Hot and Sour Soup

01

Sour from vinegar, hot from pepper

The heat in hot and sour soup comes from white pepper, not chili, and the sourness from vinegar.

Hot and sour soup is a 羹, a thickened soup. A stock or plain water is seasoned with salt, a little sugar and plenty of ground white pepper, then thickened with starch until it will run off a ladle in a long thread; shredded tofu, wood ear fungus, ham or dried shrimp, and often strips of pork blood go in, then vinegar, and finally beaten egg is drizzled through so it sets in ribbons. A few drops of sesame oil and some coriander or scallion finish it.

The pepper is the point. A chef teaching the home version uses two and a half spoonfuls of white pepper for one pot and says plainly that the heat comes from pepper and not from chili, because only pepper can be hot without hurting the stomach. In Fuzhou, the writer Chen Zhou describes white pepper as the gentle, not sharp, spice that local cooks use to suppress fishiness and lift a sour dish, and tastes its heat arriving slowly, after the sourness.

Sources [3][7][8]

02

A northern restaurant soup that travelled with its cooks

In the first half of the twentieth century, hot and sour soup was what a northern-style restaurant was expected to serve.

Republican-era restaurant guides show the soup on the menus of the Peking- and Tianjin-style restaurants that opened all over China. A Hangzhou guide of the time described Jindeji, a Tianjin restaurant, as selling mainly noodles, boiled jiaozi and guotie, with muxu pork, red-braised pork, fried shredded beef and hot and sour soup as its specialties. In Kunming, a writer of the period found Peking-style restaurants whose liu huangcai, wakuai fish and hot and sour soup were no worse than in Peiping itself. Wherever northern cooks went, the soup went with the dumplings and guotie.

Liang Shiqiu, who grew up in Beijing, remembered a related street soup: after eating a flatbread at a Beijing stall, a bowl of 罐儿汤, “jar soup,” seemed essential. It was close to hot and sour soup, Liang wrote, but neither sour nor hot, with an egg cracked into it, and better still with day-lily buds and wood ear. Decades later, eating at a famous Chinese restaurant in Washington, Liang was disappointed when the first dish was an enormous bowl of hot and sour soup, followed by a half-hour wait for anything else.

Sources [1][2]

03

Fuzhou: the sour soup that wakes up a banquet

Fuzhou times its hot and sour soups for the moment a banquet starts to drag.

Chen Zhou lays out the order of soups at a Fuzhou banquet: first rich or clear soups such as Buddha Jumps Over the Wall or chicken broth with clams; about a third of the way through, Taiping yan with its duck eggs, when the firecrackers go off and the host rises to toast; and then, past halfway, when the diners are full and the palate has gone numb, the hot and sour soups of 鱼唇, “fish lip,” or sea anemone. Last comes a sweet soup to clear the mouth.

For sea anemone soup the anemones are rubbed again and again with salt and vinegar until the slime is gone and the flesh turns crisp, coated in sweet-potato starch and blanched. Ginger and chili are fried in oil, stock goes in with mushrooms and the anemones, then salt and sugar, a sweet-potato starch thickening, rice vinegar, white pepper and coriander. Chen describes the taste in order: a flash of sourness, then the pepper heat seeping through, then a thread of sweetness. Fish-lip soup is made the same way. At home, a Fuzhou cook makes it with shark skin, mushrooms, wood ear, tomato and minced pork, adds vinegar twice, at the start and just before serving, and uses more sugar than most of China would, with pepper again as the only heat.

Sources [3][9]

04

Jiangnan: hot and sour soup in a clay pot, with guotie

In the Yangtze delta, the soup has its own shops.

Shops that sell only hot and sour soup and guotie are rare among the wonton, xiaolongbao and noodle shops of the Yangtze delta, which is why one corner shop stood out to the food writers Zhang Jianping and Gao Feng. The menu was four wooden boards, four items, four prices. A clay pot of hot and sour soup and a plate of five lean-pork guotie came to 25 yuan. The soup was deep orange, with glass noodles, shredded tofu skin and chopped zhacai pickle under a scatter of red diced yao pork and green scallion; neither too thick nor too thin, sour and hot at the same time and faintly sweet at the end, in what the writers called the true Wuxi taste. The guotie were arranged like chrysanthemum petals. The writer, who had walked past for years without going in, resolved to come back.

The cooking channel Chinese Cooking Demystified goes further and thinks the hot and sour soup served all over Taiwan probably came from Wuxi, while pointing to older relatives in Henan’s hulatang and in a Shandong version. Even in Wuxi the soup is not fixed: some shops stir egg into it and some do not.

Sources [4][7]

05

The Wuxi bowl: beef broth and day lilies

One well-documented version starts with a pot of beef shank.

The Wuxi recipe published by Chinese Cooking Demystified makes 1.4 liters of broth from 500 g of beef shank, simmered with star anise, Sichuan peppercorn, white peppercorn, ginger, scallion and Shaoxing wine. The writers mention some evidence that the soup was first made by Wuxi’s Muslim community, which would explain the beef, and they note that such a version would not have had the wine. Into the broth go 20 g of dried day lilies, 5 g of dried shiitake, 5 g of wood ear and 35 g of sweet potato noodles, all soaked in cool water for about two hours, then 250 g of soft tofu and a sheet of 千张, pressed tofu skin. About 6 tablespoons of potato starch in half a cup of water thickens the pot.

Of all this, only the day lilies and shiitake are treated as essential; everything else can change with what a kitchen has. The same writers add that a soup so familiar on takeout menus abroad is not especially common across mainland China and is popular only in pockets.

Sources [7]

06

Why foreign diners order it

Hot and sour soup is one of the few Chinese soups Western diners order on their own.

Fuchsia Dunlop observes that Chinese restaurants abroad make slow-simmered clear soups of poultry, vegetables and tonic herbs, but Western customers rarely order them: the good ingredients are invisible and the flavour seems thin. They choose chicken and sweetcorn soup or a steaming hot and sour soup instead, where the richness and the ingredients are obvious on the tongue. Dunlop adds a cook’s point: a stock of MSG and bouillon powder can just about pass once it is made into hot and sour soup, whose vinegar and pepper cover a lot, but not in a pure, clear soup where nothing can hide. That robustness is part of why the soup travels, and why, as Liang Shiqiu found in Washington, it was often the first thing on the table.

In the United States the soup was in print by the early 1960s. The word historian Barry Popik found it in the New York Herald Tribune in March 1961, as the first lesson of a Chinese cooking class, and in 1965 Craig Claiborne printed a full recipe for it in The New York Times. Joyce Chen, who opened a Mandarin restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1958, is often said to have introduced it, but Popik found no record that she served it under that name at the time.

Sources [2][5][6]

07

Craig Claiborne’s 1965 recipe

The recipe printed in The New York Times was gentle by Chinese standards.

Craig Claiborne’s 1965 recipe for The New York Times used four cups of chicken broth, dried tree ears and mushrooms, eight tiger-lily buds, bamboo shoots, shredded pork, bean curd and an egg, thickened with two tablespoons of cornstarch. Most of that would be familiar in Wuxi or Beijing. The seasoning would not: wine vinegar in place of a Chinese vinegar, and a quarter teaspoon of black pepper, far less than the spoonfuls of white pepper in a Chinese home version.

By the 1970s the soup was a fixture of Manhattan menus. New York magazine priced a bowl at 85 cents in 1971, and in 1980 Claiborne named hot and sour soup and moo shu pork as undoubtedly the two best-known dishes using tree ears.

Sources [6]

08

How to make it at home

A chef’s method for one pot, with the reasons for each step.

Sources [8]

09

Hot and sour soup around China

The name stays the same; the bowl does not.

Sources [1][3][4][5][8]

10

More on the atlas

Related soups and the dishes it is eaten with.