How I've learned to appreciate Cantonese soups in all their sensuous glory

They mean more to me in my late twenties than ever before

Source: Anna Tarazevich from Pexels

My sister and I have always known that we were spoiled; getting to taste some of the best Cantonese soups every week when we were kids wasn’t something we were ashamed of.

That being said, I can’t say that I started appreciating my mom’s masterful culinary creations until well into my adulthood, and even then I was hardly an impassioned advocate.

Inferiority Complex

Back then the plethora of unusual ingredients she used in her soups just seemed so excessive, so random and improvisatory. 

None of my friends at school for example had parents who used peanuts in their soups, nor did they have soups containing seemingly the entire kitchen pantry, from potatoes and carrots to pork bone, yuba, dried jujubes, etc.

As someone who has had a long-entrenched inferiority complex related to my own heritage, sadly, I just didn’t have the confidence at that time to appreciate my mom’s soups.

They seemed too idiosyncratic, too “foreign” for me to be comfortable sharing with friends; if it weren’t for an extended time I spent living away from home in fact I probably would’ve never appreciated them in the first place.

That only makes my change of heart I suppose all the more revelatory and significant.

So what do I like most about these soups?

Well, after I spent several years of my life toiling in the mundanity of eating at campus dining halls, I realized that the stews they served just didn’t have the kind of sensuous mouthfeel that my mom’s soups had.

It’s not as though the campus soups weren’t flavorful; on the contrary, they were incredibly delicious.

What they fundamentally lacked though, and what I truly missed, were ingredients with a sort of textural pizazz, ingredients that made me slurp and chomp to my heart’s content without any sort of inhibition.

I missed the bouncy springiness of Chinese snow fungi, for instance.

I missed the visceral slurpiness of dried dragonfruit vines.

I missed the scintillating crunch of the peanuts coupled with the firmness of the potatoes and carrots.

I missed all of these delightful vectors of sensation, unusual as they might’ve seemed.

Sure, there might’ve been that occasional flavor or texture that I disliked, but honestly speaking the longer I spent away from home the more I realized how intrinsic these ingredients have become to not only my life, but my identity as well. 

I decided while living abroad then that I needed to learn how to make these soups myself, to stop feeling so guilty and wholeheartedly embrace the culinary culture that I grew up admiring.

My mom after all could only live so long; it’s not as if I could just stop by a Chinese restaurant anywhere in the world and order these kinds of soups.

Making them myself

So, after returning to the U.S. I relentlessly pestered my mom and wrote down many of the recipes for her soups. Are they nearly as refined as the ones she’s made?

No, but at the very least I don’t feel compelled to step back in time anymore as the only means of tasting my childhood soups. 

Indulging in some much-needed nostalgia, incidentally, is something I can do now whenever I want, and considering I’m in my late twenties that means more to me than one could possibly imagine.