Cantonese Slow-Cooked Soup 老火靓汤

Cantonese Slow-Cooked Soup (老火靓汤), literally 'old-fire fine soup', is the long-simmered soup of Guangzhou (广州) and the wider Cantonese-speaking Guangfu (广府) region. It is cooked for about three hours over a low flame, usually from chicken, duck or pork ribs, with additions such as kudzu root (粉葛) or the herb jigucao (鸡骨草).

How it is made

Guangzhou Daily (广州日报) describes how Guangzhou people make it. The meat is first dipped in boiling water with two or three slices of ginger, a step called feishui (飞水) that draws out blood and gamey smells, then rinsed in cold water and drained. It goes into a clay pot with water and the other ingredients, is brought to the boil over a high flame with the lid on, and then simmers on a low flame for two to three hours until everything is soft. Salt goes in only when the lid comes off at the end. The saying 'three to simmer, four to double-boil' (三煲四炖) sets simmered soups at about three hours.

Ingredients

The Guangzhou tourism bureau lists meat, eggs, seafood, vegetables, dried fruit, grains and medicinal herbs as soup ingredients, and says the soups change with the seasons. Its examples of local soups include black-skinned chicken with donkey-hide gelatin and red dates, squab with Chinese yam and poria, watercress with pork bones, coconut chicken, duck with winter melon and lotus leaf, and bitter melon with soybeans. At the Qingping (清平) traditional medicine market opposite Shamian Island (沙面), many of the older women who shop there regularly buy herbs for soup rather than for medicine.

Where it comes from

The Guangzhou tourism bureau ties the habit to the city's hot, damp climate, and Guangzhou Daily notes the Cantonese belief that soup clears internal heat. The Tang-dynasty official Liu Xun (刘恂), who served in Guangzhou, recorded a soup called buna geng (不乃羹), boiled from mutton, chicken, venison and bones; the meat was lifted out and guests were served only the broth. Bronze cauldrons holding pig, chicken and fish bones were found at the tomb and palace sites of the Western Han-era Nanyue kingdom (南越国).

How it is eaten

At Guangzhou banquets the soup comes first and the dishes follow, and a local saying holds that a meal can go without dishes but not without soup. An old Guangzhou custom treats soup as a signal in courtship: when a young woman tells her boyfriend that her mother is inviting him to drink soup, he has most likely been approved.