Hope you had a good weekend! If you try either of the recipes in today’s email (the second is the “From the Archives” link), let me know how they turn out. Especially the second one. 😇 — Dan

A few tablespoons of vegetable oil. Three eggs, beaten. About a pound of already-cooked rice. A couple of teaspoons of soy sauce and some thinly sliced scallions — and really, anything else you want. Get a wok or skillet out, take some of the oil and warm it over high heat. Add the eggs to the pan, cooking it until into you get a loose omelet. Fold those eggs up, push them to the side of the pan, add the rest of the oil, and then add the rice. Mix with the eggs until the omelet breaks up and the rice grains separate — maybe a couple of minutes of mixing. Then add the soy sauce and whatever else you’re adding, mixing until the soy sauce evenly coats the mix. Add the scallions, remove from heat, and serve.

Congratulations! You’ve made egg fried rice!

Feel free to share the recipe with whomever you’d like — I adapted it from Serious Eats, it’s not an original. Oh, but a bit of caution:

If you’re in China, don’t share it tomorrow. Wait a few days. I don’t want you getting in trouble with the government, and if you share it on November 25th — or if you shared it on October 24th — you may get a visit from the authorities.

To understand why, we have to go back 75 years. In June 1950, war came to Korea. North Korea, a Communist nation backed by the Soviet Union and China, launched a surprise invasion into South Korea, hoping to unify the Korean peninsula under its control. South Korea, aided by a United States-led UN coalition, resisted the effort. More than three years and as many as three million lives lost later, the two sides settled on a fragile armistice that is still in place today.

One of the lives lost during the war was Mao Anying, the oldest son of the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong. His death has become a major moment in the narrative shared by Chinese dissidents today. Anying died on November 25, 1950, and in recent years, “China’s liberal-leaning crowds have celebrated November 25 as China’s Thanksgiving Day. They believe that if the young Mao had lived, China would have become a hereditary dynasty like North Korea,“ per the New York Times.

But in a regime rife with censorship, one simply can’t go to Weibo (the major Chinese social media platform) and openly celebrate the death of the junior Mao — doing so will get your messages blocked (and, perhaps, worse). So in recent years, those who want to mark the day have done so a different way: they’ve shared egg fried rice recipes or pictures of the dish online. It’s a subtle but tasty reference to the mythic story behind Anying’s demise, as the Guardian explains: “a persistent but frequently denied rumor says he was trying to cook egg fried rice instead of taking shelter, and the smoke from the fire exposed his position to enemy forces.” The government unequivocally states that the story is false, but if anything, that has given the tale outsized importance. Sharing the embarrassing story is taboo, and as a result, posting about egg fried rice on the anniversary of Anying’s death or on his birthday (October 24th) can now get you in trouble — the government has caught on to the trend, and doesn’t take kindly to the tasty dish being eaten or shared in those moments.

And yes, there have been actual crackdowns on this. In October 2020, a celebrity chef named Wang Gang “posted a short video of himself cooking egg fried rice on [October 23rd]; he was widely denounced and forced to issue an apology, saying he was just sharing a recipe,” according to National Post, and in 2011, “another Weibo user was actually jailed for 10 days for making jokes about egg fried rice” per the same article. Wang Gang was back in the news in 2023 for a similar faux pas. On November 27th of that year, he posted another video of himself making egg fried rice. Even though this was two days after the anniversary of Anying’s death, the reaction from nationalists was intense and negative. In response, the chef not only pulled down the video, but per CNN, uploaded a new one apologizing for the error and pledging to “never make egg fried rice again.” And that’s too bad — in 2021, a video featuring his “perfect” egg fried rice recipe hit YouTube, and the rice is so good, the video has amassed more than 18 million views since.

So if you want to give egg fried rice a try, go for it — it’s yummy, easy to make, and inexpensive to boot. (And, by the way, it’s good with leftover chicken.) But if you’re in China, you may want to wait until next week if you want to make a big deal out of it.

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Today’s Bonus fact: In 1999, the movie The Matrix hit movie theaters, delighting audiences. One of the trademark visuals of the movie is green characters raining down against black screens, signifying the digital, virtual world that humans are unknowingly captive in. (Here’s a screenshot of some if you’re not familiar with it. But if you’re really not familiar with it, go watch the movie! It’s great! The sequels… not so much, but the original is fantastic!) If you take a close look, there are a lot of Japanese-inspired characters in there, and that’s not an accident. In 2017, CNET spoke with Simon Whiteley, the production designer who came up with the visual. As Whiteley explained, “I like to tell everybody that The Matrix's code is made out of Japanese sushi recipes.”

The code can’t be reverse engineered into plans for a nice dinner, though; per Wired, “Whiteley went home and began browsing through the ‘stacks of Japanese cookbooks’ owned by his wife, looking for inspiration. One recipe book in particular caught his eye and the recipes therein served as the basis for what would eventually become the film's iconic falling code,” but Whiteley ultimately made so many changes to the characters — flipping them, reordering them, deleting some, etc. — that there’s no actual sushi recipe to be found.

From the Archives: Swedish Lemon Angels: Definitely share this recipe with someone with a sense of humor. Definitely do not try it yourself. (You’ll note that there’s no actual link to the recipe on that article; that’s because after I wrote this in 2014, the website I linked to took down the recipe. But you can find lots of others out there if you wish, and again, the end steps don’t really matter much.)

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And thanks! — Dan