4 鱼香肉丝 Fish-Flavored Shredded Pork
Yuxiang wei(鱼香味)literally means“fishflavored sauce.”The sauce is a mixture of seasonings that usually consists of red chilli pepper，spring onions，ginger，garlic，sugar，salt，soy sauce，among other ingredients.The sauce tends to be salty，sweet，sour，and fragrant.On restaurant menus this sauce is often translated as“hot garlic sauce.”As we can see that the dish contains no fish ingredients.The reason why it is called“fishflavoured”is because the sauce was usually used to cook fish.The following legend tells us how it began to be used to cook pork.
A long time ago，there was a business family in Sichuan.The whole family enjoyed eating fish.When cooking fish，they would add some spring onions，ginger，garlic，wine，vinegar，and soy sauce to remove the unpleasant fish smell.
One evening，when the family hostess was stir frying shredded pork，she added all the leftover seasonings from her fish cooking.She had thought that this dish might not taste good because the seasonings might not suit pork.
A moment later，her husband returned home from his business.He went directly to the food table where he picked up chopsticks，grasped the food from that dish and tasted it.Having found the food surprisingly tasty，the husband cheerfully asked his wife how this dish was cooked.The wife then told him that she used the leftover seasonings for the fish to cook pork.Afterwards the family named the sauce as“Fishflavoured Sauce”.
In 1909 a book called The Overall View of Chengdu(《成都通览》)was published.The book had of 1，328 Sichuan cooking recipes，but did not include any fishflavored dishes.The absence of such recipes shows that fish-flavored dishes appeared only after 1909.Sichuanstyle menus currently contain a list of fish-flavored dishes，including the Fish-flavored Eggplant(鱼香茄子)，Fish-flavored Pork Liver(鱼香猪肝)，Fishflavored Pork Kidney(鱼香腰子)，and Fish-flavored Shredded Pork(鱼香肉丝).
Notes: 1)shred 切碎 2)chilli pepper 辣椒 3)spring onion 葱 4)ginger 姜 5)garlic 蒜 6)seasoning 作料 7)leftover 剩余的 8)cheerfully 愉快地 9)recipe 菜谱 10)eggplant 茄子 11)liver 肝
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