Japanese-style twice-cooked pork Period BOrigin theory BVerified

In Japan, hui guo rou usually calls to mind a plate of thin-sliced pork and cabbage tossed quickly in a sweet-savoury miso sauce. That picture is quite unlike the original from Sichuan.

The Sichuan hui guo rou starts with a block of skin-on pork, first boiled or steamed, then thinly sliced and stir-fried hot with garlic sprouts and peppers in doubanjiang and tianmianjiang. Because the already-cooked meat is returned to the wok, the dish is called hui guo, 'back to the pot'. It is a fiery, rich dish that takes the trouble of cooking twice.

The Japanese version reworks that method substantially. First, the garlic sprouts, hard to find in Japan at the time, were replaced with familiar cabbage. Cabbage had spread in Japanese cultivation from the Meiji era and become a vegetable any household could use. Second, in place of tianmianjiang, Aichi's hatcho miso was combined with soy sauce for sweetness and depth. This is what gives the Japanese version its sweet flavour. Third, the two-step cooking of boiling a block of pork before frying was dropped in favour of simply stir-frying thin-sliced pork.

So the fiery original was remade into a sweet stir-fry to suit the ingredients and steps at hand in a Japanese kitchen. It spread through postwar Chinese restaurants and homes, and once food makers put premixed sauces on the market, the sweet Japanese hui guo rou took firm hold as home cooking. Sharing a name yet differing in taste and in its lead ingredients, the Sichuan and the Japanese dishes stand side by side as separate dishes.

Trace when and where Japan's sweet hui guo rou came from, and you arrive at one chef: Chen Kenmin, born in Sichuan province.

Chen came to Japan after the war and is known as the man who bridged Sichuan cooking to the Japanese table. From 1966 he appeared on NHK's Kyo no Ryori (Today's Cooking), introducing Sichuan dishes, mapo tofu, dan dan noodles and hui guo rou among them, in versions for Japanese viewers. In 1967 the show presented hui guo rou as 'pork and cabbage stir-fried with miso', and that became the major turning point for its spread in Japan.

What matters here is that this broadcast was the first appearance of the Japanese hui guo rou in the record, not the origin of the dish itself. Chen did not invent it from nothing; he adapted the long-standing Sichuan original to the ingredients and seasonings available in the Japan of his day. He swapped hard-to-find garlic sprouts for cabbage, tianmianjiang for hatcho miso and soy sauce, and dropped the two-step cooking. Chinese-cuisine trade media, encyclopedias and Chen's own writing, including his memoir Sasurai no Mabo Dofu, agree on this account.

The Sichuan hui guo rou and the Japanese one are separate dishes under one name. The Sichuan type, built on the heat of chili and doubanjiang, is a dish of the Qing era and after, and it carries on as such in Sichuan. The Japanese version took that Sichuan type as its starting point and became independent as a sweet stir-fry localized in postwar Japan. Keeping the two apart, and seeing each as its own plate, brings into view how a single dish name crossed the sea and was remade.