Su Dongpo and the Cooking of Hangzhou

Su Shi, known as Su Dongpo (1037–1101), was a poet, calligrapher and official of the Northern Song who served twice in Hangzhou, first as a junior magistrate in the 1070s and later as prefect in the 1080s and 1090s. His name is bound to the city's West Lake, where he oversaw the dredging of the water and the raising of the embankment that still carries his name, and to a pork dish that Hangzhou claims for him. Fuchsia Dunlop, in Land of Fish and Rice, treats him as the best-loved literary figure of the Jiangnan table, the lower Yangtze country of lake, canal and paddy on which Hangzhou stands.

The case for Su Dongpo as a cook rests on his poems and prose, and it should be kept apart from the legends that gathered later. He wrote with evident pleasure about food, among it a short piece on pork in which he advises cooking it slowly over a low fire with very little water, and lets the meat find its own flavour. Dunlop draws on this in Land of Fish and Rice, and the advice is the plain principle of the long, gentle braise that Jiangnan cooks still follow. The dish now called Dongpo pork, dongpo rou, is a square of pork belly with the skin on, simmered until the fat is soft and the sauce is dark and glossy. Its classic Hangzhou seasonings are soy sauce, Shaoxing huangjiu, sugar and spring onion with ginger, and it is usually served with a little of its own sauce and, often, a green vegetable beside it. That the dish was in this exact form in his lifetime cannot be shown; what the settled history supports is that his writing on slow-cooked pork and his name became joined to it in the city's memory. The pork matters because it shows how Hangzhou cooking understands richness. The fat of the belly is not trimmed away but cooked until it yields, and the weight of it is set against the clean, sweet taste of the region's vegetables, river fish and shrimp. Dunlop describes the Hangzhou table as one of restraint and freshness, in which the character of the main ingredient is meant to come through, and the braise of pork is its great exception, a dish where the cook is invited to be generous. Hongshao, red-cooking, with soy and sugar, is the broader technique on which it stands, and it is shared across Jiangnan. Hangzhou had long been a city of food before and after Su Dongpo. It became the capital of the Southern Song in the twelfth century, after the court fled south, and the dishes of the northern refugees mingled there with the produce of the lakes and the Qiantang river. The city's later reputation for West Lake fish in vinegar sauce, for shrimp cooked with Xihu Longjing tea leaves, and for beggar's chicken belongs to this tradition of refined, lightly seasoned cooking. Su Dongpo stands at the head of it not as an inventor of these dishes but as the writer whose appetite and civility the city chose to remember. For a cook reading him today, the value lies in the attitude he records: patience with the fire, trust in a few good seasonings, and a delight in eating that a scholar did not need to disguise. Dunlop's chapter on Hangzhou uses him in that spirit, as a way of explaining a regional cuisine through its most affectionate witness.

The table that Su Dongpo's name belongs to is built on freshness, gentle sweetness and the use of Zhenjiang vinegar, Shaoxing huangjiu and soy in measured amounts. A Hangzhou meal might set a dish of Dongpo pork beside West Lake fish, bamboo shoots and a plain green vegetable, with tea of the region to close. The pork is eaten in small portions, its richness answered by the lighter dishes around it.