Jinshi Beef Rice Noodles

Jinshi was a busy trade port on the Li River in northern Hunan, drawing migrants from many provinces. Local accounts trace beef rice noodles to Hui and Uyghur Muslims who settled the area during the Qing Yongzheng era's gaitu guiliu reforms: accustomed to beef noodles but living in a rice-eating region, they ladled their beef braise over local rice noodles instead. The dish is most associated with the Liu Longzi ("Deaf Liu") noodle house, opened in Jinshi in 1938 by Liu Songsheng, deaf from a childhood illness, who had run a noodle business in Changde from 1930 and learned his beef-cooking from Hui-Muslim cooks before fleeing to Jinshi after the Japanese bombing of Changde. Changde rice-noodle craft, of which the Jinshi style is the flagship, was listed as a Hunan provincial intangible cultural heritage in 2016.

The broth comes up red and slicked with chili oil, beefy and clean rather than greasy. Round rice noodles are springy and slurpable, catching soup in their slight chew; the braised-beef topping is fork-tender and fragrant with spice, the heat building under a deep beef-bone savor. Best eaten scalding hot, the moment it hits the table.

Beef is cut into roughly half-kilo blocks and soaked and pressed in water to purge blood, then long-simmered with a muslin spice bag of twenty-odd aromatics—fennel, amomum, cassia bark, licorice, dried tangerine peel, clove, Sichuan pepper, nardostachys and more—so the spice penetrates the meat. The cooked beef is cooled, sliced, and dressed with beef tallow and chili to make the topping; the cooking liquor is topped up, reskimmed of surface fat and clarified into a crystal-clear master broth. The topping is stewed apart and ladled on at service so the broth stays clean. Round rice noodles, scalded only to order, hold the soup better than flat ones thanks to their cylindrical body and bite.