Tiny Clam Noodle Soup 海沙子面

Tiny Clam Noodle Soup (海沙子面) is hand-rolled noodles served in a golden broth made from a very small clam, a Rizhao (日照) dish that the city's Communist Party publicity department calls unique to Rizhao. The clam is lan'ge (兰蛤); when young it is as small as a grain of sand, so fishers call it haishazi (海沙子), 'sea sand'. A local saying holds that nothing is fresher-tasting than this noodle soup.

Ingredients

The clams are plentiful where rivers meet the sea at Taoluo Town (涛雒镇) and Liangcheng (两城) in Rizhao's Donggang District (东港区). The Donggang district government says the Taoluo clams have a rich flavour and that the clams are most plentiful and plumpest each year from May to October. Because they are too small to make a dish of their own, local people use them only for their flavour.

How it is made

The clams go through four steps: washing, rinsing, boiling and straining. The Donggang district government notes that this takes more than two hours, and that unlike many noodle broths the taste cannot be put together from seasonings. The strained stock comes out golden, and it is poured over chewy hand-rolled noodles. Qilu Net describes the plainest bowl as nothing more than clam broth and white spring onion over the noodles.

Where it comes from

A noodle-shop owner raised on the Rizhao coast told Qilu Net that in the old days families who could not afford fish or meat went out with baskets at low tide to dig the little clams. In the 1980s and 1990s the dish was known in every Rizhao household: a single jin of clams could feed a whole family, and it became an everyday staple. A Rizhao legend retold by the Donggang district government credits a devoted son named Wang Hai (王海), who broke the winter ice to find tiny shells for his sick mother, cooked noodles in their golden broth, and so gave the clam its other name, 'filial son shell' (孝子贝).