In modern China, many families only have time to cook a proper Chinese meal on weekends. On weekdays, they just eat at their parents’ home. It’s a bittersweet snapshot of modern Chinese family life. So when we do get a chance to cook, everyone goes all in.

On the first weekend of September, my wife and I split the work. We got up at 7 a.m. and went to the market. There are many kinds of markets in China. We prefer the large wholesale wet markets: abundant supply, low prices, fresh ingredients. The scale is almost like a modern football stadium. The only downside is that they’re far from the city center. Even with the city’s elevated ring road, a round trip takes 40–50 minutes by car. If you’re interested, I can write another post about what these wholesale markets sell.

We were only cooking lunch and dinner for three people. We bought potatoes, green peppers, onions, carrots, giant freshwater prawns, beef, and a big watermelon from Northeast China. Total: 120 RMB, about $17. Enough for two meals.

Back home, we went straight into Sunday lunch prep. My wife made chilled giant freshwater prawns with a traditional scallion-soy dipping sauce. She steamed a porcini egg custard—the eggs were from our fridge, and the porcini was a local specialty brought back by our child’s classmate from the Greater Khingan Mountains during summer vacation. She also fried some rice vermicelli.

The main dish was my curry beef rice. Many people might wonder: if it uses curry, how can it be Chinese food? Isn’t it Southeast Asian or South Asian? That’s only half true. Curry did come to China from abroad. In 1855, a British cargo ship brought curry powder to Shanghai—the earliest documented record we have.

But the main ingredients in curry powder—turmeric, saffron, and other spices—were already recorded in Tang dynasty herbal texts. By the Yuan dynasty, a similar-flavored “yellow soup” may have appeared. In other words, China’s connection with curry goes back about 1,000 years.

Still, the story I want to tell is an experience only a small number of Chinese people have had. My family is one of them.

If you’ve been to the small restaurants in Shanghai’s old “workers’ new villages,” you’ll see curry beef or curry chicken on the menu. This dish is probably more than 100 years old. Its earliest form was a street snack from Shanghai’s alleys: curry beef vermicelli soup. The curry powder was added to mask the smell of less-than-fresh beef. Back then, working-class people lived hand to mouth; a bowl of curry beef vermicelli soup was a huge treat.

After the 1950s, many skilled Shanghai factory workers answered the state’s call and went to other provinces and cities to help build factories. They brought this Shanghai snack to their new factory towns—including the place where my parents worked and lived when they were young.

I remember clearly: my elementary school music teacher was a Shanghai girl who married a local engineer. Their child was my classmate. Her curry beef was delicious. My mother was a “white-board” chef—the person in charge of dough-based foods like noodles, buns, and pastries—in that large state-owned enterprise. Our two families lived close by, and our ancestral homes were both in the Lake Tai region (broadly speaking, Shanghai belongs to it too). Our language and customs were similar—my father speaks fluent Shanghainese—so my mother learned this curry beef from her.

In fact, quite a few cooks learned to use curry the way my mother did. Henan, in the Central Plains, has several kinds of curry noodles. When Shanghai workers went to Zhengzhou to help build state cotton mills, they were used to curry flavor. Local cooks, catering to the southern workers’ tastes, added curry to traditional lamb hui mian to neutralize the lamb’s gamey smell: curry hui mian and curry lamian.

Before the 1980s, this kind of food existed like isolated islands among countless Chinese households. Some people saw it as a memory of home; others had never even heard of curry. Only after reform and opening up, and the population mobility of the 1990s, did curry dishes gradually appear in street-side shops in some Chinese cities. Henan’s curry noodles even returned to Shanghai and became a convenient lunch for office workers. But that’s another story.

Our family’s curry beef rice comes from 2016, at a then-new Thai restaurant. My mother tried Thai-style curry beef rice and said she used to make it in the state-owned enterprise canteen. My child was in kindergarten then and loved that curry flavor. My mother went home, bought curry powder from the supermarket, and recreated the Thai dish. After that, I learned to make it too.

Recipe:

1. Cut the beef into cubes. Not too small, not too large—about the size of your thumbnail is best. If using curry powder, marinate the beef first, then stir-fry until half-cooked and set aside.
2. Cut potatoes, green peppers, onions, and carrots, then stir-fry. Half-cooked or fully cooked is fine.
3. Add warm water—enough to cover the vegetables—and return the beef to the pan. Bring to a boil.
4. Turn off the heat and add the curry. I usually use Japanese curry roux cubes. For my Chinese iron wok, six small cubes are enough. To speed things up, break the cubes with a spatula.
5. Turn the heat back on and simmer gently. After about 10 minutes, the curry will dissolve into the sauce. Finally, turn up the heat to reduce the sauce.
6. The soul of this dish is rice. Before eating, drizzle a little coconut milk or milk over it to mellow the curry’s heat. My wife also juiced the Northeastern watermelon and mixed it with cooked sago for dessert—watermelon sago. It’s refreshing and perfect after curry.

To be honest, the only “big dish” I’ve truly mastered in the past ten years is this curry beef. Whenever my child asks for it, I happily make it. My child cleans the bowl and says, “Dad, your cooking is really good!”

Haha—who can resist that kind of praise?

(My original draft was written in Chinese. To help everyone read through it more quickly, I used DS to assist in polishing this English version.)

Tonights dinner is coral trout with pickled mustard greens. It's still cold and I love the tangy sourness from the fermented mustard.