Sampan Congee 艇仔粥

Sampan Congee (艇仔粥) is a Guangzhou (广州) rice congee topped with fish, seafood and crunchy extras. It takes its name from the small boats, 'tingzai' in Cantonese, from which it was first sold on the waterways of Liwan (荔湾) in the old western quarter of Xiguan (西关). The Guangzhou city government portal credits the dish to the Tanka (疍家) boat people of the Pearl River Delta and calls it the congee with the most ingredients of all.

Where it comes from

Lychee trees once lined the creeks on Guangzhou's western edge, an area known as Lychee Bay (荔枝湾). From the Guangxu reign (光绪) of the late Qing dynasty, boating there became fashionable. Young Tanka women rowed from the stern and called out their wares while older boat people cooked congee in the bow; customers waved the boat over and ate either in their own boats or under the trees on the bank. The Liwan district government lists sampan congee among the foods sold from small flower boats on the Liwan waters in the Qing dynasty. Later, shops on land copied the dish, and Chinese Wikipedia notes that boats still sold congee on the Pearl River in front of the Nanfang Building (南方大厦) until the 1970s.

Ingredients

At first the boat families put in whatever they caught: fresh fish, shrimp, crab, clams and snails. The Guangzhou city government portal names fresh river shrimp or sliced fish as the original toppings, with jellyfish, fried peanuts, spring onion and ginger added later, and says the congee is boiled up with its toppings just before it is eaten. When land-based shops took the dish up they fixed the toppings and added crisp fried dough. Chinese Wikipedia gives the main toppings as fish, shrimp, lean pork, fried dough sticks, peanuts and spring onion, sometimes with fried pork skin, jellyfish, beef or squid.

Flavour and texture

The Guangzhou tourism bureau describes the fresh-cooked bowl as fragrant, steaming and very fresh and sweet. Sun Yat-sen University literature professor Huang Tianji (黄天骥) describes a bowl of milk-white congee dotted with green spring onion, holding plain slices of fresh fish, shredded squid, pork skin, jellyfish and fried peanuts; the friend he took to eat it praised the way it brings crisp and smooth together. The fried crisps are soaked in the congee, which takes away some of their 'heatiness' (火气), and dipping them makes the steaming congee less scalding.