Nowadays, Wuxi's sauce ribs have long been famous throughout the country and have become a famous local product. But the earliest Wuxi famous was cooked meat, and sauce ribs are just one of them. Cooked meat is relative to raw meat, and the operator is also a pork shop.
The breed of cooked meat, from the pig's head to the tail, as long as it is on the pig, almost everything is available. Such as: head meat, door gun (tongue), pork belly, elbow carcass, lean (whole lean meat) and heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, around the liver (small intestine wrapped around a small piece of pig liver) and so on. There are even liver clips, pig brains, dirty heads, etc., all kinds of tricks to meet the habits of all kinds of people.
Cooked meat originated in the Mo Xingsheng Hotel during the Guangxu period of the Qing Dynasty, when Chenguang called it sauce meat, which was very popular with the people and became a housekeeper dish in the store. Later, the chef in the shop transferred to Wei Xiangtai Butcher's Shop, and the cooked meat began to be operated by the butcher shop. Because cooked meat was popular with the masses, operators soon spread throughout the city.
There is an interesting phenomenon that most of the butcher shops at that time were opened under the bridge, like Wei Xiangtai and Wang Yuxing next to the Cross Tang Bridge, Lao Sanzhen was under the bridge, and Shenyu Meat Farm was under the Sanfeng Bridge. Ximen Bridge also has two famous butcher shops. What's so special about opening a butcher shop next to the bridge? Because at that time, the opening of shops had to look at feng shui, it is said that the "hot gas" on the bridge was condescending, and other kinds of shops could not eat and could only avoid. And the butcher shop master wields a fast knife all day long, and the fierce god does not dare to entangle it when he sees it. As a result, the position under the bridge was gradually occupied by butcher shops. Usually, butchers sell raw meat in the morning and don't start selling cooked meat until nearly noon.
The head of the meat mound is a large tree stumps, often more than one meter high, fifty or sixty centimeters in diameter, and the location of the store is at a high place, when the master cuts the meat, the customer is looking up, and he can't see the situation on the pier head at all. However, that Chenguang had complete trust in the merchants, and it seemed that he had never been afraid of the master's short weight or bullying the small one. When the meat was brought to hand, only to see the white fat and tender, the red was delicate, making people really want to take a bite right away. Now it seems that the delicatessen shops at that time were indeed very popular. Because dozens of copper plates are really not a big expense, even some poor people can always scrape together these few dollars, and after a while they can taste the meat.
Image source: Network
Reference: Chong'an Street