Tianmu Lake Clay Pot Fish Head 天目湖砂锅鱼头

Tianmu Lake Clay Pot Fish Head (天目湖砂锅鱼头) is the head of a bighead carp slow-simmered in a clay pot with water from Tianmu Lake (天目湖) in Liyang (溧阳), Changzhou (常州), Jiangsu. The soup comes out milk-white. In 2023 the Jiangsu Department of Culture and Tourism put it on the fifth batch of the provincial intangible cultural heritage list, one of seven Liyang items added that year.

Where it comes from

Tianmu Lake is not a natural lake. It was built as the Shahe Reservoir (沙河水库) and is also Liyang's drinking-water source. The dish was created by Zhu Shuncai (朱顺才), who came to cook in the reservoir canteen after leaving the army. He told the Jinling Evening News (金陵晚报) that the reservoir had been stocked with bighead carp fry, and the heads grew so large that they made up half of each fish. People ate the body and threw the head away until he tried making soup from the heads and found it tasted better than the flesh.

Writing in Guangming Daily, Zheng Peikai (郑培凯) notes that the dish has about forty years of cooking behind it. He links its fame to 1982, when envoys from 75 countries tasted it on a visit to the reservoir, and to 1985, when the Tianmu Lake Hotel sent Zhu Shuncai to Nanjing with fish and lake water to cook it for Deng Xiaoping.

How it is made

Zhu Shuncai described the method to Zheng Peikai: the head is first fried in lard over fierce heat, then lake water goes in while the oil is spitting; after a short hard boil the pot is turned down to a gentle simmer. Scallion knots, ginger, cooking wine, vinegar, coriander and pepper season it, and the floating fat is skimmed off. He told the Jinling Evening News that one pot takes close to 20 steps, and the paper reports that all of them are done by hand, from keeping and killing the fish to soaking out the fishy taste and frying.

The reservoir bed is sand rather than mud, which Zheng gives as the reason the fish has no muddy taste and the dish can claim to be "fresh but not fishy, rich but not greasy" (鲜而不腥，肥而不腻). He found the flesh fatty without being cloying and as tender as bean curd.