had left behind. Two centuries of refinement followed. In 1803 a descendant opened a sauce shop in Pi County, and by 1853 the family had a second, larger yard; in 1905 an outsider opened a third and ended the family monopoly. By the 1920s three yards dominated, and the paste was being shipped by river and road to Hunan, Guizhou, Yunnan, Tibet, Shaanxi and Gansu.
Morning - the drying yard
We go north-west to the bean-paste district, and the first thing that reaches you is the smell. The process is not complicated and cannot be hurried: northern Sichuan chilies grown in the Ma'anshan hills, top-grade broad beans with the skin on, rock salt from Zigong, and then the regime the trade describes in twelve characters - dry on fine days, cover when it rains, turn by day, leave out by night. Fermentation runs at least a year, and the best paste in a yard is three years old or more. You walk a working yard, look at the crocks, and taste paste at different ages, which is the only way to understand why a cook blends an old one with a young one for colour, body and heat separately. Quality is judged exactly as the trade judges it: the colour should be a deep brown-red, the aroma should be the aroma of the bean and not of raw chili, and a good paste carries no spices and a single drop of added oil.
The paste museum and the museum of the cuisine
Beside the yards is the district's bean-paste museum, opened in 2018 with a sauce workshop, a heritage gallery, a production display, a fermentation cellar and a traditional drying yard. From there we drive to the Sichuan cuisine exhibition hall at Ande, which opened in March 2013 and takes the story up a level: roughly four thousand square metres built on the principle of 'the cuisine as the subject, the bean paste as the soul', compressing three thousand years of Sichuan cooking into a single building - the Han-dynasty beginnings, the Tang and Song city restaurants, the seventeenth-century influx of migrants and their methods, and the twentieth-century spread of the cuisine overseas.
Lunch
Lunch in the district, built around the paste rather than around the heat: twice-cooked pork, where the slices are cooked until they curl into the shape the trade calls an oil lamp, and fish-fragrant aubergine, which contains no fish at all.
Afternoon - a kitchen, and the paste in your own hands
The afternoon is practical. In a teaching kitchen you cook two dishes from the beginning, using paste you have just seen made, with a local cook working alongside you: one classic dry-fried dish, and one where the paste is fried until the oil runs red before anything else goes in - the single most useful technique in Sichuan cooking and the one most often done badly abroad. You leave with a jar of paste from the yard and, more to the point, with the ability to tell a good one from a bad one on a shelf at home.
Evening
Dinner back in the city, ordered family-style, at a table where the conversation is what each dish would taste like with the wrong paste.
Meals
Lunch, Dinner
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
