Handle Pork Knuckle

Handle pork knuckle belongs to the banquet cooking of Dali county, whose old name was Tongzhou; it is a long-standing local dish, and its making technique was listed among Shaanxi's third batch of provincial intangible cultural heritage in 2011. The name is descriptive: the knuckle is plated with its leg bone left protruding like a handle (把). A popular local tale credits the dish to a Ming-dynasty Tongzhou cook named Li Yushan, who is said to have turned scraps of meat and bone forced on him by a spiteful official into this banquet centerpiece — but that named-person, named-date story is folk lore rather than documented record. What is on record is more modest and more certain: the dish is a traditional Tongzhou banquet item, the headline course of the local 'nine bowls and thirteen flowers' spread, and a recognized provincial heritage craft. It should not be confused with Sichuan's Dongpo pork knuckle, which is braised and usually boned and seasoned quite differently; handle pork knuckle is steamed, kept emphatically bone-in, and seasoned with sweet flour paste.

Set down on the platter the knuckle stands whole, bone pointing up, the skin a deep ruddy brown and so soft it quivers when the dish is moved. A chopstick goes through skin and meat with no resistance; the meat is fall-apart tender and slides clean off the bone, rich but not greasy because hours of steaming have rendered most of the fat away. The flavor leads with the savory-sweet of the bean and flour paste over deep pork, with red fermented bean curd and garlic underneath and a salt edge from the soy. Done well, the skin is gelatinous and glossy, the meat melting, the sauce clinging. Done badly, the knuckle is undercooked and the skin still rubbery and the meat tight on the bone, or it has been let go too greasy because the fat was not rendered and skimmed.

Long, gentle steaming is the whole technique, and it works on the knuckle's connective tissue. Pork skin and the sinew around the foreleg are dense with collagen; held at the steady, moisture-saturated heat of a steamer for three to four hours, that collagen slowly hydrolyzes into gelatin, which is why the skin turns glassy and tender and the meat loosens from the bone. Steam rather than a hard boil is chosen on purpose: the meat sits in its own seasoned juices and is cooked by vapor at around 100°C without being churned, so it holds its shape, the skin does not split, and the rendered fat drains down and pools in the bowl to be poured off or skimmed rather than emulsifying back into the meat — the result is rich but clean, not the greasy slick of a hard braise. The bone is left in both for the name and for flavor, since marrow and bone collagen enrich the juices. The skin is brushed with dark soy before steaming so the surface colors deeply, and the sweet flour paste and red fermented bean curd supply both seasoning and the amino acids and sugars that deepen the savory-sweet note over hours of heat. Finally the collected juices are thickened with a starch slurry into a sauce that clings to the glossy skin.