Irene Kuo's 1-2-3-4-5 Spare Ribs

Recipe from Irene Kuo

"This is a lighthearted title for an extremely easy and delectable dish—the 1 to 5 referring to the simmering ingredients. The sauce-coated meat is succulent, with a deep sweet and sour flavor. The dish serves 2 or 3 amply when accompanied by rice and a stir-fried leafy vegetable or a crisp salad. The ribs are also good as an appetizer." —Irene Kuo 

For Beef Shank: Her immediate response was: 1-2-3-4-5 beef, a shank simmered with rice wine, vinegar, sugar, soy sauce, and water. The “1-2-3-4-5” corresponded to a Chinese soup spoon ratio of ingredients in the order that she’d rattled off.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 pounds meaty spare ribs (ask the butcher to slice them into individual ribs and cut each rib crosswise into 3 pieces)
1 tablespoon dry sherry
2 tablespoons dark soy sauce
3 tablespoons cider vinegar
4 tablespoons sugar
5 tablespoons water

Directions

Put the ribs in a skillet or saucepan and set it over high heat; add the rest of the ingredients and stir to mingle. When the liquid comes to a boil, adjust heat to maintain a very gentle simmering, and cover and simmer for 40 minutes. Stir and turn the spareribs from time to time. Uncover and turn heat high to bring the sauce to a sizzling boil; stir rapidly until the sauce is all but evaporated. Serve hot. Note: It’s best (and easiest!) to ask your butcher to do the cutting, but if you find yourself with whole ribs, you can either carefully chop them yourself with a sturdy cleaver, meaty side down, or leave them whole. Left whole, they’ll be harder to stir and coat evenly and might look a little funny as the meat shrinks up on the bone, but it works fine in a pinch.

*Insider Family Tips
The recipe from The Key to Chinese Cooking was dead simple except for the part about chopping the spare ribs through the bone into small pieces. Jim pointed out that Irene always used a heavy knife to prep whole chicken and small-boned cuts of meats. But what happens to lingering bone bits?

Her tip to her son was this: Wipe away bone fragments with a cloth or paper towel, and as needed, snip off sharp edges where bones have splintered.

Knowing my cleaver limits and wanting to avoid disasters, I headed to my local butcher, picked out a rack of St. Louis–style ribs and had him saw it through the bone into narrow strips. Then it was just a matter of cutting the rib strips into individual riblets and adding everything to a saucepan. I chose a low 2 1/2–quart pan that would allow the riblets to evenly cook in one layer.

The sherry, soy sauce, cider vinegar, and sugar lent an incredible combination of flavors: bitter, salty, sour, and sweet. The water facilitated initial cooking, but at the end of the line, the pork released its fat to gently fry the flesh and concentrate the seasonings around the dark-and-handsome riblets.

It was transformative to say the least—minimal-ingredient cooking at its best.

Bulletproof & Versatile
The genius of this recipe lies in its elasticity. For example, if you forget to have the butcher cut the ribs, they’ll be harder to stir in the pan. The meat shrinks up so much around the bone that they’ll resemble high-water pants. But even with an oversight like that, the ribs will still taste fine.

For the dry sherry, use a Fino or Amontillado style. You can also use Shaoxing rice wine, which wasn’t well known in America in 1977, when Irene’s cookbook was published.

Chinese dark soy sauce has a touch of molasses to impart a rich mahogany color to dishes. Pearl River Bridge is my go-to brand. When it’s not available, substitute a 2:1 ratio of full-sodium soy sauce (such as Kikkoman) to molasses.