On Mon, 01 Mar 2004 22:09:04 -0600, Steve Wertz
<
[email protected]> wrote:
>Read the recent article in the NY Times:
>
>
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/04/dining/04SICH.html
Looks like they archived it and charge $3 for it now. Those bastards.
Here's the article in it's entirety, just out of spite.
By Denise Landis
Fire is a not unfamiliar sensation in food. Cuisines all over the world get a zap from chili peppers
in dozens of guises. But there's nothing like the numbing sparkle that the food of Sichuan gets from
the Sichuan peppercorn huajiao, as it is called there.
"You can" t cook Sichuan food without huajiao,'' said **** Dinggeng, the chef at Grand Sichuan
International on Second Avenue in New York. "You can" t get that special ma la flavor,'' he said of
the peppercorns' numbing (ma) and burning (la) effects.
But will the tingle be around for much longer?
Since 1968, the federal government has banned the import of Sichuan peppercorns, which are the dried
berries of the prickly ash shrub. The Agriculture Department did not really enforce the ban until
two years ago, and its effort is expected to dry up supplies soon. Or maybe not.
Some chefs and retailers say that they are unable to find the peppercorns, which are also an
ingredient of five-spice powder, a common Chinese seasoning. Others say they are selling what was
stockpiled before the enforcement effort began.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, some Chinese stores are selling them surreptitiously, and some
Manhattan shops carry them in unlabeled bags.
In 1968, the Agriculture Department prohibited the import of all plants and products of the citrus
family, of which the Sichuan peppercorn is a member, because they could carry a canker that destroys
citrus trees. The ban was not strictly enforced before a revision of the department's manual for
field inspectors two years ago, after the canker had begun to devastate citrus crops in Florida. The
revision specified that the ban applied to Sichuan peppercorns (Zanthoxylum simulans) and the Sansho
peppercorns (Zanthoxylum piperitum) used in Japanese cooking.
The canker is caused by bacteria that are harmless to humans but highly contagious among members of
the citrus family. It is spread by physical contact. There is no known chemical treatment for the
disease, and both infected trees and those nearby must be destroyed.
But while it is known that the prickly ash shrub, which grows in China, Japan and North Korea,
carries the canker, department officials could not point to any scientific study or research that
showed that the dried peppercorns carried it.
"Unfortunately, the popular Sichuan peppercorn is banned from import into the United States due to
its classification in the citrus family," ' Dore Mobley, a spokeswoman for the department's Animal
and Plant Health Inspection Service, said in a statement. When asked whether there had ever been a
case of peppercorns contaminating citrus trees since the ban was imposed in 1968, Mobley did not
point to any.
"Citrus canker poses a significant threat to not only citrus in Florida, but citrus in California,
Texas and Arizona as well," ' she said in the statement. "Therefore an across-the-board ban on
citrus from specific countries known to have the disease is the cornerstone of our efforts to
protect U.S. agriculture." '
There is currently no effective treatment including irradiation that would allow peppercorns to be
imported. The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service is currently working on a treatment to kill
the canker. So far, that requires heating the peppercorns, which changes their quality and
character.
The peppercorns seem more readily available in the East than in the rest of the country, but baffled
customers everywhere are looking and not finding them. Because peppercorns have a shelf life of
several years and the ban has been enforced for about a year and a half, the shortage of peppercorns
is only now being felt. While some prices have gone up as high as $25 a pound, the peppercorns were
selling for $4 a pound in New Hampshire this week.
Bob Pizza, the assistant manager of the Spice House, a small family-run business in Milwaukee, Wis.,
said that in the fall of 2002, an Agriculture Department inspector confiscated the store's supply of
the peppercorns, about four or five pounds.
But Mobley said the inspection service had only 130 inspectors dealing with smuggling and improper
importation, so not all stocks could be confiscated.
Finding the peppercorns can be challenging.
An owner of one of the largest Indian and Middle Eastern food stores in Manhattan, with an extensive
array of spices, said in a telephone interview that he could not get the peppercorns anymore. But a
visit to the store found them on the shelf. Clerks at one large grocery store in Chinatown said they
had none, but they were on the shelf in unlabeled bags.
When a New Jersey distributor was asked over the phone whether he sold Sichuan peppercorns, he said
he did. But when the reporter identified herself as a writer for The New York Times, he said he had
not had nor sold Sichuan peppercorns for many months and did not believe he would have them again.
A New England food distributor who had a fresh stock of Sichuan peppercorns said she had just gotten
it from an importer in New Jersey. But the importer said that couldn't be true because Agriculture
Department inspectors had confiscated his stock of the spice about a year ago.
In markets in the Chinatowns of the San Francisco Bay Area the peppercorns were hard to find, but
Sichuan peppercorn powder and oil were on the shelves.
When a Chinese-speaking reporter went to a large Chinese grocery in Oakland and asked for some, the
clerk pulled a bag of them from under the counter, saying she would not have sold any to an English-
speaking customer.
The peppercorns were on the shelves of a Chinese medicinal store in San Francisco.
"Well, if you want to buy from a wholesale market, they won" t sell it to you because you are a
stranger,'' a clerk at the store said. "Even here, I am not selling any to foreigners. I heard it
took a lot of trouble getting those peppers here." ' After the crackdown, he said, "people basically
took a lot of trouble transporting them to India and then Mexico and then into the U.S., but I won"
t tell you the name of the wholesale company.''
One wholesale company in the Bay Area is apparently continuing to supply regular customers with
the spice.
Eric Tucker, the chef at Millennium Restaurant in San Francisco, said he regularly uses Sichuan
peppercorns and never had trouble finding them in Chinatown.
But John Zhang, the owner of Grand Sichuan International, said the problem is real.
"We face the shortage of peppercorn and don" t know what to do,'' Zhang said in an e-mail message
from China, where he was traveling.
Martin Yan, the cookbook author and television personality, said it was unlikely that large Asian
food distributors would import the peppercorns.
"The peppercorns are inexpensive, and there is little to be gained in taking such a risk," ' he
said. "They are used in such small quantities that even a pound will last a long time." '
He said that small quantities of the peppercorns might be sent into the United States by being
hidden in personal mail.
Zhang said that some of the peppercorns now being sold are inferior varieties from southern China,
not Sichuan province.
Sichuan peppercorns are reddish brown, have a rough texture and often have tiny stems mixed in among
them. They are sold whole with bitter black seeds in the centers, or (as is generally preferred by
chefs) cracked open and seeded. They can be found in food markets in Asian communities and where
Chinese medicines are sold. They are sometimes incorrectly described as flower buds, probably
because a common name for them is flower pepper. Other names that are often used in Asian markets
are wild pepper and fagara.
They can be purchased overseas and in Canada, but anyone trying to bring them into the United States
could be fined $1,000 for having a prohibited, undeclared, concealed agricultural product.
Eddie Schoenfeld, a consultant with decades of experience in Chinese restaurants, said that Chinese
chefs would be unable to cook certain dishes without Sichuan peppercorns, but that they could still
create many popular recipes in the Sichuan style.
"It" s as if tarragon became unavailable to the French,'' Schoenfeld said. "They would still be able
to make bearnaise sauce. It wouldn" t be the same, but it would still be good.''
Zhang is not so sanguine.
"If there was not the Sichuan peppercorn any more," ' his e-mail message said, "the Sichuan cooking
would be definitely hurt." '
-sw
