Luchuan White-Cut Pork Trotters 陆川白切猪脚

How it is made

A Luchuan cook with more than ten years at the stove, interviewed by the Yulin Evening News (玉林晚报), says the dish must use the front trotter of a Luchuan pig. The trotter is washed, scraped of bristles, tied neatly with strips of bamboo and put into a pot of clear water. It is boiled over a high flame, then a low flame, then soaked in iced water; the whole process takes more than two hours and is finished when a chopstick can pierce the skin easily. The cooked trotter is laid out to cool, kept in the refrigerator and sliced onto the plate only when it is to be eaten.

Flavour and texture

The Yulin Evening News describes Luchuan white-cut dishes as crisp-skinned and smooth-fleshed, clean and fresh in taste. The cook credits the pork: Luchuan pigs, raised on rice bran, have thin skin and tender, well-flavoured meat that is fatty without being greasy. Chilling in the refrigerator both keeps the trotter fresh and makes it crisp and refreshing to eat.

The dip is built on Wushi soy sauce, a Luchuan speciality the cook describes as fragrant, rich and savoury, mixed with peanut oil, red shallot, soy sauce, garlic and pickled ginger.

Where it comes from

Luchuan has a large Hakka community whose cooking favours light, fresh flavours and the natural taste of the ingredients, so poaching and white-cutting are common there; white-cut trotters, goose and chicken are its classics. A local story sets the origin in the early Republican years at Xielu Villa (谢鲁山庄). Two sedan-chair bearers of the villa's owner, Commander Lü Yunong (吕芋农), took two cooked trotters from the kitchen and were halfway through them on the hilltop when their master called for his sedan chair; not wanting to waste the rest, they put it in a mountain stream. Days later they found the trotters unspoiled and crisper and less greasy, washed by the cold water. Others copied them and added Wushi soy sauce, creating the villa trotter (山庄猪手); today a refrigerator does the stream's work.

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