Dumplings in Vermicelli Soup 粉汤水饺
Dumplings in Vermicelli Soup is featured among the local specialties of Ningxia.
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Dumplings in Vermicelli Soup (粉汤水饺) is a Yinchuan (银川) dish of boiled dumplings served in mutton fentang (粉汤), a spicy mutton soup filled out with cubes of starch jelly and soaked starch noodles. It is tied to the winter solstice (冬至): China Weather Network wrote in 2008 that Yinchuan people drink fentang and eat mutton fentang dumplings on that day, and called the dish a local speciality snack.
How it is made
China Weather Network describes a pot started before dawn. Purple mushrooms from the Songshan (松山) hills are washed and simmered into a stock, then lifted out. Diced mutton is stir-fried until the moisture is gone, then fried again with ginger, spring onion, garlic and chilli powder. The chopped mushrooms go back in, vinegar is added to clear the toxic taste of the wild mushrooms, and mixed spice powder, salt and soy sauce follow. When the meat is tender, wood ear and daylily buds are fried briefly and the mushroom stock is poured in. Once it boils, the cook adds the cut starch cubes, the soaked starch noodles, yellow chives, garlic shoots and coriander.
Flavour and texture
The soup is meant to show five colours: red from chilli, yellow from daylily, green from garlic shoots and coriander, white from the starch cubes and noodles, and black from mushrooms and wood ear. The dumplings that go into it have a huang luobo (黄萝卜, yellow carrot) filling, and China Weather Network notes that dumplings as fragrant and spicy as these are rarely found outside Yinchuan.
How it is eaten
Yinchuan people give the solstice soup an odd nickname, 'head-brain' (头脑), and call the solstice itself the ghosts' festival. The first bowl of fentang dumplings is set out as an offering and another is carried to the neighbours. Anyone who cannot face dumplings early in the morning buys hanging-oven three-cornered flatbreads or fennel flatbreads and soaks them in the fentang instead.
The custom continues. At a 2024 solstice gathering in the Xingqing district (兴庆区) of Yinchuan, in a report on Xinhua's Ningxia channel, residents made mutton dumplings and served them in rich meat broth with clear cubes of liangfen (凉粉, starch jelly), wood ear and radish.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.