Xinyang Slow-Simmered Stews 信阳炖菜
Xinyang Slow-Simmered Stews is featured among the local specialties of Henan.
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Xinyang Slow-Simmered Stews (信阳炖菜) are the stewed dishes of Xinyang (信阳), the southernmost city of Henan, which lies on the upper Huai River (淮河) below the northern slopes of the Dabie Mountains (大别山). Henan Daily reports that stews make up a large share of Xinyang cuisine, and People's Daily Online sums up the local approach as "a thousand pots, a hundred flavours; anything can be stewed".
How it is eaten
In Xinyang, Henan Daily writes, no banquet is complete without a stew. Families and friends choose stews first at gatherings in every season, and the dish is kept hot at the table in an iron pot set over an alcohol burner, bubbling as people eat. Xinyang chef Xu Xiaobao (许小报) told the paper that the city has no century-old restaurant brands, but that its stews, handed down for a thousand years, serve as the local "time-honoured name".
Classic stews
Henan Daily names old duck soup, clear-stewed Nanwan fish head (清炖南湾鱼头) and beef dubeng stewed with radish as classic Xinyang stews. Dubeng (肚绷) is a Xinyang word for the soft, clearly grained cut from a cow's belly near the ribs; it is stewed with radishes grown along the Huai. For Nanwan fish head, cooks use fish from Nanwan Lake (南湾湖) and water from the same lake, and the broth comes out white. Shangcheng old duck soup (商城老鸭汤) is a clear stew of Huainan ma ducks (淮南麻鸭) raised for more than ten months and Xinyang green radish.
Henan Daily calls Luoshan large-intestine soup (罗山大肠汤) the crowd-puller among the stews. Intestines of Huainan pigs (淮南猪) are rinsed to remove their smell, simmered with Chinese medicinal herbs until about 80 per cent cooked, cut into strips or pieces and then stewed again with tofu and pig's blood.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.