Cattail with Bone Soup,Enjoying Cattails in Lotus Pond
2 min read“Cattails abound in Daming Lake,looking like wild rice shoots and tasting like shoots,are the treasured vegetables in northern provinces.”,which is the comment on cattails from the book A Summary of Jinan City.Since the cattails are from a unique places-Daming Lake in Jinan that is formed with the various spring streams,it has always been a kind of precious vegetable.lts eating can be traced back to Zhou Dynasty,as The Book of Song has once said:”The shoots and cattails are very slender”,a proof that the ancient people already attained great values to the taste and nutritions of the cattails.
Zang Kejia,a modern famous poet,once wrote a popular essay Hometown Cuisine enumerating the various local cuisines of Jinan,which demonstrated his deep reminiscence about hometown and inspires the readers to feel his homesickness,as if they were just back home.As the essay goes,”There are a lot of cattails,straightening up their green stems among the lotuses in the Daming Lake. Many tourists would always have a meal in a restaurant by the bank of Daming Lake. Though it might be small,there is one famous dish–stir-fried cattails with meat- Speaking of the dish of my hometown,I just have such a different feeling thatl seemed to just have returned home,back to my adolescence.”Indeed,the ones who live far from their hometown would never stop missing their home and kinsfolk while they strive for a living,and the homesickness is reflected in our preference for the food from hometown and in the review of home culture.
The ingredients used to cook cattail with bone soup are particular,since it is recommended to use the cattails that only grow in mid May and August for they have the best flavor.Before cooking,it is necessary to soak the cattails into the water for three to four hours,and scald the cattails with boiling water.Make sure to get the cattails out of the boiling water the moment they are scalded.The cattails taste light itself,thus cooking it with bone soup of heavy taste would deliver a much greater taste.Therefore,the combination of the local crisp cattails and the heavy and mellow bone soup just makes the reputable”Cattail with Bone Soup”.Having been existing more than one hundred years since it came into being,this dish is still quite popular with local people with fame.
