Jixi Spicy Cold Dishes 鸡西辣菜

Where it comes from

A 2023 food notice on the Jixi city government portal, published by the city's market supervision bureau, says the Korean-ethnic kitchen originally had only a few spicy pickles, such as cabbage kimchi, also called jingzi (京渍). The Jixi dishes, by contrast, are mostly tossed with chilli and number more than fifty. With no city flower or city emblem ever agreed on, the notice says, Jixi cold noodles and spicy dishes, loved for decades, simply became the city's "city food" (市吃). Local media once even ran a contest for a "Spicy Dish Queen".

Ingredients

Almost any common vegetable, meat or seafood can become a spicy dish, from seasonal greens to eggs. Dried tofu sheets (干豆腐), balloon-flower root (桔梗) and fried tofu puffs (豆腐泡) are the three that nearly everyone orders in a cold-noodle shop. Others on the notice's list include tofu rolls, kelp shreds, daylily, dried fish shreds, bracken, beef, pig's ear and small clams.

How it is made

In Heilongjiang the dishes are most often dressed cold. The notice's recipe starts with soybean oil brought to the boil; shredded ginger and star anise go in, and the hot oil is poured over a bowl of chilli powder and stirred. For a vegetable version, the vegetable is cut into squares and onion into shreds, a little coriander and minced garlic are added, salt and MSG go in to taste, vinegar and sugar to preference, and a generous amount of chilli oil, before everything is tossed.

Flavour and how it is eaten

The notice sums up the flavour as hot, fragrant and savoury, but stresses that the dishes are not only about heat: a fried tofu puff tastes slightly hot at first, then sweet, and then fills the mouth with aroma.

In recent years a way of eating called "duck-feed dishes" (鸭食菜) has caught on in Jixi: several spicy dishes go into one bowl with a little cold-noodle broth, aged vinegar, chilli oil and salt, and are stirred together, giving a mixed flavour of their own.