Pork Braised with Dried Salted Greens 干菜焖肉

Ingredients

The dish depends on the dried greens. Wugancai is one of Shaoxing's 'three blacks' (三乌), with the black-awning boats and black felt hats, and the Shaoxing city gazetteer describes it as glossy black, mellow and fragrant, and long-keeping. Guangming Daily says the greens are made mainly in Shaoxing, Taizhou (台州), Cixi (慈溪), Yuyao (余姚) and other places in Zhejiang, from mustard greens, rape or Chinese cabbage. For the Qing-dynasty tribute version, the hearts of mustard greens were sun-dried before the Qingming festival, salted in small jars, then steamed and sun-dried again and again until they turned a glossy red-black.

Where it comes from

A Shaoxing legend credits the Ming-dynasty painter Xu Wei (徐渭). Poor in old age, he was paid with a piece of pork for writing a new butcher's shop sign; with no salt or soy sauce at home, he steamed the meat with dried greens from a jar under his bed and found the result fragrant. The pork's fat mixed with the savoury greens, and 'dried-greens pork' was handed down from there.

Lu Xun (鲁迅) wrote to his mother from Shanghai in 1935 that the dried greens she sent were very good and that his children loved them. Zhejiang Shuren University's library notes that Premier Zhou Enlai (周恩来) also liked the steamed version and, in April 1956, ordered it for foreign guests after a tour of West Lake. For decades Shaoxing students leaving for university elsewhere have taken a jar or two of the pork with them.