Getting Saucy

From shrimp paste in Tai O to chilli sauce in Aberdeen, we meet four sauce-makers responsible for the flavours of Hong Kong.

- Tiffany Chan

Anthony Yu remembers his father smelling of chilli sauce. “When the factory wasn’t in Aberdeen but behind the store, my father would come home and finish his dinner around 8pm, go back to the shop and continue to work late into the night, until 10pm or 11pm,” he recalls. “He’d bring that chilli sauce smell – that pungent sour, spicy smell – home and it would just permeate the entire house. The smell was especially strong when he would make a dinner of preserved sausages and rice with the sauce. It was actually very fragrant, but I was young and didn’t realise this. I just thought the smell was annoying.”

Today, Yu runs the business with his brother, Charlie, and their father acts as a consultant, or “dictionary”, as he says.