Vegetable Dishes 19: Bean sprouts

I am rather fond of the soft, crisp textures of bean sprouts. When stir-fried, they must be cooked until completely done in order for the flavours from the seasonings to combine harmoniously with them.

Bean sprouts can be used with bird’s nest, with their soft textured and white colour matching each other well. Still, there are many who ridicule this recipe, since it pairs an incredibly cheap ingredient with an exceedingly expensive one. Clearly they do not understand that those such as Chao and Yu went on to respectively accompany Emperors Yao and Shun.¹

豆芽
豆芽柔脆，余頗愛之。炒須熟爛，作料之味才能融洽。可配燕窩，以柔配柔，以白配白故也。然以極賤而陪極貴，人多嗤之。不知惟巢、由正可陪堯、舜耳。

Notes:
¹I cannot find anything on Chao and Yu and their exact relation to the two early Emperors, Yao and Shun. But from this example, they are probably from a lowly or a commoner background.

P.S. Been a bit negligent in posting over the last while. Been trying to catch up with everything in life since the sprint to the finish live with the book launch. Will be doing something thinking about how to post the rest of the Suiyuan Shidan translations, either in bulk or section by section as I have been doing. In any case, some exciting stuff will be coming to this blog. Stay tuned!