■ "Sufficiently cooked, taste showed"
   A History of Dongpo Meat

Su Dongpo (1036-1101), one of eight most famous writers in Tang and Song dynasties, is also famous for his verse, calligraphy and painting. Additionally, Su is also special at cooking. When he was degraded to Huangzhou for offending emperor, he always cooked by himself to enjoy with his friend. Su's expert was cooking bouilli. He had ever poetized to explain his cooking experience: "Cooking slowly/ Watering steadily/ Sufficiently cooked, taste showed". However, the reason of calling this bouilli Dongpo meat was because of an interesting thing happened during his second time staying in Hangzhou as a local official.

At that time, the West Lake was mostly covered by wild grass. When he took the post, he called the people there to weed. The mud dug out was piled up to a long bank. Then they built a bridge to dredge the lake. The bank improved the environment and provided convenience to people. Not only people got benefit from this long bank, but also West Lake became more beautiful by this bank. Later, it was listed as the first of "West Lake Ten Scenes": Spring on Su Bank.

Meanwhile, people were very grateful for Su Dongpo. When they heard that Su liked bouilli, they all presented pork to him coincidently in spring festival. With so much pork, Su Dongpo thought he should enjoy them with his hard-working people. So he asked his family to cut pork into blocks, and to cook them with his method, then to send the bouilli, together with wine, to every household. When his family was cooking, they mistook sending bouilli with wine for cooking bouilli with wine. But the result was that the bouilli cooked with wine was more aromatic and tasteful. All people praised the especially delicious bouilli sent by Su Dongpo. Then the interesting story spread around. The students of Su Dongpo included those who learned calligraphy and writing, and some learned cooking "Dongpo Meat". Louwailou imitated Su's method to cook this dish, and improved the skill through experience, thus Dongpo Meat comes down.