Chilies and China: Brian Dott on how a New World import defined regional cuisines in China
Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 27 November 2020
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Sinica, we teamed up with Columbia University Press and the Columbia Global Centers to convene a conversation with Brian Dott, a professor of history and Middle Eastern studies at Whitman College and the author of The Chili Pepper in China: A Cultural Biography. Kaiser — who is something of a chili head himself — chats with Brian about how, when, and why the chili pepper came to China and became such a fixture of the cuisines of Sichuan, Hunan, Guizhou, and Yunnan.
7:19: Where chilies made landfall in mainland China
16:22: Chinese cuisine and cultural identity
25:48: Theories on how chilies proliferated throughout China
35:54: Chilies and medicinal applications
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Transcript
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| 0:48.9 | Music Welcome to this special live streaming recording of the Cynica podcast, a week of discussion of current affairs in China. |
| 1:04.8 | The Cynica podcast is produced in partnership with SubChina. |
| 1:07.8 | SubChina is the best way to keep on top of all the latest news from China through |
| 1:11.5 | our daily email newsletter, our website, our app, and our growing range of videos and podcasts. |
| 1:18.1 | It's a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. |
| 1:24.1 | I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you today from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Over the |
| 1:29.1 | last five months, like many of you, I've spent a lot more time than before in the kitchen. |
| 1:34.8 | There are basically three cuisines that I cook in regular rotation. Chinese and especially |
| 1:40.0 | Sichuan cuisine. Mexican, honoring my roots growing up in Tucson, Arizona, actually, and Indian, |
| 1:46.6 | which I just, I think, accounts for most of my weight gain. And all of them are tied together by |
| 1:52.0 | one ingredient in particular, and that, of course, is the chili pepper. I am an unapologetic |
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