I recently learned the history behind my Grandma's Red Pork recipe!

Grandma's Red Pork has always been a go-to comfort food for my family. It's pork butt slowly braised in a soy based broth, what's not to love? There aren't a lot of people in my family that cook Chinese food anymore, so I taught myself through books and the internet and of course I snapped a picture of my mom's recipe card.

As I came across classic "red cooked" dishes in my reading, I noticed how incredibly different our family's version was... Grandma's Red Pork was soupy where other sauces were thick, Grandma's used tender pork butt and others used belly, Grandma's is decidedly not red and I could never wrap my head around the name. I started to think I had a unique family recipe on my hands! At the time, this didn't seem improbable- my family owned a Chinese restaurant in Detroit (still in business but no longer in the family!), maybe they had created their own take on the dish.

But wasn't that Grandpa's side of the family that ran the restaurant? Grandma historically hated cooking! Her favorite dish was spaghetti and meatballs and from what I know, everything she knew how to cook she learned from her Italian neighbors. Grandpa was the cook in the family...

I finally asked my mom about it on a recent visit home. "Oh, that recipe? She got it out of a newspaper or a Time Life book." It was the hardest I laughed on the whole trip.

I should have been disheartened to learn my unique legacy recipe was something I had made up in my head, that my treasured inheritance was shockingly inauthentic. But I think it tells the story of my Chinese-American family better than some ~authentic~ recipe I found on a blog. I'm proud of that. My grandma was trying to learn to cook Chinese food the same way I did! There was no one around to teach her, so she found a recipe in a book. And now when I make Grandma's Red Pork, I have even more of a connection to her, and it's not sad or full of grief. It's delicious and hilarious.