Chinese charcuterie is having a moment in the sun

Saveur, an American high-end food magazine, runs a list of hot food trends. This year it dedicated a full page to "Chinese charcuterie". To those of us living in Hong Kong, the pictures were familiar: pink pork sausages speckled with fat and made with fragrant rose wine (laap cheung), dark pudgy goose, pork or duck liver sausages (yuen cheung), thick strips of preserved pork belly (laap yuk), and flattened salted ducks (laap ngaap).

Laap mei, also called wax meats or air-dried meats, are a southern Chinese speciality. They are a winter treat and many companies stop making them after Lunar New Year and only start up again in August. Aside from their being delicious, one of the most rewarding things about investigating laap mei is discovering how resolutely old-fashioned Hong Kong's cured meat industry remains.

While many Hong Kong foods are mass produced, overprocessed, or shipped frozen from the mainland, its sausages, for the most part, are still handmade the traditional way by families with generations of experience, and hung to dry in dim, cramped working spaces in Western district. Despite all the talk about how old Hong Kong is disappearing, in the world of laap mei, the old ways live on.

Sam Hing Lung in Western district is the poster child for old-school artisanal sausage making. A proud family company, Sam Hing Lung was started by Lee Ji Xing, who is now 82.

When we arrived, Xing was napping on a cot beneath the low beams that crisscross the small factory space (during high season, the beams are heavy with drying sausages).