Posterous theme by Cory Watilo

Filed under: Chinese food

Sinfully Delicious: The Story of Dongpo Pork

This post was from a mail newsletter. It hasn't been updated on their website, which I think later will appear here. 
[...]According to history, Su Dongpo was once the Mayor of Hangzhou City. He led people to build dams to prevent the beautiful West Lake from being polluted by algae. The local people showed their appreciation by sending a pig to his home. He asked his servants to follow his recipe to cook the pork and sent the cooked pork to the people working on the project. Since then, Dongpo Pork has become a famous dish of Hangzhou.
Su Dongpo wrote a poem called “Eating Pork”:
Huangzhou has good pork,
The price is as cheap as dirt
The rich don’t want to eat it
The poor don't know how to cook it
Cook slowly
With a little water
When the time comes, the pork will become delicious
A bowl of pork of every morning,
will satisfy a man enough to forget all cares.

This poem did not tell us detailed cooking process and ingredients, but “cook slowly with a little water” already told us how we should control heat, cooking time, and moisture.
P.S Update:
My friend sent me the below. 
東坡性喜嗜豬，在黃岡時嘗戲作《食豬肉詩》云：
「黃州好豬肉，價錢如糞土；富者不肯吃，貧者不解煮。慢著火，少著水，火候足時它自美。每日起來打兩碗，飽得自家君莫管。」
http://cls.hs.yzu.edu.tw/su_shih/su_people/su_ebook/yellow_remember1.htm

iPhone 090/365 - Cantonese Fried Rice Topped with Belly Pork

The photo was taken in the dark, so don't make any judgment from the photo. It doesn't tell you any truth.

I had a fried rice yesterday night. Chef gave me some leftover of belly pork to top on the fried rice. With the gravy and veggie, it added so much taste to the fried rice.

After starting this 365 project, I have done quite some research on the dishes I have made and ate. As I live with mostly Japanese language nowadays, many of the terms I know are alien in English to me. Even with that, I still find lots of things I didn't know, and Chinese dishes that the Japanese have seem very different, if not quite, from the original Chinese cuisine. The vector of difference I found it between Chinese and Japanese is so much bigger than, for instance the mainland Chinese Chinese and Malaysian Chinese. South Asian could be categorized as one here though.

There is something about the cultural filtering mechanism by the Japanese. With the sea across the ocean, anything that came over from mainland would be purified and culturally baptized according to this far east island belief.

For example, eunuch system in China was omitted when other authority systems came to Japan. This related to the slaughter for praying in Chinese culture but when it arrived in Japan, there wasn't any trace left in regards to slaughter.

I am jumping into some big topics again.

Anyway, the belly pork is called kakuni in Japanese, came into Japanese dining table via Okinawa; rafutei, belly pork stewed in awamori, Japanese soy sauce, and miso. But, it was from Taiwan, Tong Poh pork, apparently.

Long story to cut short, the fried rice with belly pork was yummy. :)

Image_1