Rice Cake Soup with Pickled Greens 咸齑年糕汤

Ingredients

Xianji, xuelihong and xuecai (雪菜) are all Ningbo names for the same salted greens. The xuelihong is harvested in quantity as the weather turns cold, and many Ningbo households pickle it at home as a winter store; a Ningbo saying holds that three days without xianji soup leave the legs aching. Yinzhou District (鄞州区) has produced the pickle for more than 500 years, according to China Ningbo Net, and its salting method, from picking and drying to packing the jars, layering, salting, treading and sealing, is an intangible-heritage craft whose transmission base is the Yinzhou pickled-greens museum (鄞州雪菜博物馆).

The rice cakes are Ningbo's water-milled cakes (水磨年糕). In Cicheng (慈城), which a local saying ranks first in Ningbo, they are made only from new-season late japonica rice rather than glutinous rice.

How it is made

The Economic Daily followed a family in Cicheng making the soup on the day they pounded their New Year rice cakes. They took xuelihong that had been salted for a little over ten days, cut up pork and a winter bamboo shoot, and cut the freshly pressed cakes into slices. The pork was fried until its fat ran, then a handful of xianji, the bamboo shoot and the rice cake slices went in with boiling water, and the soup was done once the pot came back to the boil, glossy with fat.

A Yinzhou chef interviewed by the district's media builds his version on a stock, finishes it with a spoonful of lard and takes it off the heat as soon as the rice cakes are soft.

How it is eaten

It is a winter dish, made when the new xianji and winter bamboo shoots come in and when rice cakes are pounded in the twelfth lunar month before the New Year. At the fifth Yinzhou pickled-greens festival in 2017, a deputy district head cooked it on a live stream to promote the district's pickle.