Eating Chinese Herbal Soup Tastes Almost Like a Sin
PERSONAL JOURNALGASTRONOMY
9/9/20263 min read
I can't. I just can't detach a pot of boiling Chinese herbal soup from what was once a love story.
Haven't I warned you that listing every detail of an experience involving food is a talent of mine? The thing is, it feels almost like a sin when this soup that I now inhale religiously every month came from a love story that ended only a few years ago. Sure, I've told you about my high school sweetheart, but that was a long, long (long) time ago.
But a story that ended only a few years ago?
That feels different.
It feels like a secret I should have kept a little longer, until one day it wouldn't feel like a sin anymore.
Let me pull back the story a little.
When I started hitting puberty, my mom almost literally spoon-fed this strange herbal soup into my mouth. I'm still debating whether it was because, as my mom put it, this was "herbal soup for a teenage girl," or simply because my palate hadn’t developed enough yet to appreciate something so complex. Savory, umami, slightly sweet, earthy, and bitter. All at the same time.
The soup usually combines chicken or pork with plenty of what I used to call strange ingredients:
dried red dates, or jujube (hong zao / 红枣)
dried goji berries (gou qi / 枸杞)
dried angelica root (dang gui / 当归)
dried astragalus root (huang qi / 黄芪)
dried codonopsis root (dang shen / 党参)
dried Sichuan lovage rhizome (chuan xiong / 川芎)
dried American yellow ginseng (hua qi shen / 花旗参)
dried Korean red ginseng (gao li shen / 高丽参)
Who on earth eats this kind of thing? I thought. I swore I would never, ever touch that soup again in my entire life. Eventually, my mom gave up on me.
Not until a few years ago, when I met a guy who became my boyfriend for a couple of years. My fingers still feel a little heavy typing this part. But anyhow, he became a somewhat important character in the story between me and Chinese herbal soup.
There was this one rainy day. The weather felt chilly, and he pulled a container filled with all the ingredients out of the fridge. Just like my mom had always wished I would, he drank this soup religiously.
Contrary to what I said in the previous paragraph, I had also become someone who liked to give things a second, third, sometimes even fourth try before declaring something (or someone) persona non grata.
So I tried again.
That first gulp was not pretty. I still didn't get it. My palate and my brain were confused.
Nobody in this world should actually enjoy this.
At the time, I could only describe the flavor as BITTER. It literally tasted like... a BAD, BAD Chinese medicine.
The second attempt was better.
The third, better still.
By the fourth, something started to change.
My palate finally began to appreciate the strange juxtaposition of all these complex flavors.
The earthiness.
The little bit of natural sweetness from the goji berries, jujube, and sometimes dried longan.
And then the umami that lingers at the back of my palate?
A winner.
I started describing it as beautifully gurih, an Indonesian word that sits somewhere between savory and deeply umami. Somehow, I had fallen in love with the soup I once swore I would never touch again.
I don't know if it's a habit, a ritual, or simply something my body now craves, but every time the weather starts getting chilly, or I feel under the weather (no pun intended), I open my fridge and find this container of treasures waiting for me. I've been having it at least five days a month for a couple of years now. In fact, I had it for lunch today. Sometimes I can't even wait for the next day to eat the leftovers.
And yet...
It still tastes like a sin.
Because I remember him.
Every time I'm preparing the soup. Every time I'm drinking it. Every single time I finish the last drop.
Not in a romantic kind of way.
Not anymore. But in a warm kind of way.
Food does hold a person.
It holds those feelings. Well, some feelings, at least— that are still not too taboo to be felt.
Eating it feels like being inside a warm, fluffy blanket in the middle of winter.
But thinking about it...
How it holds all the memories.
How one sip can bring back a rainy day, a kitchen, a person, a version of myself I thought I'd already left behind.
That still feels like a sin.