Wine-Lees Pork Offal Pot

Wine-lees pork offal pot is one of the dishes Shanghai claims as genuinely local. It is associated by tradition with a cook named Xu San (徐三) of Sanlintang (三林塘, in what later became Chuansha on the east bank of the Huangpu) in the Jiaqing reign of the Qing dynasty, around two centuries ago, who is said to have set pork ears, brain, tongue, liver, lung, and intestine in a pot of wine lees, though the exact inventor cannot now be confirmed. What is documented is that Yang Guangfu's 《淞南乐府》, a collection of bamboo-branch verses on the customs of the Shanghai region (the 14th year of the Jiaqing reign, 1809), already records the wine-lees and pickling food culture of the area, and the dish later became a signature of old benbang restaurants such as Laofandian (老饭店) and Dexingguan (德兴馆), which were renowned for it by the Guangxu reign. The 钵头 in the name is the small earthenware pot the offal was cooked in; the 糟 is the wine lees that give the dish its aroma.

It arrives bubbling in its pot, the broth cloudy and fragrant with wine lees before the first spoonful. Each kind of offal keeps its own texture: tongue dense and yielding, stomach and intestine springy with a faint chew, lung soft and porous, trotter sticky with collagen. The flavor is layered and savory-sweet, the gaminess of the organs cooked clean away and replaced by the mellow, faintly boozy perfume of the 香糟. Done well, there is not a trace of off odor and the broth coats the lip with gelatin; done badly, the offal is rubbery or still carries the raw smell of poorly cleaned innards, and the wine-lees note turns harsh or sour instead of round.

The dish stands or falls on two things: cleaning the offal and the wine lees. Pig stomach, intestine, and lung carry strong odors and mucus, so each is rubbed repeatedly with salt, flour or starch, and vinegar to strip the slime, rinsed, then blanched from cold water with ginger and wine to drive off the volatile off-notes before any seasoning goes near them; the lung in particular is flushed with water until it blanches pale so no blood stays in its spongy alveoli. The aroma comes from 香糟卤: the solid lees left after rice wine is pressed are steeped with more Shaoxing wine, salt, and sugar and then strained, so the brine carries the esters and aromatic alcohols of the fermentation without the raw grain. Long gentle cooking in the earthenware pot does the rest — collagen in the trotter and tendon breaks down to gelatin that thickens the broth, while the porous offal and the lung act like sponges, soaking up the savory, wine-scented liquid. The pot is never boiled hard, which would toughen the organ meats and boil off the delicate lees aroma.