By Li Jun (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-06-02 09:30

Local legends

The most famous type of rice noodle dish is the Guoqiao or "cross bridge" noodles. In Kunming, the dish can vary from just a few yuan to hundreds depending on the different ingredients.

For customers who try this dish for the first time, the wait staff must warn them of the heat of the chicken soup. One of my friends took a sip before the waitress could stop him, and he had to live on porridge for a month.

The soup is actually stewed for hours with chicken, duck and pig bones. The soup appears to be cold, as no heat can escape the layer of yellow transparent grease.

But when you put the slices of chicken, pork, Yunnan ham, fish, squid, pig liver, kidney and other materials into the soup, they are cooked and ready to eat in just a few minutes.

Then you can add the fresh tender peas, spinach and the thin sheet of dried bean curd into the soup. After putting this on a plate of rice noodle, all you need to do is to adjust the taste with salt, chopped green onion, coriander and pepper.

With so many ingredients, the dish is truly pleasant to both the tongue and the eye. Like other famous dishes in China, its peculiar name comes from a legend, which is about a scholar who lived during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

To excel in the imperial examinations, the foundation for official careers, the young scholar studied hard on an island in the Nanhu Lake in Mengzi, which is in today's Honghe Hani and Yi Autonomous Prefecture of southern Yunnan.

His wife had to cross a bridge when sending him the meals every day. But the scholar often forgot to eat and the meal would go cold. By accident, the woman found that chicken soup could be used to quickly prepare a good hot meal, so the scholar named the dish "cross bridge" in honour of his wife's efforts.

I asked for this dish during a recent visit to a Yunnan restaurant close to the China Central Television. At a price of 38 yuan (US$4.75), the dish didn't exceed my expectations, nor did I find the fragrance of the rice noodles special enough.

Speed vs taste

The lack of fragrance is probably due to the production technique. In Yunnan, there are two major ways to make rice noodles.

The time-consuming way is to grind fermented rice and mix it with high-quality water to make the rice noodles. The result tastes a bit sour but maintains the rice fragrance.

Named "sour liquid rice noodles," this type is the best for bean curd jelly noodles and cold rice noodles.

Only a few kinds of rice produced in Yunnan can make good rice noodles.

Also it is difficult to preserve such noodles. Mengzi County, where the rice and water are especially good, has been credited as the birthplace of rice noodles.

Very few people outside Yunnan have mastered the complicated procedure for the sour type, so a simpler method is adopted.

The rice is directly ground and put into a machine to produce a thinner type called "dried liquid rice noodles." When dried thoroughly, it can be kept for months. However, this type, common in restaurants in Beijing, lacks the special aura of the fresh rice noodles.

It is said that the restaurant in the Representative Office of Yunnan Province in Beijing supplies fresh sour liquid rice noodles, which are transported by air, each day.

Back in the early 1980s when China had just opened its doors, eating out was a luxury reserved for special occasions. When my sister and I rode our bikes from our village home for a few hours to reach the nearest town called Wenquan of Anning County in Kunming, the biggest incentive was the street-side stalls selling rice noodles.

Handing out the cents we'd saved for months for the special meal, we would finish each noodle and talk about the trip with our pals for days.

Today I often invite friends to search for good eateries where the expenditure per person seldom falls below 30 yuan (US$3.75). Deep inside, though, I still yearn for the simple rice noodles in my memory.

   1 2   

   1 2