The dish I am going to make is the red-braised beef noodle, a dish that carries my childhood memory. When I was young, I used to travel with my family by train. The most exciting part of the voyage was having a bowl of red-braised beef noodles with my family on the tray table in the narrow cabin. It was the highlight of the long and tedious train trip. Now that I am older, train travel is rare. Instead, I always take a plane to save time. However, I am still quite into beef noodles and I often ordered a bowl of beef noodles at the high school dining room. Every time I have it, it reminds me of the time I spend with my family and the trips we went on together. Thus, I decided to choose the red-braised beef noodle as the noodle dish for my midterm project.

The red-braised beef noodle is also known as the Sichuan Beef Noodle or the Taiwan Beef Noodle. It is a noodle soup made of red braised beef, Chinese noodles, and vegetables. One bowl of beef noodles is often eaten as a whole meal, with the noodles representing Fan and the beef and vegetables representing Cai. It sometimes has some side dishes like Paocai, Chinese-style pickling. There are a lot of small noodle houses serving it almost everywhere in the city. It is pretty common to walk into the noodle house near your workplace or school and have a bowl of beef noodles within 10 minutes. Its nutritious and time-saving characteristics have made it a popular breakfast dish and business meal.

The history of red-braised Beef Noodles is quite controversial with a debate of where it is originally from, Sichuan or Taiwan. According to some sources, it was first introduced by a group of veterans who fled from mainland Sichuan to Taiwan.[1] The food market in Taiwan, which sells food materials from different regions from mainland China, made it possible for those veterans to fuse and modify the dishes they were able to cook to create new food. The red-braised beef noodle was a result of a combination of red-braised beef from Sichuan and noodles by those veterans from Sichuan. With the improvement of this dish according to the needs in Taiwan, the red-braised beef noodle was finalized and became quite popular. This dish, as a creation of veterans who had left their hometown for years, not only represents the memory of the taste of two generations, but also carries with it thousands of people’s homesickness and shortens the distance between their hometowns and their distant locations.[2]

I learned the method of making red-braised beef noodle from my aunt. I am so glad I can finally make one of my favorite foods by myself. I also find it quite interesting to learn the history of the red-braised beef noodle.