Linchuan Pickled Vegetable Stems 临川菜梗

Linchuan Pickled Vegetable Stems (临川菜梗) are a salted, fermented vegetable-stem pickle from Linchuan (临川) in Fuzhou (抚州), Jiangxi, long made in family kitchens and small workshops and now also produced in a factory.

Where it comes from

A Linchuan maker interviewed by the Workers' Daily (工人日报) in 2021 cites the Linchuan county annals as recording that local people were already skilled at making the pickle in the Northern Song period. By the same account, the statesman Wang Anshi (王安石), one of Fuzhou's famous sons, took the stems to the capital after he rose to fame and shared them with high officials, and so the pickle became one of Fuzhou's tribute foods. The maker, who grew up in Qingni village (青泥村) in Linchuan, remembers it as a treat on the family table in a poor childhood.

How it is made

The Workers' Daily calls it a delicacy handed down for a thousand years that has always been made on a small scale, in small workshops and households. When the maker's company set out to produce it in quantity, storing, salting and fermenting it became problems, which the company solved with probiotic fermentation developed together with Nanchang University (南昌大学). Its plant now has a sterile filling room and an automated line for vegetable products, chiefly the stems, and its products are sold in large supermarkets in Fuzhou and Nanchang.