MUZIChinese Matrix
Jiangsu Cuisine · FFET10094
Squirrel-shaped mandarin fish is a Suzhou-style dish: a boned, scored fish is fried so the flesh opens like a squirrel's tail, then covered with sweet-and-sour sauce.
A white porcelain plate holds one fried mandarin fish, head and tail raised, its scored flesh fried into golden pieces under a glossy orange-red sweet-and-sour sauce, with wooden chopsticks beside it.
The regional cooking of Jiangsu, divided into the Jinling, Huai-Yang, Su-Xi and Xu-Hai style areas.
Squirrel-shaped mandarin fish is a Suzhou dish: the fish is boned and scored in a cross-hatch, coated in starch or egg-yolk batter and fried so the flesh opens like a squirrel's tail, then covered with a sweet-and-sour sauce. Songhelou on Suzhou's Guanqian Street is one restaurant often mentioned. A secondhand quotation from the Qing-dynasty Tiaodingji describes a fried fish made in the squirrel style; the quotation gives no year, and the original book was not checked. Songhelou was founded in the Qianlong years, and accounts give two different years, 1737 and 1757.
Squirrel-shaped mandarin fish is a Suzhou dish. A mandarin fish is boned with the head and tail kept, the flesh is scored in a diamond pattern, battered and fried until the cuts open like a squirrel's tail, and covered with a hot sweet-and-sour sauce.1,2,6,8
The sources listed here hold no dated record of the mandarin-fish dish. A secondhand quotation from the Qing-dynasty Tiaodingji describes coating a fish in egg yolk, frying it golden and shaping it in the squirrel style, a method regarded as a forerunner of the dish; the quotation gives no year, and the original book was not checked. Songhelou opened in the Qianlong years, and accounts give different years.1,2,3,4,5,6
Suzhou, around Guanqian Street, where Songhelou stands on Taijian Lane. Outside Suzhou, other fish such as yellow croaker often stand in for mandarin fish.1,2,3
The mandarin fish is boned with the head kept, and the flesh is scored in a diamond pattern, dusted with starch or dipped in egg-yolk batter and fried in hot oil until the cuts open. A sweet-and-sour sauce goes over it, often made with tomato today, with bamboo shoot, shiitake mushrooms, peas or pine nuts.1,6,7,8
Apart from a folk tale, the sources listed here do not explain why the dish is shaped like a squirrel. The name is explained in two ways: by the shape of the fish, or by the sizzling sound when the sauce is poured on.1,6
Songhelou is a China Time-honored Brand, named in 1999 and confirmed again in 2006, and squirrel-shaped mandarin fish is its signature dish. Songhelou opened a London branch in Chinatown in 2025; a noodle dish topped with squirrel-shaped fish appeared in a March 2025 London restaurant report, as menu information before the opening.3,4,5
Legend has it that when the Qianlong Emperor toured the south he went to Songhelou and asked to eat a mandarin fish from the restaurant's pond, but that fish was kept as an offering to the gods. To avoid offending the gods, the cook shaped the fish like a squirrel, and the emperor was pleased.
Told in: A folk legend told in an encyclopedia entry; Chinese Wikipedia retells a similar tale.
Grandma Li
This is a simplified home version, not the traditional restaurant method.
In restaurants squirrel-shaped fish is boned, shaped, fried and sauced with care. This is the simpler way I make it at home: ask the fishmonger to prepare the fish, score it myself, dust it with starch and fry it through, then cook a sweet-sour tomato sauce to pour over. The amounts and timings below are my own choices at home, informed by a few published recipes.
Allergens: fish, soy, wheat, sesame, tree nut
