Qinggou Fish Banquet 清沟鱼宴

Qinggou Fish Banquet (清沟鱼宴) is a meal of many fish dishes made from wild fish caught at Daqinggou (大清沟) in Fuxin (阜新), Liaoning. The Fuxin Culture, Tourism, Radio and Television Bureau lists it among the city's ten best foods.

Ingredients

The banquet draws on more than 30 kinds of wild fish from Daqinggou, among them common carp, silver carp, crucian carp, catfish and grass carp. The fish are caught, cooked and eaten on the spot, and the bureau stresses their fine, tender flesh.

How it is made

Each kind of fish gets its own treatment, and different parts of the same fish go into different dishes. The bureau counts more than 20 cooking methods, including braising in soy sauce (红烧), dry deep-frying (干炸), sweet-and-sour (糖醋), clear stewing (清炖), plain steaming (清蒸), hot-and-sour (酸辣) and slippery stir-frying (滑溜), and says the dishes cover colour, aroma, flavour and shape.

Where it comes from

Daqinggou is a scenic area in Daleng Town (大冷镇), Zhangwu County (彰武县), in the southern part of the Horqin Sandy Land (科尔沁沙地). The scenic area dates from 1958, and its reservoir dam, 320 metres long, is built entirely of fine sand. In February 2018 the area's "sand-spring fish banquet" (沙泉鱼宴) appeared in the third season of the CCTV documentary A Bite of China (舌尖上的中国), which the bureau says drew strong interest in eating fish there.