Sweet & Spicy
A light and tasty dessert (萨琪玛 sà qí mǎ) and a hot and spicy tofu dish (麻婆豆腐 má pó dòu fu)
Welcome to our 88 Chinese Dishes project! This family project is centered on digitizing 88 Chinese recipes from our family and sharing them with all of you. As we add new recipes, we’ll send out email updates through this newsletter.
This week, we’re sharing sachima, a dessert, and mápó tofu, one of our favorite tofu dishes 😋.
Sachima
We wanted to add a dessert dish, and we thought sachima would make a great first dessert. Sachima originated from China’s Manchuria region in the northeast. Its light sweetness, aromatic fruit flavors, and crumbly texture make sachima a favorite to go with tea, especially during snowy winters and Chinese New Year.
Food Lore
A common sachima superstition starts with a story about Nurhachi (努尔哈赤 nú ěr hā chì), a warrior and later the founding emperor of the Qing Dynasty. His general, named Sachima, brought this treat on the long journeys he and his troops made to unify Manchuria. The sweet, fruity taste brought cheer to Nurhachi, and most importantly, he discovered that sachima did not spoil easily, making it the perfect snack for their long, tiring journeys on horseback. In gratitude, he named this dessert after General Sachima (although perhaps he should have named it after General Sachima’s wife who made it).
Because of the brave, Manchurian horseback warriors who found strength in this treat, people believe that eating sachima brings luck during horse racing 🏇.
Notes
This dessert takes a bit of work (probably about 4-5 hours including wait time), but keeps super well, so you can make a large batch of it at once. You can also use any kind of dried fruit or toppings that you want!
Mapo Tofu
Sichuan (or Szechuan) cuisine is one of the best-known styles of Chinese cooking. Originating in southwestern China, it has a uniquely spicy flavor and numbing taste. (If you’ve ever been to Mala Project in NYC, the “mala” comes from the Chinese words for numbing, 麻 má, and spicy, 辣 là).
Food Lore
Mapo Tofu is said to have been invented by a woman who lived in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. Her neighbors called her Auntie Chen, and she opened a small cafe featuring her signature dish: tofu with ground beef, Sichuan peppercorns, and hot peppers. Soon, people were coming from all over to try this tasty dish. These new customers didn’t know Auntie Chen’s name, so they nicknamed her Auntie Freckles, after the freckles on her face. Funnily enough, the word for numbing, 麻 má, can also mean freckled (🤷🏻♀️), and the word for Auntie is 婆 pó, so the dish came to be known as 麻婆 mápó tofu.
Notes
If you don’t have Chinese cooking wine, you can use light beer or white wine instead. Unfortunately, there are no great substitutes for Sichuan bean paste or Sichuan peppercorns - but you can find them in Chinatown or Amazon (link).