What a Sichuan kitchen taught us about precision

The first thing Master Liu asked us, in the back kitchen of a courtyard house off Kuanzhai Alley in Chengdu, was whether we had eaten breakfast. Then he asked the question that organised the rest of the afternoon. He held up two small porcelain dishes, one of Erjingtiao chilli flakes from Shuangliu, the other of green huajiao from Hanyuan county, and asked which one we thought did the most work in a bowl of mapo doufu. We guessed the chilli. He smiled, set both dishes down, and said the honest answer is that they argue, and the cook is the referee.

We had come to sit with him for three days as part of a longer fieldwork visit on Sichuan cookery, arranged through a culinary studio in the city's Qingyang district. The studio works with retired hotel chefs and home cooks who learned in the years before the standardised restaurant recipe took over. Master Liu trained at a state guesthouse in the 1980s, then cooked privately for a family in Chongqing for almost two decades. He is sixty-three, wears reading glasses on a cord, and keeps a notebook in his apron pocket that he refers to without embarrassment, the way a pianist refers to a score.

The notebook is the first thing worth describing. It is a cheap red-covered ledger, the kind sold at every stationery shop in the alleys around Wenshu Monastery, and it is full of dated entries in small careful characters. Each entry records the day's batch of a sauce or paste: the weather, the humidity reading from a small dial above the stove, the weight of the chilli, the weight of the huajiao, the ratio of Pixian doubanjiang to oil, the temperature at which the oil was drawn off the heat. He has kept one of these books each year since 1987. They sit in a stack in his apartment, bound with twine, and his daughter has begun photographing them.

We asked, quietly, why the daily record was necessary if the recipe was, in some sense, fixed. He looked at us as though we had asked why a farmer checks the sky. Hanyuan huajiao changes character with the harvest, he said. The 2023 crop is more floral than the 2022 crop, which was sharper, almost lemony, because the spring was dry. Erjingtiao loses pungency after eight months in the jar. Doubanjiang from his supplier in Pixian, fermented in earthen vats for three years under straw lids, varies bin by bin. To cook the same dish twice, the proportions have to move. The recipe is not a set of numbers. It is a set of relationships.

“He smiled, set both dishes down, and said the honest answer is that they argue, and the cook is the referee.”

This is, we think, what people miss about mala. The word is usually translated as numbing-spicy, and visitors arrive expecting heat. What they encounter, in a kitchen like Master Liu's, is closer to a calibrated argument between three voices: the slow red burn of Erjingtiao, the cold electrical buzz of huajiao on the lip and tongue, and the fermented umami of the doubanjiang underneath, holding the other two in place. None of the three is the point. The point is the tension between them, and the tension shifts depending on which voice is permitted to speak loudest in a given dish.

On the second morning, he walked us through the chuanyu canon, the twenty-three named flavour profiles that classical Sichuan cookery recognises. He wrote them on a sheet of butcher paper taped to the kitchen wall, in two columns. Yuxiang, fish-fragrant, built from pickled chilli, ginger, garlic, vinegar and sugar, with no fish in it at all. Guaiwei, strange-flavour, a cold sauce that holds sesame paste, soy, vinegar, sugar, chilli oil and huajiao in uneasy balance. Hongyou, red-oil. Jiaoma, scorched-numb. Suanla, sour-spicy. Tangcu, sweet-sour. Mala was only one entry on the list, and not the most demanding.

The household versions of these flavours, he said, are different from the restaurant versions. A restaurant mala is loud because it needs to register across a noisy room and a single visit. A household mala is quieter, because it will be eaten by the same people three or four times a week, and a loud dish wears out a family quickly. He cooked us both, one after the other, using the same chilli and the same huajiao, adjusting only the proportions and the order in which things entered the wok. The restaurant version was thrilling for two bites. The household version was the one we wanted to keep eating.

We spent an afternoon at his supplier's compound in Pixian, an hour west of the city, where the doubanjiang is made. The yard held perhaps two hundred earthen jars, each about waist-high, lidded with woven bamboo and weighted with stones. The paste inside is turned by hand twice a day in summer, once a day in winter, and left open to the sun whenever the sky permits. The youngest jars were a bright brick red. The three-year jars, the ones bound for Master Liu's kitchen, had darkened to the colour of wet bark and smelled of dried fruit and old wood. The woman who turned them, Auntie Chen, has done the work for thirty-one years and can tell a jar's age by smell with her eyes closed.

She told us, without prompting, that the craft is changing. Younger producers in the county have begun fermenting in stainless tanks with temperature control, which finishes a batch in eight months instead of three years, and the result is acceptable for export and for the chain restaurants in the eastern cities. The earthen-jar producers are fewer each year. She does not think the craft will vanish, but she thinks it will become rarer and more expensive, and that the people who cook with the long-fermented paste will increasingly be older home cooks, professional chefs working at a certain altitude, and visitors who have been told, by someone, that the difference is audible in the finished dish.

Back in the kitchen on the third day, Master Liu asked us to make a single bowl of mapo doufu from his notes, with his ingredients, while he sat at the small table by the window and drank tea. He corrected us four times. The oil was too hot when the doubanjiang went in, and the paste scorched at the edges. The huajiao was added too early and lost its top notes to the heat. The doufu was stirred too vigorously and broke into curds. The scallion greens went on while the dish was still on the flame, instead of after. Each correction was offered without irritation, the way one might point out a missed beat in a piece of music.

We ate the bowl anyway, standing at the counter, and it was good, and it was also clearly not what it could have been. He wrote the date and our names in the notebook, with a short line in characters we could not read, and closed it. Outside, the courtyard was filling with the particular grey light Chengdu has in the late afternoon, soft and slightly damp, the kind that makes the bamboo in the corner look almost black. He poured another cup of tea, and asked, again, whether we had eaten enough.