I trekked to Confucius Plaza today to see my visiting dad. My pops likes to visit New York quarterly to see the relatives and to stock up on Chinese ingredients. One of those ingredients he picks up on his New York Chinatown trips is called Lap Cheong (or Lop Chong)
which looks like a pair of gory nunchucks you would see Freddy Krueger wielding as he chased you in a terrible, terrible nightmare.
Lap Cheong is affectionately called Chinese sausage which means it’s shaped or prepared in a similar manner as traditional sausage, but involves a lot of animal parts that Americans wouldn’t touch.
Being Chinese-American, I kinda understand — Lap Cheong isn’t pretty – it’s definitely one of those foods where you wouldn’t find very appetizing just on sight. It not unlike an old lady’s wrinkly fingers that had all the skin ripped off it. Yeah, it does.
Really though, once you get past what it looks like, Chinese sausage is pretty damn good. The Cantonese version is made of pork fat, pig fat, fat of the pork, some pork and some liver, rose water, soy sauce, and rice wine. Then a rope is placed into it, so it can be hung out to dry and to give us something to Instagramz!
