MUZIChinese Matrix
Cantonese Cuisine · FFET10183
A Hakka dish of skin-on pork belly browned, sliced and steamed soft over salted mustard greens, then turned out onto a plate.
A small round white porcelain bowl holds browned skin-on pork belly slices over dark salted mustard greens, with glossy brown sauce pooling beneath and green scallion on top, with wooden chopsticks resting beside the bowl.
The regional cooking of Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macau, prized for live, fresh ingredients and light flavours.
Mei cai kou rou is skin-on pork belly boiled, browned in oil and sliced, then steamed soft with salty preserved mustard greens and turned out onto a plate so the greens sit underneath. The Hakka version comes from the Meizhou area, where Hakka people live at the meeting point of Guangdong, Fujian and Jiangxi. Its precise town of origin and date remain unclear: no dated text was found; an April 18, 2023 article links it to Su Dongpo nearly 1000 years ago, but explicitly calls this a legend and gives no source.
Mei cai kou rou is a steamed dish of skin-on pork belly. The meat is boiled, browned in oil and sliced, then laid over salty preserved mustard greens and steamed until soft. It is then turned out onto a plate so the greens end up underneath. Kou rou means meat steamed and then inverted onto a plate, and mei cai is mustard greens that have been salted and air-dried.1,2,4,5
No text establishing a date for the dish was found. An April 18, 2023 article places the Su Dongpo legend nearly 1000 years ago, but gives no source, so it cannot establish a date.1,3
The Hakka version comes from the Meizhou area, in the border region of Guangdong, Fujian and Jiangxi where Hakka people live, but its precise place of origin is unclear. The Sichuan dish shaobai is comparable. Mei cai is made in Huizhou, Meizhou and Jieyang in Guangdong and Shaoxing and Ningbo in Zhejiang, among other places.1,2
The 2 recipes follow much the same plan. One uses dried mei cai, soaked for 5 to 6 hours, and the other uses salted mei cai, soaked soft and chopped. The belly is boiled before browning (about 35 minutes in one, a 10-minute blanch in the other), then browned and sliced, and steamed with the greens, soy sauce, wine and sugar: 75 minutes in one, 90 minutes at a full boil in the other. After steaming it is turned out onto a plate.4,5
The dish's connection to Hakka mountain life rests on costly transport, simple seasoning, and salty, rich cooking. This explanation appears in only 1 article, with no other source to corroborate it.3
No intangible heritage listing or output figure was found for the dish.1,2,3,4,5
Legend has it that when Su Dongpo lived in exile in Guangdong, he had a cook add mei cai to his recipe for braised pork, and the dish then spread through Hakka villages across Guangdong.
Told in: A Hakka tale, told in an article on Hakka food in Dangdai Zhongguo of April 18, 2023. The article puts it at nearly a thousand years ago but itself calls it a legend and gives no source.
Legend has it that in a time of war a fairy named Mei came down and gave people the seeds of a vegetable that grew fast enough to eat soon after planting. People thanked her by calling the vegetable mei cai. It is a tale about where the name came from, and it gives no year.
Told in: A Hakka tale, told in the same article, which presents it as a legend with no source.
Grandma Li
This is a simplified home version, not the traditional restaurant method.
This is the Hakka mei cai kou rou as I make it at home, a simplified home version: I do not reduce the cooking liquid separately, and I use just a few seasonings. The amounts and method mainly follow one recipe by a named author: 400 g of skin-on pork belly with 200 g of salted mei cai, a 10-minute boil for the meat and a 90-minute steam. Another recipe by a named author uses dried mei cai soaked for 5 to 6 hours, boils the meat about 35 minutes and steams for 75 minutes, which differs, so I did not follow it. I check for myself that the meat is cooked through, as described below.
Allergens: soy, wheat
