Andrew Leonard cooked up an incredibly feast for a small party over the weekend, as is his wont. One of the things he cooked was Szechuan duck, from a recipe in the still-amazing (and sadly out of print) “Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook.” One of the things that made the duck extraordinary was a marinade and stuffing of Sichuan peppercorns.
I wanted to know more about this ingredient, which I’d only used a couple of times in the distant past. The Web had all the answers, and more. No imaginable encyclopedia could ever provide such depth of detail. And instantly!
People sometimes get this spice confused with your basic red-hot chile pepper, since that pepper is so widely used in Sichuan cooking; but this is something different, a dried-up brown thing about the size of a matchhead that has a unique, almost numbing impact on the palate. For reasons I was dimly aware of — Andrew’s explanation was to blurt out something like “citrus infestation vector!” — these peppercorns are now illegal to import into the U.S. Which is really too bad. But at least I can read about every chemical compound they contain…