Jute Leaf Soup 麻薏汤

Jute Leaf Soup (麻薏汤) is a thick green soup made from the young leaves and shoots of the jute plant, a summer dish of Taichung (台中). The Taichung City Education Bureau calls the leaves, known as mayi (麻薏) or mawei (麻芛), a distinctive Taichung food, grown mainly in the city's Nantun (南屯) district.

How it is made

The leaves need work before they reach the pot. The Education Bureau describes the basic steps as stripping the stalks, picking out the leaves and rubbing them by hand, then rinsing away the slime and bitter juice. Small dried fish and sweet potato go in, and the soup is thickened with starch. Chinese Wikipedia adds that some cooks soften the leaves with baking soda, and some households add okra, amaranth or water spinach leaves.

Flavour and texture

The finished soup is green, thick and slightly sticky, with a faint bitterness. The bureau notes that almost every older Taichung resident has a recipe of their own: some thicken it and some serve it as a clear soup, and it is drunk either hot or cold. Wikipedia explains the bitterness: the jute grown in Taiwan is said to be the round-fruited kind, which tastes bitter, while the long-fruited kind does not.

Where it comes from

Jute was grown in central Taiwan for its fibre, which was made into sacks during the Japanese colonial period; plastics later replaced it. Chinese Wikipedia links the habit of eating the shoots to the jute mill founded in Fengyuan (豐原) in 1905. Jute was first grown most around Fengyuan and later widely around Tanzi (潭子), Shigang (石岡) and Nantun. Jute is sown in March, and the leaves can be picked from about a month after planting until August or September, which makes the soup a summer-only dish. Taichung's Mawei Cultural Museum (麻芛文化館), the city's first privately run cultural museum, covers jute history and mawei culture in Nantun, and Fengyuan held its first jute-shoot festival in June 2019.