Qingong Pork Meatballs 钦工肉圆

Qingong Pork Meatballs (钦工肉圆) are springy balls of pounded lean pork from Qingong (钦工), a market town in the northern countryside of Huai'an District (淮安区), Huai'an (淮安). They are one of the classic dishes of Huaiyang cuisine (淮扬菜), and the making technique is on Jiangsu's provincial intangible cultural heritage list. The Huai'an CPPCC history site puts the dish's history at more than 200 years.

How it is made

The meat is lean pork, preferably hind leg, from a pig slaughtered no more than two hours earlier, with the fat and sinew removed. It is never chopped with a knife: the cook pounds the whole piece several hundred times with iron bars or a flat iron beater until it becomes a paste, pulling out even hair-fine sinews along the way. Water is worked in several times and the paste is left to rest after each addition. It is then mixed with some fat, salt, chicken juice, egg white, cooking wine, ginger and scallion, covered with gauze and kept out of the light for four to five hours before being shaped by hand, then poached in broth or deep-fried.

Flavour and texture

The meatballs are smooth, tender with a slight crispness and very springy, meaty but not greasy. Poached in soup they stay white with a pink tinge; pan-fried they turn reddish-gold. A local rhyme claims that a meatball thrown over a wall is still round and smooth when picked up and bounces when it lands; the Huai'an CPPCC history site calls that an exaggeration but says one dropped from the table really does bounce.

Where it comes from

Qingong was one of the three big rural market towns of old Huai'an. Meatballs became a popular snack on market days, when those with more money ordered a bowl of meatballs and those with less a bowl of meatball soup; the Liu, Cheng and Li families' versions came to be judged the best. Huaihai Evening News (淮海晚报) repeats the story that the dish was created when an imperial commissioner (钦差大臣) was stationed at Qingong in the Kangxi reign (康熙) to supervise river works, and that it became a tribute to the court, hence the alternative names Qinggong meatballs (清贡肉圆) and Qingguan meatballs (清官肉圆). In 1999 the Jiangsu trade department and cooking association named it a Jiangsu famous dish.

How it is eaten

At weddings and funerals in the area, each table of eight gets one bowl of 24 meatballs, three per guest. In the Hexia (河下) old town of Huai'an District, at the Li family shop (钦工李家肉圆), the sixth-generation maker Li Yangyang (李阳阳) still pounds the meat by hand every day.