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Cultivating the spicy taste of back home
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FARMER Lin Furong is rejoicing over this summer’s bumper crop of red chili peppers.
“The pepper plants are not ideal for Shanghai’s climate, but they remind me of my hometown,” the Sichuan Province native explained.
Twelve years ago, Lin, her husband and their children were relocated to Songjiang’s Xinyao Village in Shihudang Town to make way for the massive Three Gorges Dam Project. Lin was one of the more than 1.2 million people displaced by the project.
After more than a decade, the family has settled new roots in Songjiang, but they do miss hometown traditions.
“We Sichuan people love spicy food, and we can’t live without red peppers,” Lin said, with a big smile.
When the family first settled here, Lin quickly planted several pepper plants in the courtyard around her home.
Today the plants are more than 10 meters high. At harvest time, Lin “beats” the plants with a long stick to dislodge the peppers, or picks the fruit from a ladder.
At that stage, the peppers are green but eventually turn red. The capsaicin in the peppers make the fruit pungent and can cause blistering to the skin. Lin usually wears a mask when picking the fruit.
“If I don’t,” she said, “my eyes would water.”
Chilies are an integral part of Sichuan cuisine. They can numb the tongue of those not accustomed to the extreme spiciness.
Lin harvests all the pepper within two weeks, then hangs them out to dry.
In 2004, when her family first came to the village, she also brought along other Sichuan-grown plants, such as plum and walnut saplings, but the pepper plants have survived the best.
This year, she reckons her pepper harvest will total about 5 kilograms.
“I’m going to plant more next year,” she said.
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