Nanping Crunchy Pork Tripe 南坪响肚

Flavour and texture

It comes as a basin of tripe slices in a thick, fragrant white broth. The taste is fresh and savoury with a clean aroma, and the tripe is crisp and springy, crunching audibly when chewed. That crunch gives the dish its name: xiang (响) means to make a sound. One diner once insisted chicken stock had been added to the broth; it had not, but the remark became a compliment to the soup.

How it is made

The work runs through a fixed sequence: washing the raw pork stomach, blanching it in boiling water, cutting it, simmering it in the pot and seasoning it as it comes out. The specifics are kept as a secret recipe.

Where it comes from

Nanping Crunchy Pork Tripe is credited to one cook, Yue Xianjiu (岳献久), who started work in 1958, aged 17, at Nanping's only restaurant, a collective that closed in 1982; he then opened a small restaurant of his own. Before him, pork tripe in Nanping was only stir-fried in slices or braised in spiced liquid, and nobody made it into soup because of its strong offal smell. In 1986, after dozens of trials over several days in his back kitchen after closing time, he created the dish. He first called it "crisp tripe" (脆肚) and later renamed it "sounding tripe" (响肚) because it both crunched and smelled good.

As the dish became known, diners came from 100 to 200 km around and many other Nanping restaurants added it to their menus. Yue stopped cooking in 2001. His sons Yue Decheng (岳德成) and Yue Hu (岳虎) each opened a restaurant of their own, and in 2023 said they planned to apply for intangible-heritage and time-honoured-brand status for the Yue family version.

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