The weather was beautiful, with a high of over twenty degrees Celsius during the day. The wild boar meat Li Xiang had cured was already dry, but it was still missing a bit of flavor. It lacked the final step: smoking with pine and cypress branches.
By now, New Year's Day had passed, and it was the beginning of the twelfth lunar month—the perfect time to smoke cured meat.
This was a traditional method of preserving meat in the south. In ancient times, without refrigerators and with the region's high temperatures, meat would spoil easily, so methods like air-drying and smoking were necessary for storage.
People from regions without the custom of eating cured meat might wonder, 'Now that almost every household has a refrigerator, isn't it better to eat fresh pork? Why go through all the trouble of making cured meat?'
