Ninghua Smoked Dried Field Rat 宁化老鼠干

How it is made

Ninghua is a mountainous farming county with wide fields where field rats thrive and damage crops, and farmers there have trapped them for a long time. Winter is the trapping season, busiest after Lidong (立冬), the solar term that opens winter. Most trappers use a bamboo-tube trap (竹筒捕鼠器) baited with paddy or rice. In the evening they look for rat runs along field banks and hillsides, set the traps on the runs and at burrow mouths, and collect them early the next morning. About three traps in ten usually hold a rat; after a frost the rate rises above five in ten. Teenagers in particular take up trapping when the season comes.

Processing takes three steps. The fur is loosened either by steaming the rat over hot water in a wok or by baking it in glowing wood ash, and then plucked clean. The rat is opened, gutted and washed. Finally it is smoked over rice husk or rice bran until it turns a soy-sauce brown.

How it is eaten

The usual way to cook it is a stir-fry with pork and winter bamboo shoots, seasoned with garlic, ginger and shuijiu (水酒), the local rice wine. People in Ninghua treat eating it in winter as a small luxury, and drinkers rate it the best dish to go with their wine. It is popular enough that a local saying holds "老鼠干猪肉价", meaning dried rat is worth as much as pork.

Where it comes from

No written record says who first turned trapped field rats into a dish, or when. In 2009 the Ninghua county news centre published the method as one of the items the county proposed for intangible-heritage application. It noted that residents in their eighties and nineties described the craft as handed down from their ancestors, and inferred from this that the preserve is several hundred years old.