Yuxiang shredded pork Period COrigin theory CVerified

Yu-xiang rousi (fish-fragrant pork slivers) is slivered pork stir-fried with pao lajiao, red chillies fermented in brine the Sichuanese way, together with sugar, vinegar, ginger, scallion and garlic. Pork, the main ingredient, has long been a staple meat in Sichuan, and the dish is cooked both in home kitchens and in everyday eateries. The first mouthful layers sweetness, sourness and heat into a savour that calls a fish dish to mind, yet there is no fish anywhere on the plate.

The heart of the flavour is the pickled chilli. The chilli, a New World plant, was taken up in Sichuan, and the practice of fermenting it in brine settled into local kitchens. Layer that pickled chilli with the sweet-sour of sugar and vinegar and the aromatics of ginger, scallion and garlic, and the taste known as yu-xiang comes together. Until the chilli reached Sichuan, the dish had no way of coming into being.

In the written record, the name has yet to appear in late-Qing Sichuan. Four books from the closing years of the dynasty, among them the 1909 Chengdu Tonglan, a survey of life in Chengdu, make no mention of yu-xiang. By 1960 the dish is there: the seventh volume of Zhongguo Mingcai Pu (Famous Dishes of China), published that year, is reported to include yu-xiang rousi and to describe it as made with the seasonings for doubanyu, a Sichuan fish dish. The dish probably took shape somewhere in that half-century, but it has not yet surfaced in any record from the Republican years in between, and when exactly it was born remains unclear.

A stir-fry called 'fish-fragrant' with no fish in it invites a story, and one has long been attached to it. In a household in Chengdu, the tale goes, someone cooked a fish and, rather than throw out the leftover pickled chilli, ginger, scallion and garlic, used them to fry slivered pork; the result was a hit, and the name 'fish-fragrant' stuck. English-language accounts tell it as the legend of a housewife who tipped fish seasonings into a pan of meat.

Yet the tale names no family, no cook and no year. No early record of it has surfaced, and none has turned up that contradicts it either. Nor does the silence of the late-Qing books settle anything: the 1909 Chengdu Tonglan says plainly that it lists only several dozen dishes to show the customs of Chengdu, so a dish missing from its pages may simply have gone unlisted. The Chengdu household story remains a legend that can be neither confirmed nor ruled out.

The name itself has two competing explanations. The first holds that the dish borrows the seasonings Sichuanese cooks use for river fish, and so reminds the eater of fish. The 1960 Famous Dishes of China already links it to the seasonings for doubanyu, Sichuan cookbooks of the 1970s trace it to folk ways of cooking fish, and Fuchsia Dunlop, who has introduced Sichuan cooking to English-speaking readers, writes that the flavour is called fish-fragrant because it draws on the seasonings of Sichuanese fish cookery. Which fish dish served as the model, whether doubanyu, pickled-vegetable fish or sweet-and-sour fish, is still argued over.

The second explanation points to the pickled chilli itself. Chengdu pickle shops, the explanation goes, called it yu lazi, 'fish chilli', because live crucian carp went into the brine with the chillies and lent them a fishy savour. A Chinese online essay on the origin of the name traces the idea to a 1979 article, and notes that the name yu lazi itself already turns up in the 1909 Chengdu Tonglan. A 2019 newspaper article introducing Lan Yong's new history of Sichuan cuisine reports that in the early days one school of cooks made the dish with yu lazi, while noting that few cooks actually do so. The same online essay raises an awkward question: if both yu lazi and pork stir-fried with pickled chilli existed by the end of the Qing, why does the name yu-xiang not appear until decades later?

Each explanation makes sense and each has its weak points; neither has won out. Why a stir-fry with no fish came to be called fish-fragrant, the Chengdu household tale included, is a question still without an answer.