MUZIChinese Matrix
Cured Pork and Sausage · FFET10425
A Cantonese cured sausage made with pork, sugar, liquor, and soy sauce, then dried in sun and wind.
Pork cured in the twelfth month and air-dried or smoked, and sausages.
Cantonese cured sausage is made from seasoned pork stuffed into casings and dried, with seasonings including salt, sugar, liquor, and soy sauce. The Guangzhou craft description emphasizes pork hind leg and back fat, rose liquor, and fat-to-lean proportions known as sanqi and erba. In Guangdong and Hong Kong, the sausage is also steamed on top of rice.
Cantonese cured sausage belongs to the cured-meat family. Chopped pork is seasoned with salt, sugar, liquor, and soy sauce, stuffed into casings, and dried to a firm texture.5,6
Guangzhou had specialized cured-meat shops during the Republican era, but the earliest written attestation of Cantonese cured sausage itself remains unestablished. An early written sausage method involves stuffing seasoned mutton into sheep intestine and roasting it; it does not establish a record of Cantonese cured sausage.1,4
Cantonese cured sausage is associated with cured-meat making in Guangzhou and the Pearl River Delta, including Huangpu in Zhongshan. Steaming the sausage on rice is a way of eating it in Guangdong and Hong Kong.1,5
The Guangzhou craft description specifies pork hind leg and back fat. The meat is chopped, seasoned with salt, sugar, soy sauce, and rose liquor, stuffed into casings in set fat-to-lean proportions, then dried in sun and wind. Sanqi and erba name different proportions.3,5,6
The craft emphasizes meat selection, the aroma of liquor, and fat-to-lean proportions. Rose liquor provides seasoning, while sanqi and erba distinguish different combinations of fat and lean meat.3
A Guangzhou municipal notice signed October 18, 2022, included Cantonese cured-meat making in the expansion list for the eighth batch of municipal intangible cultural heritage projects, under traditional craftsmanship. The recognition covers the broader cured-meat craft, rather than Cantonese cured sausage alone.2
A tale set in the winter of the twelfth Guangxu year, around 1886, tells of porridge seller Wang Hong dicing and seasoning leftover meat, stuffing it into hog casings, and drying it in a roast-pig oven to make the first cured sausage. This is a folk origin tale and does not establish when Cantonese cured sausage was invented.
Told in: Told in Guangzhou and retold in a recent newspaper article.
