Ma-La Steamed Poussin with Roasted Szechwan Pepper-Salt

Here is a perfectly steamed dish of poultry drizzled with a freshly infused oil. It is an exceedingly simple and lovely way to cook a baby chicken—or, for that matter, a larger chicken or capon, as long as the cooking time is extended accordingly. It is also just the type of thing to plan when your taste buds are feeling abused from too much this or that, or when the person coming to dinner has a simple refinement. The taste is what the redoubtable M.F.K. Fisher calls “mysteriously fragile.