Anshun Small Clay Pot Rice Jelly 安顺小锅凉粉

How it is made

A small clay pot is filled with rice jelly, sweet-potato noodles (苕粉), potato, ham sausage, coriander, pickled radish, minced meat, tofu skin, celery and soybeans. Two ladles of a house bean soup (豆汤) go in and the pot goes on the heat for a few minutes. Ni Shiqin (倪世勤), whose family has run a small-pot liangfen shop in Anshun for four generations, explains the clay pot: it heats quickly, loses heat slowly and holds in the flavours the food releases, and five to ten minutes after the flame is turned off the contents are still close to boiling.

Ingredients

The heart of the dish is the jelly, also called rice tofu (米豆腐). Rice is washed and soaked, ground with water into a slurry, cooked with alkali and left to cool and set, which gives it a springy, soft texture. It comes with a dipping sauce of chilli, crushed garlic, chopped spring onion, Sichuan pepper and minced ginger. Cooked in the pot, the jelly soaks up the thick bean soup. At the Ni family's shop the tofu skin counts as the other essential part, tender and smooth against the salty dipping sauce.

How it is eaten

Diners take a small bowl, chopsticks and a spoon, stir the contents of the pot together and blow on the hot soup before drinking. One regular, who has eaten it since her second year of primary school, sums it up as a bean-soup base with a thick feel. The classic drink with a bowl is rose water (玫瑰水); one order at the Ni family's shop is for a bowl with extra ham and two glasses of rose water.

Anshun's small-pot liangfen is alley food: most of the old, authentic shops in the city have no signboard, and locals say the owner's face is the best signboard.

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