Common Talk Weeklyshuang yu zhou kan
issue date

Red cayenne pepper
November 19, 2003
By Filar
Picture by Zhu Lijun

One day, I was having a dinner with a musician from the US. We chose a Chinese restaurant where the chef was good at cooking Sichuan food. We ordered a lot of spicy dishes. Most of them were appreciated until a dish called spicy chicken pieces（辣子鸡丁） came to our table.

The musician had been to China several times before so he knew much about Chinese customs, culture and even some Chinese table manners. As he knew, many kinds of Chinese food are cooked with meat and vegetables together. When Chinese people start to eat, they always begin with the vegetables so as to be polite, as a way to show our modesty.

This one must be delicious! The musician first took his chopsticks to the hot peppers. Wow! HOT! The peppers were so hot that tears quickly came to his eyes. But to be polite, he still held on-finishing the peppers. I was very surprised! He exclaimed: "Too hot! Too hot! Give me water!"

I immediately learned what he had eaten and quickly helped him to "put out the fire". I couldn’t help but laugh. I told him, the red dry hot peppers are not for eating. We just eat the chicken!

So in the Chinese mind, the green cayenne pepper is a kind of vegetable. But the red ones are often not. If the red cayenne peppers are dried and fried, they are a type of condiment-used for flavor only, not for eating!