Ants Climbing a Tree

The name describes the dish: the threads of glass noodle are the bare twigs and the flecks of minced meat the ants. Its actual beginnings are unrecorded, and cooks who study the Sichuan table generally place it as a much later folk creation. A fond legend ties it to the dutiful Dou E of Guan Hanqing's Yuan-dynasty opera, said to have minced a scrap of meat over noodles that her dim-sighted mother-in-law took for ants; the attribution does not hold, since the Pixian chili-bean paste that defines the dish could not have existed in the Yuan — chilies only reached China in the Ming, centuries later.

Translucent noodles stained red-brown by the chili oil, slippery and springy with a gentle chew. The pork has been fried to a crisp-savoury crumb, the 'ants' caught on every strand. The flavour is salty and fragrant with the fermented depth of broad-bean paste, a warm chili heat behind it and, if Sichuan peppercorn went in, a soft numbing buzz. Above all it is dry-fragrant — the noodles have drunk the sauce rather than swimming in it — finished bright with raw scallion.

Glass noodles are nearly pure starch, so they are soaked, not boiled: in a pot they over-gelatinise into a mushy clump, but a soak in warm water only half-hydrates them — pliable yet still firm, the test being a strand a fingernail can just pinch through — leaving room to finish by absorbing the seasoned liquid in the pan. That is the engine of the dish, because the noodles have almost no flavour of their own; they are a sponge, which is why the sauce must be seasoned heavier than usual. The pork is dry-fried first to render its fat and brown it through the Maillard reaction, building the crisp-savoury aroma and a slick of pork fat to carry everything. Pixian chili-bean paste is then fried slowly over low heat to bloom its red oil — the fat-soluble red pigment and the fermented broad-bean umami both release into the oil, and low heat keeps it from scorching bitter. Finally a modest splash of stock is cooked off entirely into the noodles in the braise-and-reduce step, so they end glossy and fully seasoned rather than wet.