Qintong Fish Cakes 溱潼鱼饼

How it is made

The fish flesh is soaked, then chopped with a knife into a paste and mixed with ginger-scallion water, egg white, cold stock, starch slurry, cooking wine and salt into a thick batter, which is stirred in one direction until it firms up. The paste is shaped into cakes of even size and fried slowly over low heat in an oiled flat pan until cooked through. The cakes are then cut into thick slices and braised in stock with other ingredients until the sauce thickens.

At a fish-cake and shrimp-ball contest held in Qintong in October 2014, the Qinhu scenic area reported cooks working with a cleaver in one hand and a wooden stick in the other, chopping and beating the fish at the same time. It counted dozens of steps, from opening, scraping, boning and chopping the fish to soaking, squeezing, stirring, searing, frying and braising.

Flavour and texture

Xinhua's Jiangsu channel describes the finished dish as a rich, full-bodied sauce around tender, fresh-tasting fish cakes.

Where it comes from

The cake's old name was yuhubing (鱼糊饼), "fish-paste cake". A local story tells how, in the Qianlong reign (乾隆) of the Qing dynasty, a provincial governor travelling incognito to Cunzhong (存中, today's Qintong) was caught by a downpour around noon and sheltered in a farmhouse. With nothing else to offer, the farmer took down a fish hanging under the eaves, scraped off the flesh, seared it into cakes and cooked them in lake water; later cooks refined the dish into the fish cake of today. The Qinhu scenic area dates the technique for fish cakes and shrimp balls back at least 200 years and ranks the two as the best of the Qinhu Lake eight delicacies (溱湖八鲜). The 2014 contest was organised by the Qintong town government with Jiangyan's tourism bureau and cooking association to show the traditional method, and in 2015 People's Daily reported on a graduate who had returned to Qintong to make fish cakes and shrimp balls at home and sell them online.