Sour fish in a Kaili household kitchen

{"slug":"kaili-suantang-yu-kitchen","title":"Sour fish in a Kaili household kitchen","dek":"A morning in a Miao courtyard kitchen above Kaili, where a clay jar of fermenting tomato and rice water sets the pace for everything that follows.","body":"The first thing we heard, climbing the stone steps to Yang Aniang's courtyard above Kaili at half past seven, was not voices but the soft glug of liquid lifted from a jar. She stood in the doorway of the back kitchen with a wooden ladle in one hand, sleeves pushed to the elbow, decanting a thin pinkish broth from a glazed clay vessel into a smaller bowl. The smell reached us before we reached her, sour and faintly fruity, closer to a bruised tomato left on a windowsill than to vinegar. She lifted the ladle once more, watched the liquid run back into the jar, and only then looked up.\n\n## The jar by the door\n\nYang Aniang is fifty-nine. She has lived in this courtyard since she married into the house at twenty-two, and the clay jar by the door has, by her count, been continuously alive for thirty-one of those years. The Miao call it the suantang weng, the sour-soup jar, and in households like hers it is fed, drained, and refilled the way another kitchen would tend a sourdough crock. She explained, without much ceremony, that the jar was started by her mother-in-law in the autumn of 1995 with the cloudy water from washing glutinous rice, a handful of crushed wild tomatoes from the hillside above the village, and a pinch of salt. Nothing else.\n\nThe jar itself is ordinary, a brown-glazed crock the height of a kitchen stool, sealed with a shallow water-moat lid that breathes outward and lets nothing in. She lifted the lid an inch. The liquid was the colour of a faded brick, with a thin froth of small bubbles working slowly along one edge, and the smell rose in a soft wave: lacto-fermented tomato, rice starch, a thread of something almost meaty underneath. The mother culture lives in the wood of the ladle as much as in the jar, she said. If the ladle is washed with soap, the jar sulks for a week.\n\n## Walking up to the pond\n\nWe walked with her son-in-law, Pan Shifu, down the lane to the carp pond at the edge of the village a little after eight. The pond is shared by four households and sits at the lower corner of a flooded paddy, fed by a stone-lined channel from a spring above the road. The fish are daoyu, paddy carp, a stocky local strain the Miao have raised in rice fields here for at least four centuries. They feed on rice-field plankton and fallen grain and grow slowly, which Pan told us was the entire point. A fast fish, he said, tastes of nothing.\n\nHe netted two, each about the length of a forearm, and slipped them into a wet straw basket. The carp were dark olive along the back and pale along the belly, with the close-set scales that mark the local line. Walking back up the lane, the basket dripping, he stopped twice to let neighbours look in and approve the size. The approval was not theatrical. It was the brief attention of people who have grown the same fish in the same water and know what a good one looks like in someone else's hands.\n\n## The pounding board\n\nBack in the kitchen, Yang Aniang had set out a low wooden pounding board, scarred and slightly concave from decades of use, and a small mound of aromatics: muyao gen, the woody root of a wild ginger relative that grows on the limestone slopes above the village, a handful of bird's-eye chillies from the courtyard pot, garlic, the green tops of spring onions, and a flat, papery leaf she called zhe'ergen, fishwort, with its medicinal, almost iodine bite. She pounded them together with a short wooden pestle, three quick strikes and a pause, three quick strikes and a pause. The board, she said, had been her mother-in-law's.\n\nThe fish were scaled and gutted on the stone sink outside the door, then scored along the flank in three diagonal cuts each, so the sour broth could enter the flesh from the side rather than only from the cavity. She did not fillet. The bones, she said, hold the dish together; without them the broth thins out and forgets what it is for.\n\n## The bowl\n\nThe cooking itself was almost embarrassingly quick. She tipped a ladle of the mother-jar broth into a shallow iron pan over a wood fire in the corner hearth, added a second ladle of plain water, and brought it to a tremble rather than a boil. The pounded aromatics went in next, then a small spoon of coarse salt. No sugar. No oil. When the broth had taken on the colour of weak red tea, she slid the two carp in flat against the bottom of the pan, covered them, and walked outside to bring in a basket of garden greens she had picked at dawn.\n\nThe fish cooked for eleven minutes. We know because Pan timed it on his phone, more out of habit than need; Yang Aniang timed it by the smell, which shifted twice while we sat there, first sour and bright, then deeper and rounder, the broth pulling something fatty and sweet out of the fish belly. She lifted the lid, lowered in the greens for the last minute, and ladled the whole thing into a wide ceramic bowl that lived on a shelf above the hearth.\n\n## What we ate\n\nWe ate at the low table by the window, the bowl in the centre, with cold glutinous rice cooled in bamboo and small dishes of pickled cabbage on the side. The broth was not the sharp sourness we had expected from the smell of the jar. It had softened in the heat into something closer to a clear tomato consomme with a long mineral tail, and the fish flesh fell off the bones in pale flakes that tasted of the pond and of the broth at the same time. Pan ate quickly and without comment. Yang Aniang ate slowly and watched the bowl.\n\nThe dish is sometimes rendered in English as Miao sour-soup fish, and the rendering is not wrong, but it leaves out the jar by the door. There is no equivalent made with vinegar. The whole register of suantang yu, the cold-bright opening, the slow round middle, the faintly funky finish, is the sound of a fermentation kept alive in a particular kitchen for a particular number of years, and it cannot be assembled from a bottle.\n\n## After the bowl\n\nAfterwards she ladled the remaining broth back into the mother jar, topped it with fresh rice-washing water and three new wild tomatoes from a bowl on the sill, and sealed the lid. The jar, she said, would rest until the evening, when she would draw from it again for a smaller bowl for her husband. Her granddaughter, who is nineteen and studies in Guiyang, comes home for the autumn festival and the lunar new year. She has been shown the jar. Whether she will keep it alive is not, Yang Aniang said, a question she has decided to press.\n\nWe walked back down the lane a little after eleven. Somewhere in the courtyards behind us, four other jars were breathing under their water-moat lids, and the morning's sour broth was settling back into the wood.","heroImageAlt":"Miao paddy carp simmering in clay-jar sour broth.","relatedDestination":"guizhou","relatedExperience":"culinary-culture","tags":["guizhou","miao","fermentation","culinary-culture","kaili"]}