Starve a Fever, Feed a Cold: Chicken Soup in China

No matter where you live on earth, catching a cold is no fun! A runny nose, the sniffles, coughing, those sore aches and pains, weakness — there is just nothing good about being sick. So what sort of medicine do you take? We Westerners tend to ingest chemicals that effectively and immediately resolve the symptoms of a cold, and hey, I am fine with that. Ibuprofen makes me feel better in about 20 minutes, and who wouldn’t want that? Here in China, however, Western medicine still has a long way to go before it is no longer viewed with skepticism and avoided. Why is that?

Hotpot Weather in the Spring City!

Chilly weather means Christmas is approaching, and hot food.

In my native Louisiana, when the weather begins to turn get cold, people start to say that it’s gumbo weather. Gumbo is the perfect warm, spicy, nourishing stew for the cold. Well in China, gumbo weather means hotpot weather! Hotpot is a creation of Sichuan province, a province known for its excruciatingly spicy food and love of meat. Hotpot is also popular in Mongolia, where it is even more meat-heavy than in Sichuan. So when the weather in Kunming turned cold this week, I knew that it was time for a hotpot night.

Make It Hurt So Good: The Joy of Chili Peppers

Ah, spicy garlic potatoes, just waiting to burn your tongue.

Let’s be honest: there is a fine line between pleasure and pain. Take for example a good massage. If the masseur or masseuse is really enthusiastic, he or she can really dig into the deep muscle tissue. It can hurt, but it also feels so good. Maybe that is why some people are into BDSM for sexual purposes. Proponents of that sort of arousal will swear that pain can cause pleasure. Athletes talk about the runner’s high, when the pain of extended exercise becomes pleasurable and ecstatic. Well, we foodies have a similar phenomenon: spicy food!

There are different types of foods that trigger the heat response in the human body. But most chiliheads like me would agree that nothing is quite so painfully delicious as the chili pepper in all of its forms and varieties. All chili peppers contain capsaicin oil, which is the ingredient that makes food spicy and hot. The chemicals in the oil actually confuse your nerve endings into believing that you are being burned with fire, and your body reacts in the same way. This means that while you experience a burning pain, your brain also releases endorphins — powerful hormonal chemicals that produce a pleasure response in the body. Some scientists believe that endorphins are released to mitigate the misery of pain after it reaches a certain point. In any case, there is no doubt that food with capsaicin oil produces both pain and pleasure, as well as highlighting the other flavors in a dish.

The heat factor of chili peppers is measured in Scoville units, which measure the amount of capsaicin in a pepper. A relatively mild poblana pepper rates at about 1,000 – 2,500 Scoville units. A decent jalapeño pepper rates at about 5,000 units. The units rise as the peppers get hotter, all the way up to a Bhut Jolokia pepper at 1,000,000 units, and the current record-holder of the hottest pepper in the world, the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T pepper at a whopping 1,463,700 units. The graph below illustrates the Scoville scale.

The Trinidad Scorpion Butch T chili pepper: the world’s hottest chili pepper.

So why are we discussing the heat of chili peppers on a blog dedicated to food as the ultimate expression of human love? Well, human love, like the Scoville scale, has a range of heat. Teenage puppy love is one thing, but cannot compare to adult romantic love. But that pales beside the intense spiritual love of a couple who have been together 50 years. And of course sexual passion is like heat. It adds a painful but pleasurable element to love, just as chili peppers add pain and pleasure to food.

Ouch, ouch, and ouch! Those are some hot chili peppers!

The spicy garlic potatoes I bought tonight from a street vendor are incredibly hot. Large cut pieces of bright, fresh, red chili peppers are everywhere. As I place a piece of potato in my mouth, the pungent garlic and the light essence of vinegar are suddenly attacked by the intense pain of the chili peppers. I can barely take it! My eyes are watering and I can barely breathe. Then, over several minutes, as the intense pain slightly subsides, the endorphins are released, and my body is flooded with calm pleasure. What was heat in my mouth is now warm comfort. My eyes close slightly, and I smile. Have I discovered the elusive chiligasm?