A bellyful of warmth

Every ingredient has a purpose.

The meat will either strengthen or cool the body. The root or leafy vegetables will play supporting roles for flavor or for health. Herbs or aromatics will neutralize certain undesirable effects－like ginger taking away the pungency of fish or pork, and dried jujubes adding sweetness where it is needed.

The long, slow simmering melds the flavors of the various ingredients and allows them to come together in the soup bowl.

Unlike Western soups, the treasured end product is the liquid, the soup, and not the ingredients that first went into the pot. These soup dregs, or tangzha as we call them, are often discarded. In fact, after three hours of simmering, almost all of the flavor has already been extracted.

And there are soups for every purpose.

The Cantonese grandmother's idea of chicken soup is to double boil a minced chicken breast. The result is a clear consomme that will tempt even the most recalcitrant invalid.

There are soups that will make you bright-eyed and clear-brained for those examination days, soups to revive flagging appetites, broths to boost energy after a hard day's workout, and a whole cookbook of soups for the new mother recovering from childbirth.

Soups are flash-boiled, simmered, steamed and double-boiled. There are also soups that resemble the stews of other provinces, but the Cantonese differentiate them by calling these geng, or thick broths.

The most famous, of course, is the infamous shark's fin soup but, with the ban on shark fins in most Chinese cities, this looks like a thing of the past. Instead, a vegetable called shark's fin melon is now very popular. This is very much like spaghetti squash and takes well to cooking with shredded chicken, crabs and mushrooms to produce a tasty substitute.

In Shunde county, the Cantonese chefs like producing a thick broth that features the local fish, which is first fried and then deboned before being added to the broth with aromatic mushrooms.

The importance of soup to the Cantonese can be seen in the description of their daily meals. For an average family, sancai yitang, three dishes and a soup, sums it up.