Taiyuan Tounao

Tounao — fully 八珍汤, the 'eight-treasures soup' — is a Taiyuan winter specialty served only in the cold season, traditionally before dawn. By long tradition it is credited to Fu Shan (傅山, 1607–1684), the renowned late-Ming Taiyuan scholar, calligrapher and physician, who is said to have devised it as a warming, restorative dish — accounts hold he created it for his ailing mother and passed the recipe to a local Muslim eating-house. That house, 清和元, still serves it in Taiyuan and traces its line to the late Ming, the two strands of the story corroborating Fu Shan's hand in it. The more colourful claims around the name — that 头脑 and the act of eating it 'in the dark before dawn' encode a loyalist's defiance of the new Qing dynasty — are folk interpretation rather than documented fact, and are best taken as legend. What is firm is that it is an old Taiyuan medicinal-food breakfast tied to Fu Shan and to 清和元.

It looks unassuming — a bowl of pale, opaque, lightly thickened broth, almost congee-loose, with a piece of soft-boiled mutton settled in it and a pale finger of astragalus root on top. The taste is gentle and warming: faintly sweet and fragrant from the rice wine and lees, savoury from the mutton, with lotus root and yam giving body, and a low pepper warmth running underneath. The texture is smooth and slippery from the flour-thickening, the mutton fall-apart tender, the astragalus soft enough to eat. It is comfort and medicine at once — you feel the warmth spread — and the pickled leek and dipped flatbread give it crunch and savour against the smooth, mild soup.

It is medicinal cookery as much as cooking. Mutton is simmered tender; the broth is built up with lotus root and Chinese yam (both 'tonic' ingredients in Chinese dietary thinking), then thickened with flour stirred into a smooth, opaque, slightly viscous soup — the flour is what gives 头脑 its characteristic loose-porridge body rather than a clear broth. The warming, fragrant character comes from fermented yellow rice wine (黄酒) and sweet rice-wine lees (酒糟) stirred in, which carry both aroma and, traditionally, the 'warming' action prized in a cold-weather tonic; a length of astragalus root (黄芪) is cooked soft for its restorative repute. White pepper and a touch of ginger add interior heat. Served scalding at dawn, the dish is meant to be eaten through the coldest forty-odd days of winter (数九) for its warming, building effect.