LONG BEFORE NOSE-TO-TAIL COOKING BECAME FASHIONABLE, THE CHINESE WERE USING JUST ABOUT EVERY PART OF THE ANIMAL.

This becomes obvious when you visit any of the numerous wet markets in Hong Kong. Here, under the glow of the trademark red lamps, every part of the beast is hung in glorious splendour. Butchers with menacing cleavers slice meat, from whole carcasses to offal, with the precision of surgeons, while simultaneously dispensing cooking tips with the ease of trained chefs.

The meat in question is pork; I have to add that no other race ‘does’ pork better than the Chinese. Much loved for its sweet flavour, pork is so highly regarded that when the Chinese talk meat, they mean pork. Because of this love affair, Chinese cooks have developed a repertoire of pork cookery that is almost limitless – how it is cooked and which restaurant makes the best siu mei (the umbrella term for roast meats) is talked about incessantly on television and on social media.

Char siu (meaning ‘fork roast’) is the much-loved glossy, salty-sweet Cantonese barbecue pork belonging to this genre. In this food-mad city, consumers readily cross town to queue for hours for this delicacy. Just go to Joy Hing, a restaurant in Wan Chai, and you’ll discover what I mean. At this fast-paced, bare-bones, non-English-speaking eatery the char siu glistens. Should you go, ask for ssam bou fan, the holy trinity of char siu, soy chicken and roast duck. If you prefer your char siu in more sophisticated surroundings, head for Tin Lung Heen at the Ritz-Carlton. Made with prime Ibérico pork shoulder with an even distribution of fat and lean meat, the barbecued pork is sublime and tender.

The love of pork is so entrenched in Chinese culture that the 11th-century poet Su Dongpo even wrote a verse on this versatile meat. The legendary dish from Hangzhou known as Dongpo pork is said to have been created by him. It’s made with pork belly, which the Cantonese call ng fa yoke, meaning ‘five-flower meat’ for its alternate layers of fat and lean meat. Extraordinarily delicious, this dish is made with soy sauce, sugar and Shaoxing rice wine and slow-cooked until the fat in the meat turns jelly-like. The Shanghai red-cooked pork in this chapter is similar to this famed dish.

Unsurprisingly, Chinese cooks in Hong Kong have come up with ingenious ways to use every part of the pig, and adventurous diners are more than happy with this guts-and-all approach. The fat is rendered into lard for stir-frying with lean meat, while the skin is either sun-dried or deep-fried into puffy, crunchy pieces (not dissimilar to the Spanish chicharrón) or simmered for hours until it turns gelatinous for making xiao long bao, the glorious dumpling from Shanghai. As for the lungs, they’re made into tonic soups, and the liver is either stir-fried with seasonal greens or made into old-school dumplings as offered in the rough-and-tumble dim sum institution Lin Heung Teahouse. Collagen-rich trotters are given to birthing mothers; cooked for hours with lots of wok-roasted ginger and sweetened black rice vinegar, it’s believed this dish not only helps them lactate but also improves their circulation. If trotters are your thing, it makes for exceptionally good eating.

Pork is used for lap cheong, Cantonese pork sausages speckled with fat and infused with a potent rose-flavoured spirit called Mei Kuei Lu Chiew. It’s also used to make lap yuk, cured belly pork flavoured with soy sauce. Both of these are used in claypot rice, a comforting winter dish (see here).

While it’s undeniable that pork cookery has a unique place in Chinese gastronomy, beef certainly holds its own with the Hong Kong Chinese. Perhaps this has something to do with the city’s proximity to Shunde in Guangzhou, from where many of Hong Kong’s most brilliant chefs hail, but there’s a canon of both traditional and innovative beef dishes. Two of the most famous are beef in oyster sauce, and stir-fried beef with black beans. For both, there’s a tendency for Cantonese cooks to tenderise the meat by adding bicarbonate of soda. This is partly due to the poor quality of beef that was historically sold in markets – traditionally, oxen were regarded as beasts of burden. However, tenderising beef is unnecessary in the West since the meat is generally hung.

One of my favourite beef dishes is the ever-popular braised brisket. A rich, nourishing street food, perfumed with star anise, Sichuan peppercorns and ginger, and refreshed with daikon some minutes before serving, this is one of the nostalgic dishes my sister made for me when I was a child. It’s a dish that will bring a tear to the eye of many Hongkongers when they long for the comforts of home. If you’re a beef brisket lover and not particularly concerned about sharing a table, you simply must go to Kau Kee, virtually an institution at more than 90 years old.

Another notable staple is beef hor fun. Sold at many dai pai dong street stalls and high-end Cantonese establishments, it’s made with strips of beef, fresh rice noodles and bean shoots. Properly cooked, the noodles sing with the sensational elusive wok fragrance and the tender beef is beautifully coated with sauce. Easy to rustle up, this is one dish I cook whenever I feel homesick for Hong Kong.

Apart from in a handful of Uighur and Chinese-Muslim restaurants scattered throughout the city, lamb dishes are not often featured in traditional Cantonese eateries. Perhaps because there’s little pasture land in the region. Lamb is also considered ‘heating’ in traditional Chinese medicine – two popular winter dishes are lamb hotpot and braised lamb with bean curd sticks.

While most of the recipes that follow in this chapter are essentially Cantonese and Chinese, it pays to remember that Hong Kong is vastly cosmopolitan. Chefs and passionate cooks from all over the world have contributed to its ever-changing foodscape, including the long-established Indian community. So you’ll find pukka British fare with HP sauce (which, incidentally, has snuck into the Cantonese food world) along with some of the best curries outside India and Pakistan.