Yeh-Yeh's Red Roast Pork Shoulder

In Legacy.com's Recipe Vault series, celebrity chefs and food bloggers share how recipes preserve our life stories and connect us to those we've lost.

Chef Ming Tsai is the host and executive producer of Simply Ming, now in its 13th season. The James Beard Award-winning chef and author of five cookbooks owns two Boston-area restaurants, Blue Ginger and Blue Dragon. The recipes he loves are au courant, but his cooking lineage also harks back to his ancestors — and he has plenty of ancestors, as discovered by the hit Public Broadcasting Service genealogy show, "Finding Your Roots." Host Henry Louis Gates traced chef Ming's lineage back 100 generations to one of the first emperors of China.

When we asked chef Ming to talk to us about a recipe with a connection to a lost loved one, he only had to go back two generations. His Red Roast Pork Shoulder evokes memories of childhood visits to his Chinese grandfather in Taiwan. Read our interview with chef Ming as he reminisces about his grandpa's cooking and the open-air markets of Taipei that "always smelled like my childhood," and don't miss the recipe so you can try this mouthwatering dish at home.

I'd like to start by asking you how you got interested in cooking.

You know, that was just an easy thing for me because I was, still am, and will always be hungry. With that in mind, I hung out in the kitchen. As soon as I could stand, 2 years old or whenever it was, I hung out in the kitchen. I'd watch grandpa and grandma cook and watch mom and dad cook. I liked the flames, I liked the smoke, and I especially liked the Scooby snacks they would hand to me as I was standing there.

That's really how I fell in love. Just all the action. But when you're a little kid, your parents disappear, and then food appears. So I wanted to know what the hell was going on back there. I just went back there, and I haven't left.

Do you have any memory of some of the first things you cooked or helped out with?

Oh, absolutely. One of my first real skill sets was sharpening cleavers. My grandfather, with an oilstone, these big Chinese cleavers — and I'm 5 or 6 years old. I was fascinated. He'd test it on a piece of paper — you knew you did a good job if you could slice a piece of paper, right?

The first dish I made was when I was 10. It was fried rice. I made that for some visiting adults. No one else was home but me. This story, just for the record, is out there, but it was my first epiphany as a cook/chef, which is fried rice. Although I don't think it was great; it was a little too oily and a little too much soy sauce, but I am 10, by the way. I should digress: When I told these people, sit down and I'm going to make you fried rice, that was great, except I'd never made fried rice before. So I just knew — I knew I could do it because I'd seen my parents and grandparents do it, and I could handle a cleaver. So I chopped the garlic, I chopped the scallions, I fried an egg, I made it. I think it was pretty good; it wasn't great. But to them, I think, one, they were amazed that a 10-year-old could make food. Two, they smiled. I could make people happy through food.

I think that for anybody, having somebody cook for you is a special thing. Even if it's not perfect. It's special that someone did it for you.

A chicken salad sandwich tastes better when your wife makes it than when you make it yourself.

Exactly.

Always. And that really set me on my path. Wow, you can make people happy through food? I'm going to think about doing this. I might not have had that intent, but I guess I did.

So do you think that's what you like best about cooking? Or is there something else that's your favorite thing about cooking?

Oh yeah, the reason that I'm a chef is that I can make people happy. I can changepeople. They can be miserable, pissed off, upset, sad, whatever — give me two hours with them in one of my restaurants and they can leave a changed person. You can absolutely make people happy through food. And there's also no better glue in this world than food. Food brings everyone together at the dinner table.