Xo Sauce

We started making xo sauce to use up the scraps from the country ham platters we serve. And since we make a lot of ham scraps, we make a lot of xo.

For the uninitiated, xo is a Chinese sauce—“sauce” is a loose term here, because the finished product is actually dry and flaky, not at all loose and sauce-like—invented in the 1980s. It takes its name from the “XO” designation given to Cognacs, obviously intended to confer a luxurious aura to the sauce. (Peter Serpico, the source of xo