Roast Pork

Roast pork is not a Foochow dish. It is very much a Cantonese Chinese New Year dish.


Although my mother is a very good cook, she has never roasted belly pork in the open, in a huge oil drum nor in an oven in the kitchen. She loves deep frying, steaming, stir frying and other simple methods of cooking.

I cannot remember when was the first time I ever had roast pork but I remember a story associated with it, probably told by my father but according to my mother she was not really sure who this Cantonese man was and so the story was probably not told by my father. She said it was not verified. But any way it was a story from the past. The days before Google, and days before Whatsapp.

It was a Chinese New Year Eve and a Cantonese man got a pig slaughtered all by himself,reared by his wife. He arranged for a diesel drum to roast his pork and soon the aroma of the cooking pork attracted a lot of attention. In those days diesel drums were very precious and they were used only to store water. Who would have thought of using a diesel drum to roast pork?

Neighbours came around to watch him and his roast pork. First the pork face was done and he had it hung up in the yard to cool and then he slowly roasted the other choice parts.

He had given the bones and the lesser cuts to his wife to cook for the New Year Eve Dinner.

His roast pork was so successful that his mother who was born in Guangzhou gave him 100 marks.

Thereafter he would slaughter a pig and make some roast pork for the new year. Some years he would sell his roast pork, other years when he made extra cash, he would give a big portion to the temple for the rituals.

P.S. Sibu being a very Foochow town did not see much of roast pork be it roasted belly pork (siew york) or the red char siew. Even kampua, the Foochow dry noodles go with just slices of boiled pork.

Ib retrospect, it was good that at least in Sibu we could buy some roast pork,from special shops and "carts", for Chinese New Year in the early days. We definitely never had roasted belly pork for New Year.

(My sisters and I are now trying our best to think which restaurant served good roast pork in Sibu.)