Lufeng Savoury Salted Tea 陆丰咸茶
Lufeng Savoury Salted Tea is featured among the local specialties of Guangdong.
Lufeng Savoury Salted Tea (陆丰咸茶) is the pounded-tea meal of Lufeng (陆丰) in Shanwei (汕尾), Guangdong: a pounded tea poured over a bowl of rice or other starches, stir-fried meat and dried seafood, finished with toasted rice, peanuts and sesame. Wu Zhiyue, a Lufeng native writing for the city's political consultative conference, notes that it is not actually salty, and that most people in the Haifeng and Lufeng area (海陆丰) now eat it as their main meal at midday.
How it is made
A home-made bowl has two parts. The "clear tea" (清茶) is made by pounding tea leaves, herbs, raw sesame and raw peanuts together in a ya bo (牙钵) mortar and pouring boiling water over the paste, so it is far from clear. The "tea base" (茶底) is rice, fen guo (粉粿) cakes, cooked wheat grains or rice beans stir-fried with meat, dried shrimp, dried cuttlefish, shiitake mushrooms and coriander. Toasted rice, fried peanuts and toasted sesame are added. A refined bowl is judged by its clear tea, for which bitter thorn leaves, mugwort, jigucao (鸡骨草) and rosary-pea vine leaves (相思藤) are prized; costly gongfu tea adds nothing.
Shanwei's city government food page describes cai cha (菜茶, "vegetable tea"), one of the dish's older names. Cooked pork, sausage, shrimp, shredded squid, glass noodles, tofu skin, beans, wheat grains, spinach and snow peas are mixed in a bowl, topped with peanuts and toasted rice, moistened with weak tea or pork-bone broth and seasoned with pepper. Hakka families and places such as Donghai (东海) in Lufeng favour fan cha (饭茶), which adds cooked rice.
Where it comes from
Wu estimates the custom is over a thousand years old. He traces it to mountain villages, where people pounded a large bowl of plain tea each day, drank it after field work and poured it over rice at noon, adding salt to replace what was lost in sweat; guava, mugwort or bitter thorn leaves could stand in for tea. Hakka brides carried the habit elsewhere. In Lufeng, he writes, the name "salty tea" came into use only after reform and opening-up; earlier it was simply "tea", "rice tea" or "vegetable tea".
How it is eaten
A family that had a baby boy in the previous year holds a "big brew" (大泡茶) on the 11th day of the first lunar month for the whole village, or for neighbours, relatives and friends in town. Another big brew is held on the day the groom's family delivers betrothal gifts, which must include sesame and peanuts so the bride's family can pound tea for guests. An invitation to "come and eat tea" signals good news, and a Qing-dynasty poem by the Haifeng scholar Huang Hanzong (黄汉宗) judges a host's warmth by the sesame in the bowl.