Anyone who says tofu is bland or boring hasn’t eaten mapo tofu, the intoxicatingly spicy, fragrant dish from the Sichuan Province of China. Unlike the gentle Vietnamese tofu dishes I grew up with in Southern California, “mapo,” as some casually refer to it, first captured my attention as a teenager in the early 1980s, when my dad and his buddy — whom we always reverently called Mr. Lee — let me tag along for lunch at a Chinese restaurant. As the adults talked, I ate as much of the tender tofu cubes and piquant meat sauce as I could without seeming piggish. Mapo tofu is sometimes translated as “pockmarked old woman’s bean curd.” (In Chinese, “ma” refers to pockmarks, and “po” can refer to an older woman.) The name is an inelegant nod to the smallpox-scarred skin of Mrs. Chen, who is said to have invented the dish in the late 1800s at her family’s restaurant in northern Chengdu.

Source: New York Times October 05, 2020 14:26 UTC