Shiitake and Pork Thick Soup 香菇肉羹

How it is made

The older habit of dropping plain shredded pork into the soup has given way to a pork paste. Lean pork, fatty pork and fish paste are used in a ratio of roughly 6:3:1: the two meats are chopped to a paste with salt, sugar, white pepper, sesame oil, potato starch (太白粉) and fried shallots, stirred until very sticky, and then the fish paste is worked in. The paste is pinched into pieces and dropped into boiling stock to cook.

For the soup, shiitake and napa cabbage or bean sprouts are shredded along with bamboo shoots. Spring onion is fried in oil to scent it and lifted out, the shiitake and cabbage are stir-fried, and the stock used to cook the pork goes back in, sometimes with wood ear fungus and dried shrimp. It is seasoned with soy sauce, sugar and salt and thickened with a little starch water, or finished with egg ribbons, before the pork pieces return.

How it is eaten

The bowl is finished with coriander and scallion oil, and eaters add garlic paste, black vinegar or soy sauce. In Beigang, the Tourism Administration (交通部觀光署) lists shiitake pork thick soup with duck thick soup and Spanish mackerel thick soup among the local snacks eaten during the town's Lantern Festival. On Zhushan Old Street (竹山老街) in Nantou County, a shop called Beigang Shiitake Pork Thick Soup (北港香菇肉羹) makes it with local bamboo shoots, organic black shiitake and pork from the hind leg, according to the county's travel site.

Where it comes from

Chinese Wikipedia's article on Taiwanese cuisine says that in the early Qing dynasty, when the ban on crossing to Taiwan (渡臺禁令) limited Han migrants to men, settlers busy clearing and farming land often cooked a pot of geng that could serve as both soup and dish. Shiitake pork thick soup is named among the geng that remain popular, beside squid, shrimp and milkfish versions.