Ruifang Fried Fish Paste Drumsticks 瑞芳龙凤腿
Ruifang Fried Fish Paste Drumsticks is featured among the local specialties of Taiwan.
Ruifang Fried Fish Paste Drumsticks (瑞芳龙凤腿), longfeng tui or 'dragon and phoenix legs', are a fried snack from Ruifang District (瑞芳区) in New Taipei City (新北市), Taiwan. Fish paste, minced pork and chopped vegetables are wrapped in pig caul fat, pushed onto a bamboo skewer and deep-fried until they look like chicken drumsticks. In Ruifang they have the nickname 'poor family's chicken leg' (穷人家的鸡腿).
Where it comes from
Two stories explain the snack. In the first, families in early Ruifang could rarely afford chicken legs, so mothers took the caul fat from around a pig's stomach, which was otherwise thrown away, and shaped fish-paste filling into mock drumsticks on skewers. The name 'dragon and phoenix' refers to its two fillings, fish paste and minced pork. In the second, a fish-paste maker who found it wasteful when paste went unsold borrowed the method of the Taiwanese chicken roll (鸡卷), and the fritter became so popular for wedding banquets that it was given the auspicious name.
Taiwan Television (TTV) reported in 2021 that many people in Ruifang stop for one near the railway station, and profiled Hua Ji Longfeng Tui (华记龙凤腿). According to the report, the grandmother of Zhou Zhiyuan (周志远) began frying them to make up for the chicken legs her children went without; the business is now in its third generation and has been selling them for close to 60 years.
How it is made
The filling is fish paste mixed with pork and vegetables such as carrot, onion and cabbage. The Chinese Wikipedia article on caul fat also lists water chestnut. The stall filmed by TTV uses shark fish paste mixed with minced pork. The mixture is wrapped in a thin layer of pig caul fat (猪网油), the membrane from inside a pig's belly, then fried in hot oil until golden.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-25. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.