Emotional Terroir and the Inspiration For Our Szechuan Chicken Dinner
When you have someone cook for you, it can be nice, but it can also just be routine. Your body needs fuel, so you go somewhere and get something to eat. Sometimes that fuel is a hurriedly eaten cheeseburger in your car during your lunch break from work. It happens to all of us, and there’s nothing wrong with it per se. But, I personally see it as an example of a meal completely lacking in emotional terroir.
If you’re interested in how setting or emotion can improve the food that you eat, you could try hunting down some ingredients and bringing them to a chef who is willing to prepare them for you. Suddenly there starts to be a personal connection to the meal and the food that you’re eating. You’re attached to something that went in to it… and boom! it becomes special to you, just like that. So if you then gather food to cook with and make the meal yourself, you’re building on that connection. Not only do you have a relationship with the ingredients, but now you get to prepare them specifically to your personal preferences. You can put love and care into it.
Next you can try adding a close companion to the mix. An additional person means you don’t have to gather the ingredients alone and there’s company, more conversations and less work! Now you can gather more ingredients. You have more perspectives and knowledge going into finding or foraging the best of the best. You get to share the cooking experience with each other and learn the other person’s techniques, or flavor combinations that they enjoy. After all that you get to sit down to a lovely meal and share the beautiful alchemy you worked on together. The joy of making a meal with another person, getting to know them more in the process, and then sharing the fruit of your labor is a wonderful experience that can elevate a simple food to the point where it becomes an unforgettable memory.
Emotional terroir is what made eating at Mission Chinese in San Francisco such a special experience for our group. Our field trip in California was in its second week and we’d spent all day hoofing it around town when we came to our final destination. At Mission Chinese we got to sit down, relax, and eat amazing Americanized Sichuan food together. The four of us, joined by two of our professors Steve, Abir, and a few of our classmates all settled into a large rectangular table at the center of the restaurant. It was a bit hard to hear everyone in the packed restaurant but there were smiles all around, even at other people’s tables. It seemed like everyone was happy in there. After I tasted the food I knew why. We had started with hot tea made with tea bags gifted to us by Red Blossom Tea Company, a stop we had made earlier that day. Then we ordered. kung pao pastrami, tiger salad, matcha green tea noodles, pickled cabbage and cucumber with peanuts, chongqing Sichuan chicken wings, Mongolian long beans, Singapore style fried rice, thrice cooked bacon and rice cakes, mapo tofu, and a few Tsing Tao beers to cool the flames.
To be completely honest, nothing we ordered was particularly incredible or earth shatteringly good but certainly nothing was bad either. I enjoyed the tiger salad, the thrice cooked rice cakes had a fun texture, and the kung pao pastrami was a tasty spin. The food was great it just wasn’t terribly memorable in and of itself. The element that escalated the meal to something extraordinary was being able to relax and eat a tasty meal after a long day with people we’d grown close to in the previous days of our field trip. While we were eating it, I felt as if everyone’s enjoyment was being amplified by each other group member’s individual delight.
Good food, a relaxing setting, and wonderful people converged to make something great. The Sichuan peppercorn fried chicken wings were definitely a key element of our experience though. I think for at least a few of us it was our first time experiencing the peculiar spiciness of Sichuan peppercorns. They were really just well done chicken wings, but watching the plate going around and seeing the odd sensation of its tingly numb burn hitting each person in turn, added to our fun. So, the chicken is what stood out in our minds and it became the inspiration for our meal. Two weeks later, the goal was to try to conjure up some of the same feelings and emotional terroir we’d experienced during our dinner at Mission Chinese.
-Lydia Hammond February 2016
