Cantonese-Style Congee 广东粥
Cantonese-Style Congee is featured among the local specialties of Taiwan.
Cantonese-Style Congee (广东粥) is the breakfast congee of Kinmen (金门): rice cooked with a pork-bone stock for hours until the grains all but dissolve into a smooth, thick base with almost no visible rice. In Kinmen it is also called zhoumi (粥糜), and the Kinmen County Government runs its congee festival under that name.
How it is made
A Kinmen Daily (金门日报) editorial, reprinted on the Kinmen County Government portal, describes the rice and bone stock simmered over several hours until the grains melt into the liquid. Meatballs, pork liver, beaten egg, fish slices, shrimp and youtiao (油条, fried dough sticks) that soak up the congee go in on top. The street-branding programme of Taiwan's Commerce Development Administration (商业发展署) sums up the island method as pork bones, long-grain rice, shacha sauce (沙茶) and slow cooking on a low flame, with each cook's order of steps, spoonfuls of shacha and hours of stock passed down from the previous generation.
The Kinmen tourism website describes one three-generation shop, Yongchun (永春), whose bowl carries small Kinmen fish balls kneaded from fish paste the same day, about two centimetres across, and little balls of minced pork mixed with spring onion and finely chopped water chestnut, dropped raw into the pot so the juices stay inside.
Where it comes from
According to the Commerce Development Administration, large numbers of Nationalist troops, many from Guangdong (广东) and southern Fujian, were garrisoned on Kinmen in the 1950s. A pot of thick congee saved rice and kept people warm; eating it with crisp youtiao or flatbread made the meagre rice soup more filling, and some discharged soldiers stayed on and opened congee shops. When the shops applied for business registration, the form had no entry for zhoumi, so they registered as "Cantonese congee" (广东粥), a name outsiders could understand.
The Kinmen Daily editorial records other local explanations: islanders who worked in Guangdong, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia in the early 20th century brought the food of those places home; rice was scarce, so it was cooked down until no grains were left; or rice shipped to the island arrived partly broken and dissolved easily. It also notes that Kinmen's soil and water do not favour rice growing, so rice had to be brought in from elsewhere.
How it is eaten
It is eaten at breakfast. In Jincheng (金城), Minzu Road (民族路) and Juguang Road (莒光路) grew a cluster of congee shops to feed the garrison, and ten of them are still in business; some regulars come twice a day and carry congee home in their own pots. The county government has also run the Houpu Congee Street (后浦粥糜一条街) event and a county-wide Kinmen Congee Festival (金门粥糜节).
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and fact-checked against them on 2026-09-25. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.
Image credits & notes (1)
- Cantonese-style rice porridge (congee) with meatballs, as served in Kinmen · 金门广东粥，配肉丸 Source-recorded photograph date: 2009-09.Photo: User: (WT-shared) Shoestring at wts wikivoyage · CC BY-SA 4.0Resized for the web; the photo itself has not been edited. Thumbnails may show a cropped view.
