San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Repertoire
A Sichuan recipe to spice up Valentine’s Day.
My wife and I have been married for 17 years and have known one another for more than half our lives. I would say that prepandemic we knew one another very well, but now, after nearly a year together, no breaks, there aren’t any mysteries. I know, for example, what she has for every meal, because I am the one who prepares it; she has the grace to eat whatever it is I’ve made without complaint.
We both miss going to restaurants a lot. I miss eating food cooked by someone else, and she probably misses being relieved of dish duty. The other day I was dreaming of dan dan noodles, thinking of all the orders I’ve consumed in my life. I’ve had these noodles more times than I can count, always prepared by someone else, in restaurants in New York and San Francisco and other parts of the country, sometimes from takeout containers stained orange, but I’ve never prepared them myself.
I miss those noodles, and all the places I ate them. And while there’s not much I can do about the latter, the former is in my hands: I made the noodles.
If you have not had dan dan, here’s what to expect: wheat noodles with a very complex, spicy sauce that contains chiles in two ways (oil and pepper flakes) and the numbing thrum of Sichuan peppercorns, which contribute the essential mala sensation, a defining feature of Sichuanese cooking. The heat is balanced by the addition of peanut butter (or, usually, sesame paste), the flavor amped up by ginger and garlic and black vinegar.
The versions I like best have a bit of ground pork and some pickled mustard greens, a foil for the noodles’ richness. The versions I like best wake up your taste buds, cause your nose to run, make you crave another serving. The recipe is not difficult, and if you are looking to literally (and figuratively) spice up a February night — dare I say a Valentine’s night? — in pandemic times, they are just the thing to make.
The first time I made the recipe at home some weeks back, basing my recipe on memories of restaurant meals past and a survey of Chinese cookbooks I own, I mounded a pile of the noodles in a bowl, spooned on some sauce and ground pork, and set the dish in front of my wife. She lifted them to her mouth with chopsticks, eyes going wide. “What are these?’ she asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever had them before.”
I thought of all the bowlfuls I’d scarfed down in the two decades we’ve known one another; somehow she’d never been with me when I ate them. You think you know someone, but after all this time, there are still mysteries and surprises, the spice that keeps us coming back for more.