Three dishes, one ancestor
Sichuan hotpot is a sit-down meal: one pot, one table, several hours. The most interesting eating in Chengdu is done by the same logic at a fraction of the scale, and it exists in three distinct forms that a visitor will see on the street and not know what to do with. This day is about learning to order all three and understanding why they are not simply small hotpots.
Chuanchuan - the skewers
Chuanchuan takes the hotpot broth and changes the unit of ordering. Everything is threaded onto bamboo skewers - vegetables, tofu skin, offal, quail eggs, marinated beef - and you take what you want from a refrigerated wall, cook it yourself in a pot of spiced broth on the table, and pay at the end by counting the skewers. It began as a market-stall version of the restaurant meal, priced so that a labourer could eat a full meal for very little, and it has kept that character: it is the most informal, the noisiest and, for most travellers, the most fun. Your guide will build a plate for you explaining what each skewer is, how long it needs, and what belongs in the dry-spice dip rather than the oil dip.
Maocai - the bowl for one
Maocai is what happened when someone decided to cook the whole thing for you. The name describes the method exactly: the ingredients are held in a basket and 'surfaced' in a spiced stock, then served in a single bowl with the broth, a spoon of the house seasoning and a scatter of chili and sesame. It is a one-person dish, it arrives in five minutes and there is no pot, no burner and no negotiation. Its origin is unusually well documented: broad bean paste reached Pengzhou in 1806 and the miners working the cold, damp valleys around Hawozi and Yinchanggou began cooking vegetables and meat in it, adding chili and Sichuan pepper for warmth; a local herbalist then blended in a set of warming herbs, and the dish was fixed. It is the most everyday of the three and, in our view, the best introduction.
Bobo chicken - the cold one
The third dish is served cold, which is why it exists. Ingredients on skewers are cooked and then steeped in a red-oil or green-peppercorn dressing, and eaten straight out of the liquid at room temperature. The name comes from the earthenware pot it was originally sold out of, and the tradition is from Leshan, south of Chengdu, where it is sold from stalls beside the river. In Chengdu it has become the standard summer plate, and the green-peppercorn version - fragrant rather than hot, with a slight electric numbness - is the one to order if you have already had enough chili for one day.
How the day runs
We start late, because none of these dishes is a morning food. Lunch is maocai, taken standing at a counter in a working neighbourhood. Mid-afternoon is bobo chicken by the river, which takes an hour and involves a great deal of sitting. The evening is chuanchuan, deliberately unhurried, with the skewer count at the end as the punchline. Between stops your guide covers what Sichuan cooks mean by a flavour type - the tradition formally recognises more than twenty, arranged under the headings hot and numbing, aromatic, and the fresh-hot-sweet-sour group - and where each of the three dishes sits within it. Vegetarians can be looked after in all three, and one of them is naturally meat-free in its stock, but we need to know in advance.
Meals
Lunch, Dinner
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
