A narrative history of the most important spice in Chinese cuisine (and, let's admit, even among cuisines all over the world), The Chile Pepper in China traces the origins of the beloved - and sometimes feared - spice. Extensively researched and written, divided into interesting sections (with one chapter even dedicated to Mao, Chiles and identity), the book takes the reader on a culinary journey and informs on how the Chile pepper became intertwined with Chinese cuisine, so much so that most Chinese believe the spice is native to their country. As much as the book is packed with information and nuggets of historical anecdotes gleaned from ancient books and other hard to obtain resources, in the absence of an engaging narrative, it's also a laborious read. This is not a commentary on Dott's language, which is fluid and informative enough but the book nevertheless seems to suffer from mildly overwrought academic prose. Even so, it's a treasure in every bookshelf because it is unique in its nature.

I knew this would be more research and history than recipes and stories but thought I would have more interest in the subject than I ended up having. I believe this will appeal to those who like obscure facts and tidbits on a single topic...trivia buffs, perhaps. It was interesting to find out that the chile pepper came so late to China. Thank you for the opportunity to read and review. I may find I have time before the book is archived and will give it another go. If so, will come back and update my feedback.

If I look back about what tempted me to pick this title up was the randomness of the topic. The content stayed true to the title, this book is all about the documented rise and alteration of Chiles' use in China through centuries. It is not often that one finds access to a book on such an obscure topic, so I gave in and jumped in enthusiastically. After a false start or two, I finally worked my way through till the end.
The author talks of the different ways the Chiles are now blended into the Chinese lifestyle. The various things that they now symbolize were quite fascinating. The background of the narrative, which showed how the trade worked and people lived in the pre-1800 times, was also interesting. However, the flow was very much like a textbook, not conducive to continuous reading, which meant I took an inordinately long time to finish it all. I almost gave up a couple of times, but curiosity drove me on because I wanted to know more about how something so innocuous could hold so many different values in a civilization. Some of the things mentioned were known, while others unknown to me. I am not sure who the intended audience for this book was, but I am sure some people will find it easier to read than others.


I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

I don't normally read nonfiction but I do enjoy learning about different types of cuisines and cooking techniques and styles from around the world. As a history/anthropology nerd this book also appealed to me as I was interested in learning more about the history of the chili pepper in Chinese cuisine!
This book is definitely an academic book and I didn't feel as thought it was written for a more casual reader as it did take me some time to get through. Some of this was due to the structure and layout of the book and some of it really due to the delivery.
This is a very niche book and most likely won't appeal to a broad audience. I'd say skip if you are looking for a light read or recipes. If you like academic works and are interested in history/anthropology this is worth the time it takes to get through!

A very interesting book! The author made a very complete investigation to give us a work that at the same time that educates, also entertains. Who was going to say that the humble chile would have so much history, that even one of the most famous revolutionary leaders in the world would praise him so much and that songs and poems were composed in his name!
This is a book recommended for scholars who enjoy eating chile peppers and are interested in their relationship and influence on Chinese history.

Following the trend for history/biographies of specific foods and how they influence their region (or the world) “The Chile Pepper in China” aims to show readers the influence of this nonnative plant in all realms of Chinese life- from food and medicine to revolutionary culture. As a fan of many food ‘biographies’ I was looking forward to learning more about the chile pepper and its impact on Chinese culture. However, I found this book to be written more like a very scholarly college textbook than one aimed at a popular audience, and not necessarily a well done one at that. Heavy repetition and lots of scholarly talk about the author’s research meant that this book felt a lot longer than it was, and in my personal opinion, managed to use a lot of words to say very little. Not a book for the casual reader.

I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review

If you have ever been interested in how peppers came to be in China and Chinese cooking, this book is for you. I am not a huge fan of chili peppers but I have an interest in Chinese cooking and this book blew my mind. It's a combination of history and recipes. It is heavy on information, but in an easy to digest format. Foodies will really enjoy this and I can see this being a great christmas/birthday present for some foodies in my life.

The Chile Pepper in China is an academically rigorous and worthwhile cultural examination of the chile pepper's history and use in Chinese cuisine and culture. Written by Dr. Brian Dott, it's part of a series edited by Dr. Albert Sonnenfeld. Due out 12th May from Columbia University Press, it's 296 pages and will be available in hardcover and ebook formats.

According to the author, in his introduction, this book has two main focus questions: "How did chile peppers in China evolve from an obscure foreign plant to a ubiquitous and even “authentic” spice, vegetable, medicine, and symbol? And how did Chinese uses of chiles change Chinese culture?" I found the answers interesting and unexpected. The book is full of interesting cultural asides and unexpected quirky history.

The author is an academic and this is what I would call a layman accessible academic treatise of the chile pepper in all its incarnations as they intersect with Chinese culture and history. As an academic work, it is *full* of tables and statistics and maps and minutiae (in a good way). The author definitely "shows his work" in full. I loved poring over the notes from pharmacopeia published in the 16th century along with an exhaustive bibliography and full chapter notes and annotations (did I mention that this is an academic work?). The notes and references are likely worth the price of admission for anyone interested in the subject and there's obviously been a faint-inducing amount of time spent on research and resource gathering on the part of the author. There's an exhaustive glossary (including many of the Chinese hanzi) suited for western readers - no Chinese language proficiency is needed to read and enjoy the book.

I found the entire book quite interesting and fascinating. It is admittedly a niche book and will appeal to readers interested in cultural anthropology, but might not appeal to readers looking for recipes or an easy read. I found this one so interesting that I'm going back to try to acquire some earlier volumes in the series.

Five stars. This is well and deeply researched and interesting.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

It would be hard to imagine Chinese food without Chile peppers. Chilies were introduced to China in the 1570’s. Used in food, medicine, healing and culture. Fascinating book about Chile culture in China.

Ever wanted to read a textbook on the chile pepper in China?
Me either.
This had a wealth of information and some of it was highly interesting.
Especially how this became such a huge part of Chinese culture despite being an immigrate to China.
The delivery was DRY. One long lecture in book format and I struggled to keep my eyes open.
Very cool topic, I wish it had been delivered in a kids book...with lots of pictures.
Thanks to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for my DRC.

If you are interested in how global trade and the sense of local or national culture can coexist through a commodity, I think you should read this one!

Although the author does not have a very clear structure in this book which may take away from the red thread of the narrative, the subject is quite fascinating and with a good balance of facts and descriptions, an essential asset of a non-fiction book.

This book was offered for me to read by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

The Chile Pepper in China by Brian R. Dott is a non-fiction history of how chile peppers, a plant native to the Americas, became ubiquitous in China. Dott, an associate professor at Whitman College leads readers through the complicated and sometimes unclear history of how this spicy fruit came to hold such significance in Chinese cuisine, medicine, culture, and politics.

It is important to note that The Chile Pepper in China is an academic, non-fiction book. The book therefore spends as much time walking the reader through its methodology and sources as it does telling the chile pepper’s actual history. While much of those parts of the book are equally interesting, not all of it will feel germane to the casual reader. This is by no means a negative attribute of the book, especially since these walkthroughs are well-researched and well-explained. In fact, The Chile Pepper in China is a book that can be easily understood and enjoyed by casual readers, something not all academic non-fiction books can say.

For anybody with interests in learning about non-America cooking, medicine, or even language, The Chile Pepper in China is an excellent resource for learning about an array of Chinese practices. Dott explains how Chinese systems for classifying foods and medicines were intertwined with language in ways that are easily understood in the English language for an American not well acquainted with the concepts. I do wish that some of the explanations of chile peppers’ use as medicine were discussed in a modern context. There was ample discussion of how capsaicin, the chemical that makes chilis spicey, was used as preventatives and treatments for many types of illness. I was just left so curious about the ways Dott explained food and medicine as virtually one and the same that I found myself wanting to understand if its uses have evolved since the 1600s.

The way the book breaks down Chinese words and phrases is also really compelling. The book is very careful to make clear that China is not a singular culture and that in different groups and regions across time periods people have held different and sometimes contradictory beliefs. I enjoyed seeing how the word for and words used to describe chile peppers evolved and eventually landed on “the foreign pepper.”

Beyond being a well-researched history, The Chile Pepper in China does an excellent job demonstrating how cultural symbols, even when recognizable by an entire population like the chile pepper is, do not always hold the same symbolic meanings for everybody. The book’s latter chapters demonstrate this in both classic Chinese literature and in contemporary politics. For example, the chile represents the trope of the “spicy girl,” a somewhat aspirational and attractive quality of being bold, passionate, and firey. Meanwhile, the pepper has been used as a warning against that very inversion of traditional gender roles.In more recent times, chile peppers in China have come to be associated with revolution and even Mao himself.

I particularly appreciate The Chile Pepper in China as a reminder that culture is constantly evolving, its symbols are not uniformly interpreted, and its origins are rarely what our society wants us to believe. The positive, harmless foray into developing culturally can be applied to American cultural symbols just the same. Whether we are talking about popular films or controversial political symbols, The Chile Pepper in China is an excellent and interesting reminder that just because something is ubiquitous does not mean it’s universal. Culture is neither created in a vacuum nor suspended in the time of its inception.

The chile pepper was not native to China until one day, it was, and as Dott shows in The Chile Pepper in China, the fruit has meant different things to different people over the centuries and probably will continue to mean new things as time goes on. While I wish The Chile Pepper in China had even more examples of the spicy plant’s cultural importance in China rather than repeating the same information often, it is an excellent history and an even greater reminder of how culture is ever-changing and not everybody experiences culture the same as one another.

The Chile Pepper in China is available for pre-order and is available March 13th.

Rating: 8.5/10

THE CHILE PEPPER IN CHINA: A CULTURAL BIOGRAPHY by Brian R. Dott:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/28/2020]

THE CHILE PEPPER IN CHINA: A CULTURAL BIOGRAPHY by Brian R. Dott covers more than just the chile pepper as food, but let's start there.

The Chinese recognized five flavors: sour, sweet, bitter, salty, and pungent. Of particular interest to us Sichuan cuisine fans is Dott's brief discussion of the spices in the "pungent" group that chile peppers replaced in China, in particular, the Sichuan pepper (fagara). As he notes, "In addition to their flavor, the shells also have a numbing or anesthetic quality." Other foods in this group include onion, garlic, ginger, and cinnamon, as well as the relatively more recent anise, fennel, clove, and black pepper. (It also served as a substitute for salt as a flavoring, since the production and price of salt was controlled by the government.)

The problem for us Sichuan cuisine fans is that Dott's book is heavy on the academic and light on discussion of the actual food. Dott covers the mentions of chili peppers in books on medicine, in artworks, in government reports, in every possible aspect. One problem is that he seems to repeat himself a lot, at least to my un-academic reading. There seem to be multiple sections that talk at length about medicinal uses, for example. And there is a long section of footnotes and bibliography. (The main text ends on page 196 of a 296-page book.)

Maybe one needs to be a more serious student of the intersection of food and culture than I am to really appreciate this book. I cannot deny it is well-researched and well-written, but I was expecting something more like THE FORTUNE COOKIE CHRONICLES: ADVENTURES IN THE WORLD OF CHINESE FOOD by Jennifer 8. Lee. As long as you know what to expect, you can judge whether this is a book for you.

I received a digital copy of the book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.

This book is written like a graduate level research project that was published. It discusses the history of the chili pepper in China not only in food, but in medicine, culture, and other areas as well. I found parts of interesting and I learned a few things. I thought other parts dragged and I ended up skimming through them.

That said, I can still think of many people I know who would download this book, because they would, like me, find one or two chapters useful for research for their own projects, or in-depth analysis related to a specific hobby. Because of this aspect, I have already posted about this book to one of my Facebook groups where I know there will be a number of interested readers.

Brian Dott’s The Chile Pepper in China: A Cultural Biography, due out from Columbia University Press in May of 2020.

Although I have some hesitations about this book, and I’ll talk about them a bit at the end, I have to say that the book’s subject is far more fascinating that I was imagining. I saw that Dott’s book was coming out just a few weeks after having a great conversation with my husband about the Columbian Exchange—that is, the movement of flora and fauna, or disease, etc. between the new world and the old after colonization began in the Americas. Historians usually talk about the movement of foods like maize (or corn), tomatoes, squash, and potatoes. As I was writing a lecture for an online history class that I was planning to teach to international students, David asked me if the chili pepper was also part of the Columbian Exchange. I hesitated. Yes, I’d always thought of peppers in general as a food indigenous to the Americas. But that couldn’t be true, could it? Was it really possible that the various cuisines throughout East Asia and South Asia didn’t have access to chili peppers until the 16th century? Surely not.

Well, it didn’t take long to figure out he was right. And honestly I felt pretty stupid not to have been aware of the fact earlier. And then this book popped up, The Chile Pepper in China, and I found out I was not the only clueless person. In the introduction, the author points out that, as he writes, “Today chiles are so common in China that many Chinese assume they are native.” After he started his research for the book, he presented some of his thoughts to a group of Chinese historians, who were equally taken aback--“astounded,” as he says, “that chiles are not indigenous.”

Brian Dott starts out by suggesting that unlike many spices or foods that entered into global trade, chile peppers were likely to have been brought over from the Americas only because multiethnic crews aboard ships has packed dried chiles to season their food as they travelled aboard ships. Just a few leftover seeds were all that were needed to bring the plants to new lands. Unlike many items of trade, the chile pepper grew easily in a great variety of soils and temperature zones. And unlike even such foods as the native Szechuan pepper, the chile plants were small and easy to grown in individual gardens. This fact had the consequence that it could not be a money maker for anyone—so it was not embraced at the beginning by elites who sought to engage in financial pursuits. But it did spread widely within non-elite communities, both as a spice and as a vegetable.

Although chili did not automatically fit perfectly into the preexisting Chinese system of flavors, and of elements, it was inserted in a compelling way—and that allowed rapid integration of the chili into culture more broadly. Dott explains how it was embraced by some and not by others, and how it became such an essential part of many Chinese culinary traditions. But some of the most interesting parts of Dott’s book discuss not the culinary use of chiles but the degree to which hot peppers became integral to Chinese medicine, to common language, to artistic representations (including important literature), and to symbols of revolution—whether a revolution in gender ideology or a political/military revolution.

In short, the author of this book wants to know how the chile become so central to Chinese culture at large? One of the author’s main questions is how this foreign plant became not only ubiquitous in many regions of China but how it became seen as, or believed to be, indigenous, or at least authentic. Dott has a pretty fancy way of saying the same thing: “constructed authenticity does not necessarily correlate with [true] indigeneity.”

As I said, this is a fascinating topic and Dott pulls out some fascinating aspects of the topic by looking thoughtfully at some relatively unconventional sources. But the book suffers from significant repetition of ideas and some pretty weak organization, especially at the level of the chapter. But despite its limitations, this book is a fascinating look at how global trade and a sense of local or national culture can coexist. The author makes no claims for broader applicability of his work, but I think his analysis of the process of constructing authenticity might be useful in many other works of cultural history, or other cultural analysis.

"With a handful of chiles she can speak her mind."

How do we define what is authentic cuisine? This ambitious history of the chile in China is a must read for anyone interested in food history or Chinese culture. Imported from the Americas, the chile was incorporated and adopted into Chinese culture until it became an authentic taste and symbol of certain regions, types of women and the revolutionary spirit. You might wonder how much you could learn about China and her people by studying one food item. The Chile Pepper in China explores complex topics such as trade routes, traditional Chinese medicine, class, gender, regional culture, climate, social movements, religious rituals and politics in one enjoyable and occasionally humorous read.

The book draws on a wide range of sources, including international records of trade, local histories (difangzhi 地方志) and modern media. The chapter on how the chile pepper was introduced to China thankfully includes maps such as how the world looked in the sixteenth century, local provinces, import routes and where chile was mentioned in early texts. It was fascinating to read how chile became a food preservative and a local substitute for highly taxed and imported products such as salt or black pepper. As the chile was integrated into local cuisines, the chile began to be used alongside or in place of the native Sichuan pepper. It is difficult to read this book without becoming hungry.

Since the chile could easily be grown from seeds in kitchen gardens, it found popularity with the working classes and was considered a coral-like decorative garden plant among the elites. The vitamins and antifungal properties found in chiles were essential for those living in remote or mountainous areas or those who needed an affordable way to make a monotonous starchy diet more appealing. Chiles can be preserved through the winter and were excellent for stimulating an appetite and cheering up the appearance of a simple meal. The author addresses the popular myth that chiles are used to hide or disguise spoiled meat, which is often trotted out in discussions of Asian cooking. Cooks will enjoy the in depth analysis of the Chinese five flavours and the inclusion of clearly written historical recipes. Although I would not classify this as a cookbook, a few recipes were placed inside the relevant chapters. China has a long, rich history of regional cuisines and there is no shortage of Chinese cookbooks available these days, but this text is essential for understanding how and why these spicy regional differences emerged. It also explains why some regions prefer flavours such as pickled or smoky.

This history also examines the chile's role in traditional Chinese medicine and how it was used in the malarial areas of Guangdong and Guangxi. It must have taken the author a huge amount of effort to track down how chiles were being used by the lower classes, as much of the histories were written by elite officials who conformed to a set expectation for upper class behaviour. The culinary reluctance of the elites and their separation from the lower classes in their own community was well illustrated in the division between chile as a decorative garden plant and chile as an essential ingredient. Furthermore, in the late imperial period, the chile was considered to disrupt Buddhist and Daoist notions of having a clear mind. Again, the elites avoided the chile. One particularly fascinating chapter describes how military heroes from Hunan popularised the chile and by the early 1900s, dining at Sichuan restaurants became a mark of status in Shanghai. Migration, wars and revolution further made the chile an 'authentic' part of Chinese cuisine.

Artistic representations of the chile were carefully reviewed and illustrations were included in the text. The chile reveals itself in classics such as Dream of the Red Chamber and The Peony Pavilion, as well as woodblock prints, poetry, descriptions of gardens, pop music and government announcements. The journey of the chile across class hierarchies and across professions are well explained, even up to posters representing Xi Jinping's 'China Dream.' This humble kitchen garden plant went from obscurity to ubiquity.
As a Mandarin language learner, one of my favourite aspects of this book was that concepts were introduced in English, hanzi and pinyin. This made it incredibly easy to look for more information online, such as when I wanted to look up a Chinese song (辣妹子) about the hot blooded women who eat them. The text also outlines how the name of the chile differs across Chinese regions and why certain Chinese characters or radicals are used.

Those interested in representations of gender will enjoy reading how the chile represented fierce female passion in classic novels and learning about the archetype of the assertive, feisty and sexy "spicy girl." The chile pepper itself could represent male virility, numerous offspring or the fiery spirit of the revolutionary. Quotes from Mao Zedong include the phrase "without the chile peppers there would be no revolution."
I expected to read about the culinary and medical uses of the chile, but the thorough analysis of symbolism and aesthetics really set this book apart from other food histories. This book is packed with surprises about how the chile became part Chinese culture, history and identity.

An advance copy of this book was supplied by Columbia University Press for review.