Frozen Raw Fish Shavings 刨花鱼片

How it is made

Shenghuo Bao (生活报), in a report carried by Northeast Net (东北网), notes that most minority peoples freeze fish and meat to store it through the winter, while the Hezhe have a custom of eating the frozen fish directly. The paper calls this the Hezhe's own shavings meal (刨花餐), an old way of eating found mainly in winter. Fresh pike, sturgeon or snakehead is frozen and skinned, then planed into thin slices with a carpenter's plane, and the slices are piled on the plate in the shape of a tower.

The Beijing News (新京报) describes the same dish under its Hezhe name, sulaka (苏拉卡), commonly called fish shavings (鱼刨花), and calls it the classic example of the Hezhe habit of eating raw fish slices. It names pike or taimen as the usual fish, skinned while still frozen and planed into thin slices that curl slightly.

Flavour and how it is eaten

The slices are snow-white and ice-cold. The Beijing News likens the first bite to ice cream frozen hard; as the fish melts in the mouth it turns slightly chewy. The seasoning comes from a sour-hot dip made from vinegar, chive-flower paste, chilli oil and salt, and each slice is picked up with chopsticks and dipped before eating. The Beijing News adds that the dish goes well with alcohol.

The Hezhe whole-fish banquet

The Hezhe, described by the Beijing News as the only people in northern China who live by fishing and hunting, live mainly in the basins of three rivers: the Songhua (松花江), the Heilongjiang or Amur (黑龙江) and the Ussuri (乌苏里江). Sulaka is one of the representative courses of their whole-fish banquet (全鱼宴), prepared for important festivals. Before the Spring Festival, families cut holes in the river ice and set nets beneath them, then break the frozen holes open again on New Year's Eve to haul in the fish. In 2019 the Hezhe whole-fish banquet was entered in Heilongjiang's sixth batch of provincial intangible cultural heritage items.