Fish-Flavored Shredded Pork

This is a famous dish in Sichuan cuisine. The sauce is a mixture of seasonings that usually consist of spring onion, ginger, garlic, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, sugar and chili pepper. The dish contains no fish but the pork tastes like fish because the sauce was originally used for cooking fish, hence the name fish-flavored shredded pork. Legend has it that there was a housewife in Sichuan province in late Qing Dynasty who’s good at cooking fish. Once she used the leftover seasonings from fish cooking to stir fry shredded pork so as to avoid waste. After the dish was done, she became upset because she thought her husband would be unhappy with this strange taste. Unexpectedly, her husband loved this dish very much and asked about its recipe. Since then the specific seasoning has been called fish-flavored sauce. Now Sichuan cuisine contains various fish-flavored dishes such as fish-flavored eggplant.