In my hometown of southern Hebei, whenever I entertain guests or have a party, there will be a famous local food-donkey sausage on the table, and the custom of "no donkey sausage, no noodles" has gradually formed.

Sausage is a very old local delicacy. Jia Sixie, a scholar in the Northern Wei Dynasty, wrote a special "enema method" in "Qi Min Yao Shu", which recorded the preparation method of this kind of food in detail. Almost every nation and region has its own gourmet sausage. For example, Cantonese sausage in Guangdong, Sichuan sausage in Sichuan and garlic sausage in Beijing. However, using donkey meat as the main enema raw material is a major feature of hometown sausage. There is a folk saying: "Dragon meat in the sky, donkey meat on the ground." In the eyes of China people, the dragon is an imaginary deity, but the donkey is a living four-hoofed animal. This kind of sausage has chestnut-colored sausage skin, which is bright and transparent, oily but not greasy, and has a fragrant flavor, which makes you drool at a glance.

At first, the donkey sausage was made by washing the donkey intestines and drying them in the air. Then, the cooked donkey ribs were mixed with broth, chopped into minced meat and evenly mixed, added with pepper, fennel, Amomum villosum, cardamom, cinnamon, shredded ginger, etc., and then mixed with sesame oil, seasoning and soup stock to form a paste, which was poured into the casing. Finally, cook for two hours. Now, the donkey meat sausage in southern Hebei still maintains the traditional skills, such as formula, filling, high-temperature cooking and sterilization, fruit and wood smoking, and every procedure is stick to the rules. Donkey sausage, as a casing, can keep the original flavor of donkey meat unchanged, which is also the characteristic of southern Hebei donkey meat sausage different from other sausages. Filling intestines is also a technical job, and the chef has to pretend that he is not thin and not thin, and then the melon will be smooth after cooking. This technology can't be expressed in words and words, and it can only be mastered by skilled process. In the process of boiling intestines, we should keep an eye on every dish of intestines in the pot, and which one is inflated, so we must quickly poke and deflate it with a long stick with a fine needle tip. Even the best equipment can't finish it accurately. In addition, the temperature is also very important. The temperature depends on experience and feeling. The next smoking and baking is made of peach wood with light sweetness, and the furnace is built with bricks and lined with good clay. The process of smoking and roasting only has the aroma of earth and mahogany, and the simmering is accompanied by the aroma of meat and sesame oil, which gently pours out from the casing. The casing slowly changed from pale red to chestnut-like red, and the fragrance blended with the natural fragrance, which wafted out from the stove.

People who make sausages will build a ventilated arbor in the yard, where they can dry their hot intestines in the weather without rain or snow. Sausages must not get dewy when they are drying. As long as it is a sausage beaten by dew, people will be upset when they eat it. In the process of making sausages, every link needs to be sewn together. According to the words of veteran artists, you can't get into the money, you can't smash your own signboard, and you can't break your conscience.

Persistence and conscience make the donkey meat sausage in southern Hebei always elegant and refreshing.