Helen — Old Friends Rice Noodle

Talking about my favorite dish, I would definitely recommend the “Old Friends Rice Noodle,” a signature dish of my hometown Nanning, a small city in China. People who first encounter the rice noodle may be discouraged by the strange smell caused by the sour bamboo shoots, one of the main ingredients in the rice noodle. However, the sour, combining with spicy flavor, whet people’s appetite. Locals also believe that this rice noodle can drive out chill in winter. The complex tastes of the Old Friends Rice Noodle usually make people end up with loving it. Old Friends Rice Noodle is everywhere in Nanning. You can find noodle houses no matter in luxury malls or alongside the road. And Nanning people love it in every day of their life. Even in the hottest days in summer, those rice noodle houses are full of people, eating noodles even without air condition and enjoying the hospitality in a bowl of soup. It’s also a local non-stratum-differentiated food representative: you can see people who come with expensive cars waiting for seats in a humble but clean roadside noodle house; you can find young and old people are all enjoying the noodle together in a noodle house. 

Old Friends Rice Noodle is a symbol of my nostalgia. I seldom go back to Nanning. My family now moved to Shanghai, and I study in the United States. The distance between me and the rice noodle never stops my love towards it. Every time I go to Nanning, I would have a bowl of Old Friends Rice Noodle. Since Old Friends Rice Noodle is not a very famous food in China, there are only two restaurants in Shanghai that have this noodle as I know, plus that my parents are not good cooks, I might only have it about five times a year, but I always miss the taste and the feeling of being in hometown. I remember the time when my family were still in Nanning. In a lazy Sunday morning when nobody wanted to cook, we walked out of the neighborhood and to have the noodle, talking about trivial things. It’s the feeling about being home, about having little happiness that I always miss. When I was in high school in Oregon, I once tried to make Old Friends Rice Noodle for my friends and my host family as a way to release my nostalgia and bring Nanning-style hospitality to America. My friends and I went to asian market to buy materials, looked up the recipe online and cooked together. Thinking about my host parents didn’t like like peppery and sour, I even made another one with soy sauce instead of spicy chili sauce. The strange smell attracted my host family. I asked the to try the one I made for them. They used forks to taste a little bit, and said, “It smells so terrible! But it taste much better than I thought! Thank you for bringing the Nanning noodle soup to us!”

There’s a story about Old Friends Rice Noodle and why it has such a strange name. There was an old man who always went to Zhou’s teahouse, but he had a cold and didn’t go for a few days. Zhou worried about him, so he cooked the refined noodles with fried garlic, soy sauce, chili peppers, sour bamboo shoots, beef, pepper and so on into a bowl of hot noodles and brought it to this old friend to eat. This hot, spicy and sour noodle whet the old man’s appetite. He was sweating and eventually cured from cold. The old man felt very grateful about it and made a board writing that “Old Friends Always Come” to Zhou. The noodle got the name from the story and later spread in Nanning, became the signature dish of Nanning. It also symbolize Nanning people’s hospitality, solidarity and friendship. Nanning people love sour and spicy food, but people from other place may think the taste too strong and strange, so it’s vary favored in Nanning but has not yet spread to all around China yet.

 A picture of Old Friends Rice Noodle that I took this summer.

 A picture of my family in Shanghai

recipe of Old Friends Rice Noodle:

Ingredients (one person): cut powder (river powder) or noodles two to two; sour bamboo shoots one or two shredded; Douchi a little shredded; ginger garlic a little; chili two minced peppers; vegetables a few slices; onion a little; meat sliced one to two (depending on everyone’s preference, pork, beef, pig liver, powdered intestines). Methods: 1, meat with wine, salt, sugar, light soy sauce, tender meat powder, pepper seasoning, taste can be slightly heavy; 2, oil pot with ginger, garlic, chili, soy sauce fried, add flavor and stir fry meat until discolored, add sour bamboo shoots to stir fry for a minute, add soup or water to boil, add wet noodles, remove and add vegetables, boil and add onion. When cooking noodles, put the alkali noodles in boiling water until medium well, then remove the water, to remove the paste in the noodle soup, after the clear water will become tough, here will be prepared garlic, Douchi, chili, sour bamboo shoots and other ingredients into hot oil to fry, then add semi-fat lean meat slices (broken meat is the best) a little stir-fry, add bone soup to boil, add noodles and cook until eight to nine ripe, and then add vinegar, and then add the prepared garlic, soy sauce, chili peppers, sour bamboo shoots and other ingredients to the hot oil, then stir in the semi-fat lean meat slices (broken meat is the best), add the bone soup to boil, boil the noodles and cook until eight or nine ripe, and then add vinegar. Pepper and other seasonings, then began to smell its sour fragrance, and then you can “hip-hop” ha-ha. As for old friend powder, there is a “cooking medium well, overwater” process. Sometimes when the wet noodles in the shop are sold out, pour the powder directly into the cooked old friend noodle soup and cook it. The same sour and spicy fresh fragrance, the same food dripping.

https://baike.baidu.com/item/老友粉/1455128?fr=aladdin

The recipe is translated by Baidu Translate.