Xiaogan Fermented Rice Wine

Xiaogan, in the home country of the legendary filial son Dong Yong, has brewed this rice wine for centuries. A late-Qing county gazetteer (the 1882 Xiaogan County Records) noted that the rice wine "came to be in Xiaogan, began in the Song, was later imitated everywhere, yet Xiaogan's alone stood out." Legend adds that the founding Song emperor Zhao Kuangyin, passing through, tasted it and praised it as a "divine dew" — a tale, retold locally, rather than fact. What is consistent across sources is the dish's Song-era roots and its making with Xiaogan's distinctive honeycomb yeast cakes.

A warm bowl, milky and a touch cloudy, smelling of honey and faint wine. The first taste is clean sweetness, then a gentle sourness underneath and the soft warmth — not heat — of light alcohol. The rice grains have gone tender and slippery, still whole, swimming in the thin sweet liquor; if there are little dumplings they are soft and chewy, if an egg, it ribbons through silky. It goes down easy and comforting, a dessert and a tonic at once, best when the bowl is hot.

This is controlled fermentation. Glutinous rice is soaked, steamed firm, then rinsed cool so the grains are loose and separate, not clumped — clumping smothers the yeast. The crushed honeycomb starter, rich in the molds and yeasts that drive saccharification, is mixed through, and the rice is packed into a vessel with a well dimpled in the center to read the rising liquor. Kept warm, the molds first break the rice starch into sugar (the source of the sweetness), then yeast turns a little of that sugar into alcohol — stopped early, before it ferments dry, to keep the result sweet and only faintly boozy. To eat, it is diluted, warmed, and often bound with a rice-flour slurry so the broth lightly thickens.