If your experience of Sichuan cooking outside China has been a stir-fry drowned in red food colouring and tabasco, then you're in for a shock the first time you sit down to eat in Chengdu. Dominating the Southwestern China cooking school, the Sichuanese style is also one of the most subtle - after you grasp the principles behind the use of the far-from-subtle ingredients.

The most obvious ingredient here is chilli, with the food often arriving glistening under a layer of bright red chilli oil. Locals explain its use as a result of climate - chillis are warming in winter and cooling in summer and, according to Chinese medicine, dispel "wet" illnesses brought about by damp or humid conditions. Unfortunately for novices, they can also be the biggest hurdle to enjoying the food, as, even by Asian standards, the Sichuanese heap a phenomenal amount on any one dish. But chillis don't simply blast the tastebuds, they stimulate them as well, and, once conditioned, you'll find flavours much more complex than they might appear at the initial, eye-watering, mouthful.

Often present in the same dish, Sichuan cuisine's two most definitive tastes are the manifold flavour - a blend of hot, salty, sweet and sour - and aromatic heat ( mala), characterized by the use of spring onions and Sichuan pepper ( huajiao, or flower pepper), with its soapy perfume and gum-numbing side-effects. Typical dishes include hot and sour soup , tangerine chicken - cooked with the slivered, dried peel of local fruit - and mapo dofu , bean curd and minced pork swamped in a chilli sauce. Mapo dofu also illustrates another feature of Sichuan food, where the main ingredient becomes a simple vehicle for the sauce; other classic examples are fish-flavoured pork (whose "seafood" sauce is made from vinegar, soy sauce, sugar, ginger and sesame oil), and strange-flavoured chicken - cold chicken shreds served with a dressing of sesame paste, vinegar, chilli oil, Sichuan pepper, spring onion, ginger and garlic.

As in the rest of the country, texture also plays an important role in Sichuanese food, with the emphasis often on a chewy , dry effect, the result of prolonged cooking. While this may sound unappealing - some people find many Sichuanese dishes unpleasantly oily - with dishes such as dry-fried pork shreds , the effort of chewing seems to enhance the rich flavour of the meat.

Several dishes that originated in Sichuan otherwise have little in common with the above examples. For instance, double-cooked pork , where a plain piece of meat is boiled, sliced thinly and then stir-fried with green chillis, is a straightforward meal invented by salt-miners in eastern Sichuan. Other favourites include smoked duck - especially a version using camphor wood shavings - a chilli-free cold dish, aromatic, juicy and acrid; and crackling rice , where a meat soup is poured over a sizzling bed of deep-fried rice crusts.

Meals here are not always a gastronomic experience, however, and much of everyday food is similar to what you'd eat elsewhere in China, though often given a Sichuanese twist. Anywhere should be able to cook up gongbao pork , the local version of stir-fried pork and peanuts; spiced and oily dandan mien ("carry-pole" noodles, named after how street vendors used to carry them around); dumplings served with chilli and garlic relish; tiger-skin peppers , scorched then fried with salt; and spicy aubergine slices, battered and stuffed with mince. Perhaps the most striking adaptation to local taste is the hotpot ( huoguo), which, though found all over China in one form or another, has really been taken to heart by the Sichuanese. At its best eaten informally at street restaurants, hotpot here consists of skewers of meat, boiled eggs or vegetables, cooked by you at the table in a bubbling pot of chicken stock liberally laced with chillis and cardamom pods. You then season the cooked food in oil spiced with MSG, salt and chilli powder. The effect is powerful, and during a cold winter in Chengdu you may well find that hotpots fast become your favourite food.