Soochow Pearl Meatballs

Recipe from Lawrence C.C. Chu

These delicate pork baalsever Vers in pearly sweet rice and steamed atop bok choy leaves. They are very versatile, and can be served as an appetizer, with a main meal, or as a midday snack.

Yields:

16 meatballs

Time Required:

• 15 mins. cooking time

Ingredients:

• 1 cup sweet rice glutinous rice)
• 2 dried black mushrooms

Mixture

• ½ lb. (0.45 kg) lean ground pork¹
• 2-3 water chestnuts, coarsely chopped
• 1 green onion (white part), minced
• 1/2 tsp.² (1.3 g) minced fresh ginger
• 1 Tbsp. (15 mL) dry sherry
• ½ tsp. (2 g) sugar
• ½ tsp. (3 g) salt
• ¼ tsp. (0.6 g) white pepper³
• 1 egg
• 1 Tbsp. (8 g) corn starch (US/Canada), aka cornflour (UK/other)⁴

• Bok choy leaves (or other greens)

Preparation:

Needed: Large bamboo steamer.

Soak rice in warm water for 4 hrs. or overnight. Drain well and spread out on a plate. Soak mushrooms in warm water for 20 mins.; drain, remove stems, and mince. Combine mushrooms and MIXTURE ingredients thoroughly, in a large bowl.

To shape, grab a handful of mixture (about 4 Tbsp., equals 60 mL) and squeeze out 1" (2.5 cm) balls from top of fist.

To steam, line bamboo steamer with leaves, to prevent sticking. Roll meatballs in rice, and place on leaves. Cover and steam over boiling water for 10 mins. Remove and place on top of serving platter for easier handling. Bring steamer to the table, to serve.

Author's Notes

If possible, grind your own pork, using pork butt. If you have a food processor, you can process the meat mixture at one time.

A bamboo steamer simplifies the serving process, because you cook and serve in the same container. It's difficult to transfer hot meatballs from a conventional steamer onto a serving platter.

¹ I bought ground meat for decades before realising how quick and easy it is to grind (deboned) meat in a food processor, producing better, fresher, and cheaper food.

² Quarts, pints, cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, and fl. oz. are as defined in US Customary Units, not to be confused with differing British imperial, "legal", "coffee", Commonwealth of Nations, Canadian, Latin American, Japanese, Russian, or Dutch definitions — further proof that everyone needs the metric system.

³ White pepper is the same Piper nigrum berry seed as is sold as black pepper, except left to fully ripen, fermented in water, and the black outer coat removed. Accordingly, it has a milder flavour and lighter colour. Otherwise, one is a natural substitute for the other.

⁴ "Corn starch" is powdered starch processed from the New World grain maize (from Spanish, orig. from Nahuatl), which grain the USA/Canada call "corn", unlike the rest of the English-speaking world, which reserves "corn" to mean cereal grains generically. This starch product, needed here in its customary role as a thickening agent, is called "corn starch" in the US/Canada, but "cornflour" in the UK and most other anglophone lands — not to be confused with whole maize grain: That product — not a thickening agent — is called "polenta", "corn meal", or "corn flour" in the US/Canada, depending on how finely milled, and called "maize flour" in the UK and most other places. Australians should beware that their "cornflour" is starch extracted from wheat kernel, sometimes more-helpfully labelled as "wheaten cornflour". As if that weren't confusing enough, the maize-based thickener may be labelled (in Australia) either as "corn flour" or as "corn starch", so beware. Further, the maize flour product, there, is labelled as "cornmeal".

Note that whole-maize grain is traditionally, in Meso-American cultures of origin, wisely soaked in alkaline solution ("nixtamalised") to increase bioavailability and thereby prevent niacin deficiency (pellagra), among other important benefits, yielding "masa" (lit. dough) aka "masa de maíz" (lit. maize dough), also available in dried & ground form as "masa harina" (lit. dough flour) aka "harina de maíz" (lit. maize flour), and in its unground form, hominy. As further complication, Americans distinguish "corn flour", meaning prepared from maize endosperm only, from "maize flour" for use of whole maize — the former, neutral-flavoured; the latter, much more nutritious.

Origin of the naming mess: Originally, North America shared with Mother England the language's original meaning of "corn" to mean cereal grains generically (from Old English "corn" meaning single seed of any cereal plant, orig. from Proto-Germanic "kurnam" meaning small seed). The colonists got the gift of maize from native peoples, therefore at first calling it "Indian corn". Later, in the USA and Canada, "Indian corn" got worn down to just "corn", while the original meaning of "corn" was lost, locally. "Maize" is thus now the least-ambiguous term in international contexts, though many Americans either don't know that word or reserve it for variants from Latin-American (and Spanish) cooking.

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Taken from: Lawrence C.C. Chu's classic cookbook Chef Chu's Distinctive Cuisine Of China, p. 127. published 1980 by Harper and Row, which can be checked out in scanned format at Internet Archive. Thank you! (Chu's the chef / restaurateur of beloved local restaurant Chef Chu's, in Los Altos, California.)

Collected and re-published at http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/recipes/soochow-pearl-meatballs.html by Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> on Oct. 5, 2026. Individual recipes are free from copyright. Share and enjoy!

(If I have any copyright title in my own very minor contributions to this page — not my intention — they were created in 2026 by Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> and licensed for use under CC0. I have thereby waived all copyright, compilation copyright, and related or neighbouring rights to this work. This work is published from: United States of America.)