AS A CHILD I loved Chinese food. My family, like most people in England in the 1970s, seldom ate in restaurants and a takeaway – fish and chips, Indian or Chinese – was a rare and thrilling treat. I can’t remember much about the Chinese takeaways we shared. Chicken with tinned bamboo shoots, fried noodles and prawn crackers certainly played a part. But the one dish my little sister and I loved most of all was sweet-and-sour pork. It consisted of a paper bagful of golden, deep-fried balls of batter with pieces of pork tucked inside, served with a polystyrene cup filled with a luminous red sauce. There was never enough of it to satisfy our appetites; it always left a tantalising taste in our mouths, enough to fuel fantasies of the next, distant Chinese takeaway and months of pestering our beleaguered mother, whose delicious and wholesome home-cooked meals never met with quite such a rapturous reception.

     Sweet-and-sour pork balls weren’t just a favourite for my sister and me. They were the archetypal Chinese dish for a whole generation of Britons, the accessible and acceptable face of a cuisine otherwise renowned for its textural weirdness and exotic ingredients. Who could dislike a deep-fried pork ball with sweet-and-sour sauce, a morsel that answered loudly to our primitive evolutionary call for fat, salt and sugar, its cloying sweetness cut by the light, bright strains of rice vinegar? It was a crowd pleaser, childishly irresistible, like cheesy Wotsits and Pringles crisps.

     Behind the scenes, the staff of Chinese takeaways despised the British for their barbarian tastes. The novelist Timothy Mo, in a tale set in the Chinese restaurant world of the 1960s, described the food cooked for non-Chinese guests as “total lupsup [rubbish], fit only for foreign devils”. Dishes at a takeaway opened by his main character “bore no resemblance at all to Chinese cuisine … ‘Sweet and sour pork’ was their staple, naturally: batter musket balls encasing a tiny core of meat, laced with a scarlet sauce that had an interesting effect on the urine of the customer the next day.”

     Yet this confection, disdained as it was by the Chinese, was so adored by foreigners that it became a kind of metonym for Chinese cuisine and even China in general. The title of Timothy Mo’s novel was Sour Sweet. Twenty-five years later I subtitled my own culinary recollections A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China. Though the Chinese are not the only producers of sweet-sour delicacies – consider Sicilian caponata and English pickles, even mango chutney – anyone might think China was their spiritual home.

     When I started visiting China in the 1990s it was a surprise to discover that sweet-and-sour dishes were a rarity on restaurant menus. One might be offered the occasional deep-fried fish in a sweet-and-sour sauce, or perhaps a sweet-and-sour salad, but that was as far as it went. When I lived in the Sichuanese capital, Chengdu, for a couple of years, one restaurant near the university did, it’s true, serve sweet-and-sour pork, but it bore little resemblance to the pork balls of my childhood memories. There, strips of pork tenderloin, lightly battered and fried, were bathed in a subtle sauce seasoned with not only sugar and vinegar but also garlic, ginger and spring onion. Even so, the dish was singularly unpopular with local diners: it was only foreign students who ordered it, and with hindsight I suspect that it was solely our presence that demanded its inclusion on the menu at all. For the Sichuanese, the sweet-and-sour, or literally “sugar-vinegar”, taste was just one of dozens of flavour combinations and far less exciting than local specialities such as “fish-fragrant”, “scorched chilli” and “numbing-and-hot”.

     I have no idea when and how sweet-and-sour pork began to hog the Chinese culinary limelight in Britain. Did it evolve out of some sweet and vinegary dishes that were brought over by early Shanghainese immigrants to the Liverpool docks? Or were the pork balls derived from the Hong Kong version of sweet-and-sour pork, gu lou yuk? The latter did seem more likely. Gu lou pork is a curious dish with a slightly murky history. It consists of strips of pork with a good streaking of fat that are covered in starch, deep-fried and tossed in a wok with tinned pineapple, bamboo shoots or peppers and a sweet-sour sauce. The name gu lou, an anomaly in Chinese, is an onomatopoeia representing what in English might be called a glugging or rumbling sound.

     Chinese culinary sources explain the origins of gu lou pork in various ways. According to the respectable reference work Classic of Food, published in 1999, it may also be known as the similar-sounding gu lao pork, or “pork in the ancient style” and dates back to the late 19th century when, as a result of the punitive conditions of the treaty that ended the First Opium War in 1842, foreigners were allowed to settle in the port of Guangzhou. The foreign residents, so the story goes, loved eating local sweet-and-sour pork ribs, but were unaccustomed to spitting out the bones, so Guangzhou chefs began to make the dish with boneless meat. And because the foreigners struggled with Chinese pronunciation, they often said “gu lou” instead of “gu lao”. Locals noticed that people chewing the springy pork made glugging or rumbling sounds, the account concludes, so the name gu lou was the one that stuck. Another culinary dictionary says foreigners in late Qing Dynasty Guangzhou made these noises because they weren’t used to chewing bones.

     Do people eating sweet-and-sour pork or pork ribs really make glugging, rumbling sounds? And, in a country where the origins of many well-known dishes date back hundreds or even thousands of years, did the humble sweet-and-sour pork ribs ever really merit the label of “ancient”? Furthermore, since when did Chinese restaurateurs change the names of classic dishes to accommodate the mispronunciations of foreigners? This explanation always sounded fishy to me.

     It wasn’t until I leafed through Chen Zhaoyan’s 2002 Complete Book of Common Hong Kong Dishes that I found a much more convincing tale. According to Chen, the Cantonese originally called this boneless version of their old pork-rib dish foreign devil pork (gweilo pork). Given that some Hong Kong people still call Westerners foreign devils, and that anti-foreign feeling must have been at its peak in the humiliating years after China’s defeat in the First Opium War, gweilo pork could have seemed like the perfect name for some dumbed-down dish invented for those foreign sojourners. And the Chinese had always given disparaging names to foreign foods. The tomato is still called a barbarian aubergine in many parts of the country, pepper is barbarian pepper and the carrot a barbarian radish.

     The ingredients of the sweet-and-sour sauce used for gu lou pork vary from recipe to recipe, but apart from the essential sugar and vinegar they usually include tomato sauce and a few other bottled condiments. One recipe in a Hong Kong cookbook suggests making a brew of sugar, vinegar, tomato sauce, O.K. Fruity Sauce and Worcestershire sauce, with a couple of slices of lemon and a Chinese plum; other versions recommend adding Bird’s custard powder to the marinade. And of course the lurid British version I remember would have relied on artificial colouring.

     Although Hong Kong cooks are not above using Western packaged seasonings in dishes for their own consumption, such a riotous assembly of them in a single dish would appal a conservative Cantonese gourmet; presumably, this is the kind of “total lupsup” to which Mo refers in his novel. Yet even if sweet-and-sour pork was originally intended as an insult to our infantile gastronomic sensibilities, foreign devils like me just loved it. And strangely, though China’s opening up in recent years has exposed the world to ever more sophisticated Chinese cooking, the sweet-and-sour genre remains extraordinarily popular. A Google search for sweet and sour generates nearly 13 million hits; for “sweet-and-sour pork” the total is about 800,000, most of them links to recipes.

     So Cantonese cooks continue to serve “glugging, rumbling” pork not only to gullible foreigners but also to young, Westernised Chinese, while displaying a certain amnesia about its original cultural meaning. Even Chen, who spills the beans in Hong Kong Dishes, skates tactfully over the subject in another collection of Hong Kong recipes published in his name the same year, merely referring to an old name of “ancient” pork and suggesting that the fruity sweet-and-sour sauce had become part of the dish in the 1950s.

     The item has its place in the pantheon of Cantonese classics, even if it has always been more popular with foreigners than native Chinese – and the gweilo connection is rarely mentioned.

     Sweet-and-sour pork is no longer something I particularly enjoy. These days I find its sweetness cloying and anyway, it has been eclipsed in my affections by so many more subtle and exquisite dishes. Faced with a choice of sumptuous Dongpo pork, lip-tingling Sichuanese chilli chicken and clear-steamed bass, why would anyone choose foreign devil pork? And sweet-and-sour pork balls have largely disappeared, at least from restaurant menus. I did buy a bagful from a takeaway in London a couple of years ago as part of my research for a newspaper article. They were exactly as I remembered and yet I couldn’t imagine how I had ever eaten them for pleasure. Just one of the stodgy dumplings with its nugget of tough pork in the centre, dipped in the almost fluorescent sauce, was enough to shatter my memories forever.

     This year, however, I happened to visit the old city of Chaozhou in southern Guangdong Province, which is renowned for its street snacks and for a cuisine that is a thrilling diversion from the Cantonese mainstream. In the back alleys market traders were selling the famous spiced goose with its garlic-and-vinegar dip, as well as an assortment of rice-flour dumplings. And then I came across one stall where a glass cabinet displayed little golden balls of what they called guo rou (guo means fruit, but the people of this region use the word to describe all kinds of dumplings, pastries and noodles; rou is meat). Intrigued, I bought one and it turned out to be a mixture of minced pork and fish, seasoned with spring onion and spices, covered in a thin batter and deep fried. It was served, Chaozhou style, with a dip, which in this case was a sweet-and-sour plum sauce. It was magnificent, crisp and fragrant, deliciously savoury and perfectly complemented by its light, fruity sauce. For a moment, it seemed as if my tastes as child and adult had been reconciled.

      Could it be, I wondered, that this was the true ancestor of the sweet-and-sour pork balls that had been served in every Chinese takeaway in Britain, rather than Hong Kong-style sweet-and-sour pork? Had one stray Chaozhou immigrant infiltrated a Cantonese takeaway somewhere in suburban England and tried out a new version of an old family recipe that was eventually copied up and down the country? Somehow, it made me feel better to imagine that my favourite dish had been the bastard offspring of a true Chinese delicacy, rather than the bastard offspring of a dish that had only ever been chucked together for the debased pleasure of foreign devils such as me.