Anlu Stir-Fried Pork with Pickled Greens 安陆白花菜炒肉

Anlu Stir-Fried Pork with Pickled Greens (安陆白花菜炒肉) is pork stir-fried with pickled baihuacai (白花菜), a leafy spider-flower plant grown as a vegetable in Anlu (安陆), a city in Xiaogan (孝感) in central-eastern Hubei, about 100 km from central Wuhan. Pickled baihuacai is one of Anlu's main summer pickles, and it is stir-fried with pork, with egg or on its own.

Ingredients

Baihuacai, also called yangjiaocai (羊角菜, 'goat-horn vegetable'), is an annual plant covered in sticky glandular hairs, with five-part leaves the size of a thumb, small white flowers in summer and autumn, and slender pods 7 to 10 cm long. It comes in red-stemmed and green-stemmed forms and is sown in the third month. Fresh baihuacai has a goaty smell, so it is not eaten fresh. In Anlu the stems and leaves are pickled instead, and the pickle is then eaten plain or used as a seasoning ingredient, stir-fried with pork or with egg.

Flavour and texture

The Hubei Department of Culture and Tourism describes the pickle as fresh and fragrant, with a distinctive aroma and a lingering taste, and calls it both a local delicacy and a favourite seasoning on Anlu tables. The Hubei Chu Cuisine Research Institute (湖北楚菜研究院) says that pickled baihuacai is clean-tasting and fragrant, and that dishes fried with it, whether with pork or egg, are good in colour, aroma and taste. It names a related dish, pork belly steamed with baihuacai (白花菜扣肉), as an outstanding example of Hubei cooking.

Where it comes from

Hubei's culture and tourism department names Anlu as the plant's place of origin, with more than 3,000 years of documented cultivation. An Anlu county gazetteer from the reign of the Kangxi Emperor already praised it as 'strangely fragrant, matchless in taste' (奇香味绝), singled out the red-stemmed kind as the finest and said no other place could match it because of the local soil. In 2009 Anlu baihuacai was registered with the Ministry of Agriculture as a geographical-indication farm product, and in 2013 'Anlu baihuacai' became a registered geographical-indication certification trademark. The Anlu city government lists it with Anlu ginkgo and Nanxiang radish (南乡萝卜) among the city's nationally protected geographical-indication products.