Hakka Pork Belly and Mustard Greens Are Chinese Soul Food
Photo by Johnny CY Lam

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Food

Hakka Pork Belly and Mustard Greens Are Chinese Soul Food

"White people would just be like, 'What the fuck?'"

Nick Chen-Yin is the owner and pitmaster of Smoke Signals Barbecue in Toronto. He agreed to let us in on some family secrets and convinced his grandmother to show us how to make a Hakka classic in her apartment.

You could never serve this dish—at least this preparation—in a restaurant.

White people would just be like, "What the fuck? There's a piece of bone and cartilage in here and why are the mustard green stalks so thick?!" They would be freaked out by it, I think.

Ham choy (pickled greens) and pork is a classic Hakka recipe that my grandmother made when I was growing up. Strictly speaking, Hakka is a dialect like Cantonese or Mandarin. The Hakka people aren't limited to particular province in China; they're spread across a more general region that spans a few provinces.

Most of the Hakka Chinese are very nomadic, so a lot of them had this diaspora from China during the Chinese War and a lot ended up in the Caribbean, Trinidad, Jamaica, even South Africa. So, if you meet a Chinese South African or Jamaican, there's a 99 percent chance they're Hakka.

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