Pork Belly Braised with Dried Bamboo Shoots

Pork belly braised with dried bamboo shoots was Grandpa’s signature dish. Every time we went to Grandpa’s home, located in a small town in Anhui Province right below the Yangtze River, it would appear on the dinner table. It’s not a sophisticated dish to make. First, the dried bamboo shoots need to be soaked in water overnight. When it’s time to cook, the first step is to fry the sliced pork belly. Grandpa had a secret here—he would heat a teaspoon of sugar in the wok until it melted into brown syrup and bubbled slightly before he added the sliced pork belly. Grandpa learned this technique of caramelization from the locals. A bit of adjustment from what he learnred from his mother when he was a child in Shanghai. However, he never changed his sweet tooth. After a life full of hardship, Grandpa still often said, “I like to eat something sweet.” Now, the meat smells a faint sweet flavor, you can mix them with the water-soaked dried bamboo shoots. Then, add some water and light soy sauce. When it boils, let the wok sit over a low flame for about an hour. No condiments except salt and one or two slices of ginger, so that the distinctive scent of the dried bamboo shoots can be exhibited to the fullest.

The slow braising makes the pork lose much of its fat into the gravy. So the fatty meat doesn’t taste greasy, and its smooth texture almost melts immediately on the tip of your tongue. The lean portion now has a delicate aroma tinged with a kind of smoky flavor from the dried bamboo shoots. But it’s the dried bamboo shoots that really steal the show. They seem to have regained their soul as they immerse themselves in the rich gravy, plump, tender, and mellow.

When we visited Grandpa’s for Chinese New Year, we would always find a large pot of pork belly braised with dried bamboo shoots prepared by Grandpa in advance. Decades ago, marketplaces would close for fifteen days to celebrate the Festival. So, families had to prepare and store enough food that doesn’t spoil easily. You would see deep-fried tofu, meatballs, and eggrolls placed in the baskets under the balcony roof; preserved fish, pork, and chicken hanging on the garden fences; semi-pickled vegetables stored in massive earthen pots along the outside wall; various dishes filling all the jars and pots in the kitchen…Pork belly braised with dried bamboo shoots was undoubtedly an ideal Chinese New Year dish, because the contents submerged in the gravy full of pork oil could last one or two weeks in winter.

But that was before I was born. Nowadays, materialistic business owners won’t even close their doors on Chinese New Year’s Eve. Refrigerators have come into every household, nullifying the need to prepare lots of food beforehand. Yet, Grandpa and his generation, who had known hunger, retained a sense of this tradition. Indeed, what else other than an abundance of food can give us an immediate feeling of a prosperous and peaceful life?

Three years ago, we stopped going to Grandpa’s for Chinese New Year. Aging and living by himself, he couldn’t prepare all the food as he once had done. Standing up against the winter cold became more challenging as well. So, he came down south to our place in Guangdong Province for the winter. Every time he visited, he would bring a bag of dried bamboo shoots. “It’s good stuff,” he said, “you can’t buy this thing anywhere else.”

Grandpa was right. Although up to four hundred species of bamboos grow all over China, the south of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River boasts of the most bamboo resources and the best dried bamboo shoots. When spring comes, bamboo shoots spring up in unbelievable amounts in this area. In the English-speaking world, if something grows very quickly, people will say it emerges “like mushrooms after the rain.” In Chinese, there is an equivalent idiom—“like spring bamboo shoots after the rain.” At this season, cones of foot-long milky white and greenish bamboo shoots pile up in markets. Nature’s bounty is too much to be consumed at once. So, the surplus is dried under the sun. Without refrigeration, dehydrating foodstuff is a clever method of preservation.

Grandpa was from Shanghai, a city on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, where sun-dried bamboo shoots were mostly supplied from the neighbouring province of Zhejiang. In 1959, a nineteen-year-old Grandpa was barred from college as his father was charged as a “historical counterrevolutionary.” He traveled inland and found a job in northern Anhui Province, where he experienced the Great Chinese Famine at once. The yellowish sun-dried bamboo shoots were seen, though very rarely. In 1969, Grandpa was sent to the countryside in southern Anhui Province to receive “re-education”. After having endured three years of “struggle sessions”—public humiliation and torture—during the Cultural Revolution, he felt unburdened, or even lighthearted to be re-educated by the artless villagers. A lighthearted grandpa was curious about a kind of blackish dried bamboo shoots there. He was told that they were roasted. In the spring, villagers set up mud stoves and make fires with bamboo charcoals. Fresh bamboo shoots get dried slowly on an iron-wired sieve over the gentle charcoal heat, tinged with the color as well as the aroma of the charcoal. Grandpa loved the aroma. He moved to the nearby town years later and took root where he could eat the charcoal roasted bamboo shoots. He married a girl from northeast China. He was widowed when his daughters, Mom and Aunty, were six and four. He remarried, then separated. He brought up his daughters by himself. Finally, he became old. Old Grandpa missed his Shanghai deep in his heart. When he said, “I like to eat something sweet.” I could catch a glimpse of nostalgic expression on his wrinkled face. But he also developed a connection with the small town on the south bank of the Youngtze River. He would give the special dried bamboo shoots to his friends and claimed that they were “our hometown products.”

Last December, Grandpa came to visit us for the last time. I just came back home from my school in the US for Christmas holiday. He brought us “our hometown products” of the special dried bamboo shoots and talked about braising them with pork belly. “It’s good stuff,” he repeated and urged me to take a smell. Digging my head into the bag full of the blackish hard six-inch strips, my nose was met with an intense aroma from the roasting process.

But there was one slight issue: though Grandpa loved pork belly braised with dried bamboo shoots wholeheartedly, Mom was ambivalent. She enjoyed the dish prepared by Grandpa, but she always made sure to point out, “the tenderness and the tastefulness of the dried bamboo shoots all come from the pork fat. It’s unhealthy.” Yes, this dish requires very fatty meat. The dried bamboo shoots need to wallow in a pool of pork oil and must absorb it as much as possible; otherwise, you are just biting into pieces of wood. Grandpa would argue that fat was also necessary for our body and we didn’t eat this dish every day. Thus, Grandpa kept bringing dried bamboo shoots to us, and Mom kind of just left them there. After Grandpa used up a portion of them, the rest would inevitably stay untouched until they went moldy and had to be trashed. Last July, returning home from my school in the US, I was not surprised to see in the kitchen cupboard that bag of dried bamboo shoots Grandpa brought seven months before.

In October, Grandpa fell ill suddenly. The phone call came the day before my birthday. With international travel restrictions and a burgeoning pandemic, I attended school virtually the entire fall, working through nights, sleeping through days. Mom had joked that it was heaven’s will that I should celebrate my sixteenth birthday with my family. Alas! Who knows what heaven’s will is? We took the first flight on my birthday to see Grandpa.

It was to our relief that Aunty, who arrived a day earlier, told us that Grandpa seemed to be recovering well. He was. He walked around in the ward. He asked Mom to take the razor home because he wanted to be back home for his next shave. He didn't eat much, but he reminded Mom to make meaty dishes for me. “I have some dried bamboo shoots in the cupboard. Braise some pork belly with them,” he instructed. The evening before he passed away, Grandpa promised to make dinner for us when he came home.

However, Grandpa was never able to step into the kitchen again. Instead, Mom took out the dried bamboo shoots and cut the pork belly. I never saw her make this dish before. But when my tongue touched the first piece of the dried bamboo shoot, I felt a sting in my eyes. The intense aroma, the tender yet mellow texture—it was as if Grandpa had made it.

A week later when we were back home, Mom took out the bag of the dried bamboo shoots that had remained in the cupboard for over ten months. She gently scraped off a few tiny mold spots on the surface of them with her fingertips and said, “We’ll buy some pork belly.”