At the Cui family's chili banquet, Li Dongyang and Fei Hong, two guests from provinces that love eating spicy food, were very satisfied with the meal. Some of them wrote poems and some wrote essays when they returned home, praising chili as a delicacy with a unique color and fragrance like peanuts, which is good with rice or wine.
The poem spread all over the capital overnight, faster than Tang Bohu's On the Painting of Cui Meiren. Even the palace people copied Li Dongyang's new poem. Emperor Hongzhi remembered that the Italians had offered several pots of peppers as tribute, which seemed to be kept in the greenhouse, so he ordered the eunuchs to go to Cui's house to ask for the recipe and pick some peppers to taste.
September and October are the months when peppers are full of fruits. The palace kept those pots of red peppers as potted plants, but unlike Ryan Cui, he was reluctant to eat them in order to save the seeds, and he could pick a full sieve of peppers at will. Ryan Cui was also not like those officials who valued private dishes and refused to tell the palace when they asked. He was very happy to tell the method of using peanut oil to fry dried peppers instead of lime pickled dogwood oil to mix vegetables, and told the eunuchs that these small peppers should be pickled and eaten.
He didn't know how it was done, but he could say it boldly, because no other time traveler could come out to refute it.
The eunuch returned to the palace satisfied, and gave the secret recipe to the imperial kitchen, asking them to fry chili oil and pickle small chili peppers. She also said a few good words about Ryan Cui in front of the emperor.
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