Spice Nirvana - Growing a Sichuan Pepper Plant

Even up against some stiff competition it was probably the oddest dinner of my time in Shanghai: eighteen dishes, three bottles of wine (personal consumption, not shared), fifty red-faced locals sweating and sneezing and generally looking like invalids from a TB ward, and a gaggle of agitated waitresses shouting over the grubby, bronchial din. It is notoriously difficult to describe the cause of this carnage. Some say it’s like a nine volt battery on your tongue, others that it tastes of frozen spoons; people have likened it to a colour (bright silver), a sound (‘shrieking falsetto’), a medical emergency (like having a heart attack) - even a kind of semi-religious experience.

Mentioning it to anybody who’s tried it ‘blind’, without any prior knowledge of its effects, tends to elicit the wild eyed, clammy-handed panic of someone reliving a half-suppressed trauma. On the other hand its disciples (I count myself among the converted) generally display a level of slavering enthusiasm for the stuff you’d happily cross a busy street to avoid.

The Chinese know it as hua jiao, botanists as the Zanthoxylum genus. To Westerners with a passing knowledge of mainland Chinese food it’s the infamous Sichuan pepper, key ingredient in one of the fieriest cuisines on earth - that of the southwestern province of Sichuan. The Chinese distinguish between two types of spiciness – ‘la’ which refers to your bird’s eye chilies, vindaloos and Tabasco-style sauces, and ‘ma’, a strange, numbing sensation that affects the mouth, tongue, lips and, given enough time and effort, the whole body. Only from the seed pods of three or four types of Zanthoxylum shrub do you get the ‘ma’, of which the Zanthoxylum Simulans (the species native to Sichuan) is the fieriest.

In a typical Sichuanese meal the effect of ‘ma’ is cumulative, starting with a mild tingling in the gums and ending with the not unpleasant sense that all your blood vessels are surfing a giant wave of static electricity. Essentially you are paying to be poisoned, but in a good way, and one of the pleasures of a great Sichuan restaurant, like any great meal, is the feeling that you are part of a carefully orchestrated performance. Not a symphony as such; more the sensory overload of a three day tribal initiation ceremony.

The ‘ma’ effects of Sichuan pepper start diminishing the moment you harvest the pods, but the only version readily available over here is a dried and bottled Sichuan spice mix – good, but lacking the visceral hit of the real thing. I very nearly wept for joy then, when I read this article in the Guardian. Apparently Zanthoxylum Simulans, hardy shrub that it is, can be grown quite easily in the UK, needing no more than a decent bit of sunlight and a well-drained spot in the garden. Hooray! And given that any bird dim enough to eat the seeds will probably go into neurological meltdown, spending the rest of its days rocking back and forth on a branch and dribbling over the grandchildren, I doubt I’m going to need a fruit and vegetable cage to keep this bad boy safe. I’m ordering my plant this week, so I’ll let you know how things go over the the course of the season.