Hexian Lamb Noodles 和县羊肉面

Hexian Lamb Noodles (和县羊肉面) are the lamb noodles of He County (和县), Ma'anshan, Anhui. The best-documented version comes from Xiangquan (香泉), a hot-spring town in the county, where the dish goes by the name Xiangquan lamb noodles (香泉羊肉面) and is made with goat meat.

Ingredients

Zhang Zhengbao (张正宝), who has cooked the dish for more than fifty years, says the meat must be goat (山羊肉), because it is lean and not strongly gamey. The noodles are a locally made 'hanging noodle' (挂面), also called 'water noodles' (水面), firm enough not to fall apart in the pot but not so hard that it is tough to chew.

How it is made

Fresh goat meat is soaked in cold water for two hours to draw out the blood, then put into a pot of cold water over a high flame, and the scum is skimmed off just before the water boils. Once it boils, the heat is lowered and the meat cooks for another two hours; the cook tests it with chopsticks and stops when the meat just parts from the bone. The meat is lifted out and sliced, and the stripped bones go back into the pot to keep the broth cooking. Finally the noodles are boiled in the broth, lifted out and scattered with garlic leaves. Timing matters: the noodles lose their bite if they are left too long.

How it is eaten

A bowl comes with eight-treasure vegetables (八宝菜) dressed with sesame oil and the red chilli paste that He County makes in quantity. Winter is the busy season. Xiangquan is known for its hot springs, and a bowl of goat-meat noodles towards evening after an afternoon soak is a local habit. A local saying lists the town's 'four treasures' as goat-meat noodles, potsticker dumplings, a haircut and a bath (羊肉面，锅贴饺，剃个头，洗把澡).

Where it comes from

In the early 1920s Zhang Yuanhe (张元和), a Xiangquan man, opened a small goat-meat restaurant with the shop at the front and the workshop behind, cooked by the owner and served by his family. In 2023 the cooking technique of Xiangquan lamb noodles was one of 19 items on Ma'anshan's seventh list of municipal intangible cultural heritage. Shi Guangyuan (石光远), whose family has made the noodles for four generations, is one of the town's two county-level representative bearers of the technique.