Luhe Cold Braised Pig's Head 六合猪头肉

How it is made

Luhe cooks add almost nothing to the pot: spring onion and ginger to take away the porky smell, star anise for aroma, soy sauce for colour and salt for seasoning. The head goes into a zeng pot (甑锅) over a low fire with no open flame, so the brine stays just short of a boil, and after three to four hours the meat is lifted out, cooled and cut.

The brine is kept and topped up with new stock from one batch to the next. A feature on Ziniu News (紫牛新闻), the Yangtse Evening Post (扬子晚报) news platform, reports that the Guabu Old Street (瓜埠老街) workshop at the foot of Guabu hill has used the same brine for seventy years; the owner says it was kept by his godmother's mother-in-law.

Flavour and texture

The meat is eaten as it comes out of the pot once cooled; the Guabu owner says versions that are stir-fried or dressed with extra seasoning are not true Luhe pig's head. The feature names firewood as what sets the Luhe version apart. The owner says that of more than a hundred Luhe kitchens making it, no more than five cook over firewood, and that his attempts with a pressure cooker and gas did not taste as good or come out as tender. Cooked this way, the feature says, the meat is fat without being greasy and melts in the mouth.

Where it comes from

Local tradition gives the dish a history of more than 260 years and links it to the Qianlong Emperor's tours of the south: people are said to have saved the brine from that time and kept adding it to each new pot, on the belief that the older the brine, the more fragrant the meat.

In September 2020 Luhe Cold Braised Pig's Head was named to Jiangsu's list of a hundred local landmark dishes (江苏省百道乡土地标菜), and the Nanjing city government invited the Guabu workshop to show it to visitors at Fuzimiao (夫子庙).