Macau food - minchee and bread pudim

Macau cuisine is as hybrid as everything else in the culture. Hooray! Macanese food mixes Chinese, Malay, Indian and Portuguese, so removed from their origins as to be almost unrecognizable. Recipes are handed down by family tradition, so they vary from home to home. The iconic soul food is minche or minchee (minced pork stir fried with soy sauce, lots of onions, garlic and pepper, garnished with little cubes of fried potato). Some add a fried egg on top, some add minced beef or ginger. Some minches swim in soy sauce, some are crisp and dry. Europeans may think it sounds like shepherd's pie, but it's cooked in a different way and always served with rice and Chinese greens, like a Chinese dish. Now it's trendy to eat "Macau food" they have "minche fan" on menus in some restaurants. Luckily minche has an exact translation in Chinese, meaning mince.

Here is another typical Macau recipe called "bread pudding" pudim de pao. It's nothing like English bread pudding .
15 eggs - yes 15! one pound of sliced white bread! (bread in South China is always white and paper-like) one pound sugar! 1 pound sugarcoated dried fruit! Serves 8!

Soak the bread in water til soggy (about 5 minutes) Mix eggs, sugar and milk (in tropical South China, they do buffaloes not cows, so milk comes in tins by Carnation). Then mix in the diced fruit and bread and pour the dough into a mould and bake. In these more health conscious days this recipe will probably not catch on. But Macanese people have good genes (hybrid vigour) and many live past 100. LOTS MORE on this site about MACAU, macau food, hong kong, Chinese culture, Chinese food, Chinese movies, Macau history etc