The Making of Pun Choi Basin Food

The traditional “pun choi” basin food would use a wooden basin as the container. Now for reasons of hygiene, metal or ceramic bowl is used. The ingredients and portions of the food vary according to the traditions of different villages. Normally the ingredients include pork, Chinese radish, fried bean curd puffs, pig skin, squid, and bean curd sticks (tofu skin), etc. But if the occasion is a Jiao festival, the villagers would have to follow a vegetarian diet, and vegetarian ingredients would be used instead. At Ma Tin Tsuen in Shap Pat Heung, after the Lantern Lighting Ceremony to celebrate the newborn son, the head of that household would distribute pork to other villagers; if it is a baby girl, arrowheads are used as an ingredient for the basin food.

The making of basin food is rather complex: it takes a lot of manpower from washing and preparing the food ingredients down to cooking and distribution. Residents of walled villages would normally start preparing for the basin feast one or two days in advance. Helpers from the village would first wash and prepare the ingredients for the master chef to do the cooking. The chef would cook the ingredients type by type, and season to taste. Among them, stewed pork is the most challenging in terms of culinary skills. When all the ingredients have been cooked, the chef and the helpers would arrange them in layers in a big bowl or basin – this step is called “da pun”, or “filling in the container”. The bottom layer consists of ingredients that absorb most readily the sauces, such as Chinese radish, dried conger-pike eel, pig skin, bean curd sticks, etc.; the middle layer is pork; the upper layers are chicken, duck, and fish etc. After the “da pun” process is completed, clansmen would sit round and share a meal at their ancestral hall or in an open space.