Preserved Horse Beans

NYT Cooking

Yearly Surplus

Gish Jen, the author of “Mona in the Promised Land,” shared this recipe with The Times in the late 1990s. Growing up in Scarsdale, N.Y., she was “suspicious” of her mother’s cooking. “I mean, I never ate the kind of Chinese food they serve in restaurants.” But she came to love her mother’s family-style Shanghai cooking. This dish is an adaptation of a dish served at the traditional Chinese New Year feast (her mother made it with steamed carp), along with Step-by-Step Higher (rice and cabbage), High Achievement (pork and hard-boiled eggs) and Safety in All Seasons (chicken with chestnuts and ginger). To derive the maximum benefit from the feast, the author said, you have to eat absolutely everything — the sweet and the sour.