Just like Western cooking, Chinese cuisine uses stock for braising and soup base.
Dishes live or die by the quality of the stock, called gaotang 高汤, or high soup. Normally gaotang is normally made from slowly stewed pork bones.
Without a good basic stock, a lot of vegetarian cuisine comes out tasting like waterlogged onions – or tasting like nothing at all. I’m not sure which is worse.
So how did our 19th century Chinese cookbook handle this? Remember that Treatise on Vegetarianism is written for gourmets. There are many reasons to write a cookbook, to promote health, local culture, etc., but for the standard for this book is taste.
Treatise on Vegetarianism gives three recipes for gaotang, which makes our next step fairly obvious.
I know now what I must do
That’s right, kids. We’re going to cook all three and find out which one is best.
Let’s meet our contestants:
莱菔汤 Radish broth
京师扁莱菔、陕西天红弹莱菔为最上，其余莱菔次之。
用莱菔七成、胡莱菔三成，切片或丝，同以香油炒过，再以高酱油烹透，然后以清汤闷之。闷至莱菔极烂，其汤即为高汤。或浇饭，或浇面，或作别菜之汤，无不腴美。余每日以浸软蚕豆去皮煮汤，或莱菔汤，浇饭、浇面、吃饼，甚为适口，胜肥脓多矣。
This soup combines the big white radishes called daikon in Japanese with “foreign” radishes, aka carrots, in a 7:3 ratio. Both are sliced into thin strips, fried in sesame oil and cooked with soy sauce until extremely soft. The broth is a gaotang that can be used to cook rice or noodles, or make soup.
蚕豆汤 Fava bean broth
蚕豆浸软去皮，以煮至豆开花时，豆已烂熟，将汤澄出，作为各菜之汤，鲜美无似，一切汤皆不及也。若用汤多，不及剥去豆皮，汤味便减。至于以蚕豆芽煮汤，味亦清腴，虽不及去皮蚕豆汤之鲜美，要仍不失为素蔬中之高汤也。
This recipe uses dried beans, which it specifies need to be cooked with the skins on. The beans are cooked until they split open, creating a soup that is “delicious beyond compare,” especially as a broth for vegetable dishes.
蘑姑汤 Mushroom broth
磨菇见前，其汤素菜高汤，用处最多，然非加以蚕豆、黄豆等汤，则味单也。
This presumably uses dried mushrooms, although the recipe does not specify. As a vegetable gaotang, this broth has the most uses, but if beans or radish are not added, it is weaker in taste than the others.
So now I’m ready to start cooking–starting by soaking the beans overnight.
I’ll go through each one in a separate post, but so far my shopping list has included:
- 300gm dried fava beans
- 60gm dried shitake mushrooms
- 60gm dried deer ear mushrooms
- One medium sized (600gm) white daikon radish
- 0ne carrot, but to about (600/7*3)=270gm
Thomas David DuBois 