I Lost My Appetite Because of Covid. This Sichuan Flavor Brought It Back.
By Tejal Rao
Jan. 20, 2021
新冠毁食欲 麻辣来雄起
-----新冠败胃奈之何? 唯有川味!
【美】德金·饶 (译音) 摘译自《纽约时报》
When I got sick and lost my sense of smell — a common neurological symptom of Covid-19 — the foods I loved became muddled and ugly. My brain was incapable of interpreting the delicious information floating around me, unable to detect, let alone identify, any of the aromas I took in through my nose. Without smells to guide me, my sense of taste faded and food flattened out, going gray and muted, dull and lifeless. Cheese became rubber and paste. Popcorn turned into thorny foam. The bland squish of a roast-chicken breast made me recoil. My appetite dwindled, until I was brought back to the pure pleasures of eating by a classic Sichuan flavor: mala.
The word translates to numbing (ma) and spicy (la), and it’s a result of a partnership between Sichuan peppercorns and chiles. “Flavorwise, it’s so intriguing,” said Jing Gao, who was born in Chengdu and now owns the Chinese food company Fly by Jing, which specializes in Sichuan ingredients like chile crisp and dried peppers. Mala is just one of many flavors in Sichuan cuisine, but it’s immensely popular, in part because it’s unlike any other. “That’s because there’s a texture to the flavor,” she said.
You experience that texture as a buzzing current through your mouth and lips,, thanks to a molecule called hydroxy-alpha sanshool found in Sichuan peppercorns。 The pepper has plenty of flavor, too. The writer Fuchsia Dunlop compares peppercorn plants to vines grown to make wine grapes — capable of producing fruit that’s deeply expressive of its terroir.
Mala has become so popular that it has been commercialized and exported to huge success — not just through mala hot-pot restaurants, which continue to open all over China and beyond, but in packaged mala-flavored snacks like potato chips, nuts, soup packets and jerky. “You can mala anything,” said Jason Wang, turning the flavor into a verb. Wang’s chain of New York restaurants, Xi’an Famous Foods, specializes in the foods of Xi’an, but in a new cookbook named after his restaurants, he includes a mala beef dish finished with a slip of chile oil.
If Wang is right, and you can mala anything, his simple recipe is a gift, and a way to keep my appetite up while I’m still recovering — however long that might take.