Pork is not only the featured red meat in the traditional Chinese kitchen, it is symbolically central to the entire culture. The skin of a beautiful woman was likened to cool pork fat by Chinese poets, ritually slaughtered pigs figured historically in the propitiation of heavenly deities, and on into modern times whole roasted pigs are a fixture at almost every Chinese celebration. Indeed, the pig is so much at the heart of the Chinese scene that the character for “home” (carrying with it the additional meaning of “family”) shows a pig and a woman under a roof. How’s that for a model on which to build a household?

Having been raised in a Jewish home, not only without a pig but with a prohibition against them, eating pork came to me rather slowly. Alternately fearful that a thunderbolt would come through the window to strike me and attracted to what was forbidden, as a child I took a few tentative nibbles on bacon and cold ham from the deli; that was the extent of my experience with pork. Occasional pecks at Chinese-American fried rice and gnawings on sweet spareribs rounded out my knowledge as a young adult.

I was in for a shock upon arriving in Taiwan to discover pork on every table in its many superb forms, hardly any of them sweet and sour or lacquered with red food dye. My first year—still in the grip of a fashionably emotional vegetarianism cultivated in college—I feasted on “vegetarian ham” and various Buddhist-style gluten concoctions that mimicked the taste and texture of pork. This was excellent stuff, a feature of traditional Chinese eating that had been immortalized in vernacular novels (in which noble characters were revealed by the ordering of such a dish). Lured, however, from my lofty perch that summer by the scent of shrimp in a Kyoto tempura bar, I returned to Taipei a fallen vegetarian with a hunger for real pork. I wasn’t disappointed. Pork, as cooked in China, is a scrumptious affair.

In our China Moon kitchen, we continue the grand tradition of loving pork. While the demands of a constantly changing menu dictate that we rotate the different types of meat, pork is my unabashed favorite; pork fat is supremely clean and light-tasting, and the meat is wonderfully versatile.

Were I to have only one roof over my head and only one animal under it, the beast I would choose would be a pig. In that, I am very Chinese.