What is the difference between Cantonese and Szechwan cooking?

Answer 1

The dialect.

Answer 2

I'm a Cantonese and I can spend hours to write long long answer your question but I prefer not to bore you too much. In short, I found the introductions of Chinese food in wikipedia.

Cantonese cuisine originates from Guangdong Province in southern China, or more precisely, the area around Canton (Guangzhou). Of the various regional styles of Chinese cuisine, Cantonese is the best-known outside China. A "Chinese restaurant" in a Western country will usually serve mostly Cantonese food, or an adaptation thereof. The prominence of Cantonese cuisine outside China is likely due to the disproportionate early emigration from this region, as well as the relative accessibility of some Cantonese dishes to foreign palates. Cantonese dishes rarely use "hot" spices like chilli, unlike, for instance, Szechuan cuisine.

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*Szechuan cuisine, is a style of Chinese cuisine originating in the Sichuan Province of southern China which has an international reputation for being hot and numbing pepper, because of the commmon ingredient Sichuan peppercorn . Although the region Sichuan is now romanized as Sichuan, the cuisine is still spelled Szechuan in the West [citationﾊneeded]. The four styles are separated by location: Chengdu, Chongqing, the Greater River (Yangtze), and the Lesser River (Jialing).

The common ingredient in Szechuan cuisine is Sichuan mala, or "numbing pepper" is an indigenous plant that produces a fragrant, numbing, almost citrusy spice. Also common are ginger and spicy herbs. This emphasis on spice may derive from the region's warm, humid climate, where people need a good sweat and necessitates sophisticated food-preservation techniques which include pickling, salting, drying and smoking. Broad bean chili paste is also a staple seasoning in Sichuan cuisine.

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