They have all kinds of air-dried meat. Regular pork sausages, special lean pork sausages, spicy pork sausages, duck liver sausages, goose liver sausages, pork with dried tangerine peels sausages, dried pork belly strips, air-dried duck legs, duck gizzard, whole ducks, … But the main items are obviously the sausages.
It is a family-owned business. Each year they spend several months making the sausages. The operation starts in autumn, when the weather cools and the air dries, ending just before Lunar New Year. After that, you have to wait until the next winter to buy their sausages.
You can watch them make the sausages: grinding the meat, stuffing the sausages, tying them up, hanging them up, trimming them, … It is fun. But the floor is slippery with all the fat.
We steam the sausages with rice, stir fry them with vegetables, mix them with noodles or spaghetti, … All good and tasty.
To me, they are a symbol of simple but tasty food, of family, of simply having enough to eat. When I was growing up, having Chinese sausages with rice in winter was a special treat. For seven years, from grade 5 to 11, I attended a boarding school run by the Salesian Brothers. We played soccer for an hour each day after attending classes. By the time we sat down for dinner everyone was ravenous. Feeding 500 growing boys with a tight budget was hard. We never had to go hungry. There were always rice; but not much meat or vegetables. We usually sat 8 to a table. And we often had to ration the meat and vegetables to ensure that those who eat slower could still have a fair share.
Under these circumstances, if your family managed to smuggle in some sausages for you, it is easy to imagine the impact - you become the privileged class, and object of envy. That is partly why Chinese sausages take on such special meaning, even after so many years. Even though I can actually afford to buy lots and lots of them.
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