Sweet and Sour Pork Meatballs

palatablepastime

12 years ago

Advertisements

Sweet and Sour Pork Meatballs are prepared with a classic sweet and sour sauce over fluffy white rice, for a trip down memory lane.

Sweet and Sour Pork Meatballs

By Sue Lau | Palatable Pastime

This recipe is something I put together for a retro foods event with a blogging group.

I first ate Chinese food, or at least what we called Chinese food, back during the 1960’s when I was a kid. In those days, no one I knew ever had a wok. And what we did have was Mom being adventurous and buying the stacked component cans of La Choy dinners for chicken or beef chow mein or sometimes a boxed mix for pepper steak (you added your own meat). I loved any of it as I discovered early on that I had a real fondness for soy sauce. And the commercials for it didn’t hurt the appeal of it either as the La Choy dragon wound his bouncy tail around our hearts. Later as a teenager, I discovered I liked the sweet and sour chicken that came ready to heat from a can. As always, La Choy knew how to “Make Chinese food swing American.“

As I started writing this post, I even wondered if they still make those cans of stuff for home cooks (they do). Now I am not going to advocate that you run out and buy that stuff. But look at that, they still make it. Great to reminisce but…I may have cut my teeth on this stuff, but all in all I think we can skip a few steps from the old ready-to-serve.

Anyway, back to my story. As time went on, I discovered Chinese take-out. I was a big fan of sweet and sour pork as well as fried rice. And from those early days and love of the food, I tried various Chinese recipes I would come across here and there. And a few years later, I bought my first Chinese cookbook, which was Chinese Cookery by Rose Cheng and Michele Morris. I think I have made every recipe in that book ten times over. And with the variations on those recipes where I did my own thing, the food was endless.

So much so that I sort of gained a reputation in my family for being the Chinese cook. My mom was fast spreading the word. And once, when she was hospitalized and my uncle came up from Texas to see her, I cooked for him, and he told me it was the best Chinese food he ever ate.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that meal wasn’t Chinese. (Although I suppose I am busted now.)

Ahem.

But even during the mid to late 1980’s eating Chinese I guess really wasn’t all that common among families we knew. And after I met Bill (my better half, writer at Potable Pastime) whose family was eating Chinese all the time, we would go to many different Chinese restaurants as far as thirty miles away for a casual dinner. My idea of what that cuisine was really expanded beyond the limits of home cooked recipes and take-out from the hole in the wall down the road.

In the years since that time, my tastes for Chinese often extend to traditional fare including types of offal. It doesn’t get better than that. But even so, from time to time my heart longs for the old days and the old flavors. There aren’t many cooks out there who cook and have the same flavors. Although recently we came across an old-school restaurant over in Montgomery Ohio (Bon Chinese) that makes the definition of Hong Su Har (Shrimp in brown sauce, Hong Kong style). I have had it elsewhere when it did not taste even close, but this tasted as it should and I even passed up on ordering from the dim sum cart just to get it.

But my beginnings are entrenched in my early favorites, and of those the best for me was sweet and sour pork. That version often uses pork tenderloin which is marinated and then battered and quickly fried, to be served with the classic combination of pineapple, onion, carrots, and occasionally green pepper.

The sauce in this recipe uses a bit of tomato paste, which is how I learned to make it early on, although more authentic recipes for sweet and sour made sauce from a plum base. I do have a recipe for that type of sauce if you want to see it. It is very good with things like egg rolls and crab rangoon.

Chinese Plum Sauce (Sweet and Sour)

That sauce is made from fresh plums. I did another version of sweet and sour when I posted recipes at the old Recipezaar.

There was a contest for members to make a recipe in the fashion of Ready Steady Cook, where you create a recipe using five mandatory ingredients selection from among a diverse list of fifteen. That wasn’t necessarily an easy thing to do, as many of the ingredients just didn’t go together. That recipe placed second or something, I don’t recall. I had won the contest a couple of times, and when I didn’t, my recipes were usually among the finalists. Sometimes well deserved, sometimes just lucky, but I did enjoy having fun with creating recipes (as you can obviously tell by now). That recipe you can view here:

Asian Meatballs with Plum Sauce

I do hope you enjoy this little culinary excursion into the past. Cooking has always brought me joy and finding ways to recreate the old memories really is special to me and a way that I can hang on to the old days forever.

~Sue