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.

Ask when and where Japan's sweet hui guo rou came from, and the first name you hear is Chen Kenmin, a chef 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 many Sichuan dishes reworked for home cooks. Chinese-cuisine trade media write that in 1967 he presented hui guo rou on the show as 'pork and cabbage stir-fried with miso', and that this became the major turning point for its spread in Japan. No record from the time describing that broadcast has yet been found, however.

On paper, the Japanese form can be traced a year earlier. The August 1966 issue of the women's magazine Shufu no Tomo ran a feature on Chinese cooking that named Chen Kenmin as head cook of the Sichuan Hanten restaurant, and on the page for Sichuan Hanten in Azabu Roppongi it printed a 'hui guo rou pian'. Thin-sliced pork is stir-fried with cabbage, green pepper and green onion and seasoned with chili-bean paste and hatcho miso loosened with sugar; there is no step of boiling the meat first. The Japanese form, with cabbage and hatcho miso and thin-sliced meat stir-fried as it is, was in print as a Sichuan Hanten dish by 1966 at the latest. Whether Chen's name is attached to this particular recipe is not known.

Chen did not invent the dish from nothing. He adapted the long-standing Sichuan original to the ingredients and seasonings available in the Japan of his day, swapping hard-to-find garlic sprouts for cabbage and tianmianjiang for hatcho miso and soy sauce, and dropping the two-step cooking. The same Chinese-cuisine trade media report that Chen wrote in his book Sasurai no Mabo Dofu that tianmianjiang could not be had when he first came to Japan.

Hui guo rou made with cabbage and miso was in print even earlier. Kyofu Katei Ryori Hyakudai (A Hundred Kyoto-Style Home Dishes), a home cookbook by Ogawa Akira published in Kyoto by Shirakawa Shoin in 1961, lists 'hui guo rou (pork cooked in miso)' among its dishes for March. A bar of pork belly is boiled, cut crosswise into slices, stir-fried with cabbage, green onion, shiitake and bamboo shoots, and worked together with red miso. The cabbage and miso point toward the Japanese version, while boiling the pork before frying it keeps the two-step method of the original. Whether this Kyoto dish should be read as an early form of the sweet Japanese version that later spread into homes is not yet settled.

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.