The night before Chinese New Year, my friend and I found ourselves in Kunming, staying at a funky hostel with a roof deck lounge and bar, a perfect location for viewing the fireworks.
We also found ourselves with a dearth of food options. Chinese New Year, or "Spring Festival" as my students call it, is the country's biggest holiday and everyone goes home by 6:00 p.m. We wandered the streets a bit a bit before finding a deserted-looking noodle shop just four doors down from our hostel.
After some confusing pointing, arguing and pricing discussions, we determined that we had successfully ordered some noodles. What we hadn't realized was we had ordered "cross the bridge noodles", a Kunming specialty. According to my Lonely Planet guide, the name of the noodles stems from an old tale of a woman who used to have to cross a bridge to bring her husband his lunch at work. By the time she delivered it, the dish had always cooled. She discovered that a layer of fat across the dish kept the dish hot while she was crossing the bridge -- and this made her husband happy.
The version we ordered consisted of a GIANT bowl of steaming broth (I think mine was 10" across), and the remainder of the fillings, including the noodles, on accompanying plates.
The noodles themselves were chewy and of a modest thickness, not unlike Japanese udon noodles. The broth was decidely chicken stock, with a thick gloss of fat floating on top of our enormous bowls. We added all the ingredients including a few slices of thinly-sliced fish and a quail's egg. We ate and ate and ate... and at the end, we had eaten (though not completed) the biggest bowl of chicken soup ever. Comforting, though not thrilling.
In addition to the soup, we also feasted on spicy, musty, cumin-y grilled octopus and chicken skin, the latter of which was a novelty to me. When I was a kid, I always loved chicken skin and endured my father's complaints about my preference for the cheap, fatty portion of the bird. So a whole plate of skins! Ooh, I was in heaven, until I had consumed about five of them. I then succumbed to a feeling of disgust. It was, after all, chicken skin.
Posted by Astrid at February 24, 2005 05:45 AM