This Chinese dish has become a global icon without getting Westernised

The dish

Mapo tofu, China

Plate up

A dish has to work hard to stand out in China. This is a country of more than 1.4 billion people who eat eight distinctive cuisines across a vast area that ranges from Himalayan peaks to the Gobi Desert to tropical islands. There’s a lot to choose from, and the foods that do achieve global fame tend to be Western adaptations: chow mein, egg fried rice, yum cha dumplings. But then there’s mapo tofu.

This is a serious dish from the Sichuan province with very little room for adulteration, a spicy, salty, numbing stew that has nevertheless traversed the globe in its fame and popularity. Mapo tofu contains three key ingredients: silken tofu, minced beef, and doubanjiang, an umami-rich paste of fermented beans, chillies and salt. To make the dish, garlic, onion and ginger are fried in oil, and then it’s in with the minced beef, then ground Sichuan peppercorns, doubanjiang, then water, tofu, and finally a cornflour slurry to thicken. Serve with rice, and you have a dish that can genuinely claim icon status.

First serve

It’s rare to find such an old and cherished dish with a clear origin story, but that’s what mapo tofu has. It’s all explained in the name: “ma” is short for mazi, which means pockmarked, and “po” is a shortening of popo, meaning elderly woman.

Mapo tofu was invented in Chengdu in the mid 19th-century by Chen Mapo, a woman known for her smallpox scars as well as the quality of the dish she and her husband had begun selling at their modest eatery. The original version used pork mince, though in the 1920s the restaurant capitalised on its lasting popularity and went upmarket, subbing in beef mince and perfecting the recipe.

Order there

In Chengdu, Chen Mapo Tofu still exists on Qinghua Road, and is a must for fans of this dish (no website).

Order here

In Sydney, sample mapo tofu at Spicy Joint (spicyjoint.com.au). In Melbourne, check out Sichuan House in the CBD (sichuanhouse.cafeleader.com). And in Brisbane, try Wu Kong (wukongkitchenandbar.com.au).

Cook it

Try it yourself at home following Neil Perry’s beef mapo tofu recipe on Good Food.

One more thing

Japan has its own distinct version of mapo tofu, which is also worth seeking out: it contains miso and mirin, and forgoes the numbing Sichuan peppers.