Taylor Halliday has written a few articles on Sichuan Peppercorns and concludes in the following that the heat treatment, on peppercorns fresh from Sichuan province, don’t diminish the taste much. We are left to assume that low quality product or staleness from sitting shelves (perhaps exacerbated by the heat treatment) is why Sichuan peppercorns sucked in the US from 1968 to 2005, and in most cases still are awful.
The first Sichuan Peppercorns I tasted were purchased from Kan Man Food on Canal St. in NY in the late 90s. A worker denied they carried the product, but I found a dust covered package nonetheless, and chanced that “prickly ash” might be code for what I was looking for. I remember making a salt and Sichuan peppercorns powder, tossing it on a corn cob, and enjoying the numbing sensation across my lips and cheeks, in full denial of the rank acrid flavor.
I’ve read accounts of Sichuan food having a golden age in NY in the early 70s, as pre-revolution Sichuan chefs living in Taiwan availed themselves to the lifting of immigration restrictions a few years earlier, and introduced their spicy cuisine before it got dumbed down for the masses. Has anyone read accounts from back then of what the chefs thought about ingredient quality in the US? Or can anyone, perhaps @souperman, speak to their experience then and now?
