Author: Helen Zeng

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A Study of the Popularity of Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle

Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle is a local food that is famous for its peculiar odor, but it is one of the most popular food in China in recent years. Among many bands that produce prepackaged Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle and are popular on the e-commerce platform, the brand “the King of Snails” has the highest selling; its online sales of Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle of a single day are about 100,000 packs(Mo). Moreover, it has been exported to the United States and it is always sold out online. My paper aims to demonstrate what Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle is and the reasons behind its popularity.

It was a cold day last semester, for the first time I realized that Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle, a Chinese local food, has now left its home from China and had its international influence. At the snow day break, even though there was absolutely no snow, the frigid weather in early February pre vented me and my roommate from getting out. The plan was to lounge in the room, until an intolerable huger interrupted our idleness. After thoroughly rummaged our drawers, we finally found the last pack of Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle that I brought from China  several months ago. We borrowed a pan from our sophomore advisor, went down to the kitchen and cooked the noodle immediately. It was a delightful meal. We washed the pan thoroughly and returned it to the SA. He took it, had a sniff of the pan, and asked us: “did you just have Snails Rice Noodle?” We were so shocked and confused, “how did you know?” He told us, “I had it before, and was very much impressed by its peculiar odor.” We laughed, and agreed to have Snails Rice Noodle together next time.

The experience made me notice the popularity of Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle and begin to wonder the reasons behind it. I found that though Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle doesn’t have a very long history, it can enter into the public is because of its special taste, the production of prepackaged food, the use of internet, the government support and its cultural meanings.

Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle is delicious. Authentic Snails Rice Noodle uses dried rice noodle made by aged rice. The noodle was dried out of water when it has the shape, so it keeps the freshness of rice and thus the noodle itself is tasty and chewy. What’s more, the noodle is famous for its terrible smell. When we cooked the noodle in the kitchen of the dorm, the whole dorm could smell it. And everyone who walked closed to us and had the noodle before could find that we just had the Snails Rice Noodle. The peculiar smell is came from the pickled bamboo shoot. After pickling, the bamboo shoots have the special and annoying smell. But if you have a bite, you would find it sour and fresh. Moreover, the soup is very special that you could find many taste from it: sour, spicy, salty and sweet. Simply the soup is worth the price of the bowl of noodle.

Traditionally, the noodle is hard to make. Due to the variety of the ingredients and the complexity of the preparation, people usually have Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle at noodle houses. To cook a bowl of Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle, the chef need to cook bone soup, soak and wash the snails, fry the beancurd skin, then cook pickle shredded vegetables, bamboo shoot, hot pepper and many other ingredients together and put them into the bone soup. After that, make the soup with snails and pepper for an hour. And finally, mix the noodle, bone soup, snails with soup, vegetables and so on. A bowl of Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle is made. The troublesome process is what makes the noodle so delicious but also what prevents it from spreading all over China, don’t even talk about all over the world.

Fortunately, thanks to the development of technology, prepackaged products appear in the market in around 2013. Liuzhou businessmen catch the opportunity. They produce prepackaged Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle and make the quality guarantee period as long as half a year. A pack of prepackaged Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle has around 9 packs of ingredients, including dried noodle, pickled bamboo shoots and pickled green bean, vinegar, pepper sauce, snails and so on. The various ingredients make the taste of the noodle similar to those cooked in the noodle house. Most importantly, it is very easy to be made at home. It takes about 10 minutes to cook a bowl of prepackaged Snails Rice Noodle; it allows people to enjoy the interest of cooking and it is not so complex that may bother people.

In order to “gain an insider’s or emic perspective”(Crowther) about the Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle, I employed the method of participant non-observation. I opened one pack of Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle and cooked it for my mom and myself. Firstly, I boiled a pot of water and cook the dried noodle with it for 5 minutes. Then I picked out the noodle into a bowl, poured out the water. After that, I opened all the other small packs in the package, including pickled bamboo shoots, vinegar, chili sauce, snails soup, peanuts and so on. I put them all into the pot with water and boiled for another 5 minuets, then I put the noodle in and soaked for 2 minutes. Finally, I found it may be not enough for two people, so I added an egg and some vegetables. It’s not a difficult dish, but it’s definitely delicious and taste like authentic Rice Snails Noodle that we used to have in noodle house. Both my mom and I liked it so much. My mom praised my cook though I didn’t do anything skillful and it took me no more than 15 minutes. I was very satisfied with the experience, I enjoyed the process of cooking and was proud that I could cook a delicious meal for my mom. I believe many other people liked the prepackaged Rice Snails Noodle for the same reason.

But producing prepackaged Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle is far not enough for it to be popular as much. Qingshi Liu, chairman of a brand that produce prepackaged Snails Rice Noodle, said, “many years ago, we went to Chengdu Sugar and Cocktail Fair, no matter the agencies or the customers, everyone asked us where Liuzhou is, what Snails Rice Noodle is. At that time, the popularity of this noodle is zero.” People from places other than Guangxi province didn’t know the noodle and thus wouldn’t buy it and talk about it.

Fortunately, in 2012, the documentary “A Bite of China” saved the noodle from dying down. “A Bite of China” is a documentary series about the pursue of the Chinese people to food and life, using the stories of specific people to show the food ecology of all parts of China. Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle is part of the documentary. The documentary swept across the whole country, so as the Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle. Many people in other cities know the noodle from the documentary, and they try it because of curiosity, and fall in love with it because of its taste. More and more people try it and introduce the noodle to their friends and post it on the internet.

Furthermore, the companies that produce prepackaged Snails Rice Noodle caught the fashion of posting and watching short videos and blogs. They cooperated with popular bloggers and youtubers, these online celebrities share their experiences and thought of Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle with their fans, posting the videos of their reactions when eating the noodle on all kinds of social media(Whytui Marketing). I looked up online for some data: in Bilibili, a Chinese website like Youtube, there are thousands of videos related to the noodle, including videos posted by Chinese, Japanese, American and Korean bloggers. Some of the videos have over 2.5 million hits. In 2017, famous blogger “Zhang Dou and Zhang Hua(张逗张花)” who studied in Emory University also made a video about some American Emory students’ reactions to the noodle, and the video had about 771,000 hits. Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle is not only popular in China; there are around 12,000 search results of “Snails Rice Noodle” on Youtube. The use of network propaganda successfully catch the heart of people, especially of young people. As the noodle began to be more and more popular, interesting news about the noodle began to show up on the “trending” of Weibo, the Chinese version of twitter, including news like “a Guangxi high school begin to provide Snails Rice Noodle in their cafeteria” and so on, catching people’s attention again and again.

The employment of the e-commerce platform also plays an important part in the popularity of Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle. The customers of prepackaged Snails Rice noodle are mostly young people as they like interesting food and don’t have a lot cooking skills. Another character about these young people is that they like to buy things online. Many brands of Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle have online flagship stores in taobao, an e-commerce platform like Amazon. This allows people to buy the noodle easily. Young people are lazy, their curiosity about the noodle may not support them to go out to shop, but if all they need to do is a click, they would happily order it and try it. Not only in China, Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle are also sold in many American e-commerce platforms, including Amazon and Yamibuy, a website that specifically sell asian food in the United States.

The popularity of a local food cannot be separated from the relevant policy and government support. On August 20, 2018, Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle gained the trademark of National Geographic indication, protected by “Regulations on the Protection of Geographical indications products” passed by National Administration of quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine. With the protection, the name of “Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle” cannot be used randomly, so the reputation of the noodle is protected. Moreover, there’s an agency in Liuzhou government that is specifically to support the development of Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle, the policies includes providing grant-in-aid to inheritors of hand-making the noodle, financially supporting the companies to spread the culture of Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle and so on (Liuzhou Business Committee). What’s more, in January, 2018, Liuzhou government opened a museum about Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle, showing the culture and skill of making the noodle, and there’s also a room for visitors to participate (Guo).

Liuzhou Government supports the development of the Snails Rice Noodle is not only because of that it boosts the economic development of Liuzhou, but also that the noodle contains the heart of Liuzhou’s culture.

The story of the birth of Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle demonstrates the creativity of Liuzhou people. Compared to many other kinds of noodle, Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle has a short history of about 40 years. It was originated from Liuzhou night market. At the end of late 1970s, after the Great Cultural Revolution, business began to recover, including the Liuzhou night market. It was a tradition that Liuzhou people loves to eat snails and noodle, so some clever businessmen began to provide both cooked snails and noodles in their noodle houses. After movies, some hungry customers occasionally asked the chefs to put some snails and the soup that used to cook snails into their noodles(VC). The combination had magical powers; they found it so delicious! So there it came the Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle.

Nowadays, Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle is the signature dish of Liuzhou, Guangxi Province. In 2008, the skill of hand-making Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle was selected for the second batch of intangible cultural heritage list in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous region and it is gradually applying for national and world-class heritage.
Snails Rice Noodle may sounds weird at first, but eating river snails(田螺) has a long history in Liuzhou. “About 20,000 years ago, the ‘Liujiang people’, who lived in Bailian Cave, began fishing for snails and learned to use fire. Now the site of Bailian Cave still leaves the remains of the primitive man ‘burning snails’ at that time.” Liuzhou City Bailian Cave Science Museum curator Jiang Jinyuan said. Nowadays, eating snails in night markets is still part of Guangxi people’s life. Night markets are streets that have many kinds of food and people like to eat food, drink and talk on the street sides. And when eating snails, people need to use toothpicks to pick out the meat inside the shells. The process of picking out the meat is the heart of eating snails; if somebody else help you pick out the meat and place them in a bowl, then you lose the interest of eating snails.

There’s a saying: “human beings are shaped by the land around them,” and even the character would be along with the local food to send out unique local characteristics. Both the fried snails and Snails Rice Noodle are hot and spicy, they symbolize Liuzhou people’s characteristics. Liuzhou people are outgoing,  straightforward and don’t care about trifles; they enjoy the atmosphere in night markets where everyone is happy and talking loudly, though the place may be simple and a bit dirty.

Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle, a distinctive food originated from Liuzhou night market, is gradually walking out from its hometown and spreading its influences internationally. The Snails Rice Noodle doesn’t get its popularity for no reason. This significant progress should be attribute to several different causes, including its own deliciousness, peculiar odor, the development of prepackaging technology, increasing network propaganda, and the support of the government. The most important factor, however, is intangible. Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle has come a long way since created; it is the profound cultural connotation that made it a great success. The Snails Rice Noodle is a fruit of habit and thought of the society in Liuzhou, and is a representation of the reinvigorated food culture of China. It serves as a bridge between Chinese and various other cultures. Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle is only a small part of the splendid Chinese civilization. There are more to be explored.

 

 

Work cited

Crowther, Gillian. Eating Culture: An Anthropological Guide to Food. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Print.

Guo, Kaiqian. 广西柳州螺蛳粉：非遗美味做成全球产业. 2018 https://baike.baidu.com/reference/1455359/47d9APf3Be1ODWB7cqBdAa7pB06x6eI9YT-toTF7-zx6F92rQsdV5V4GL2jmtn7YeGBnViCkHGDnExdjXsaAVroUiF998QWEdrBDexqg3aOwlcq16NFsMmKQaDIv5KXXcVsoRXvGrok

Liuzhou Business Committee. 关于公布柳州螺蛳粉产业若干扶持政策联系方式的通知. 2018  http://www.liuzhou.gov.cn/xwzx/notice/201807/t20180730_1137600.html

Mo, Zhiye. “互联网+”时代柳州螺蛳粉网络营销传播研究. Diss. 2018. http://xueshu.baidu.com/usercenter/paper/show?paperid=1r1w0m30h27e0vw00f3402s0k5050780&site=xueshu_se

VC. 又爱又恨的螺蛳粉. 2019 https://baike.baidu.com/vbaike/又爱又恨的螺蛳粉/26403

Whytui Marketing. 螺蛳粉走红品牌大揭秘. 2019 https://www.whytui.com/news/pinpai/8809.html

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The Summons of the Soul (Helen Zeng)

Oh Soul, come back! Why should you go far away?

All your household has come to do you honor, all kinds of good noodles are ready:

Round rice noodle (圆粉), flat rice noodle (扁粉), wide rice noodle(宽河粉), mixed all with wheat noodle(面条),

sour, spicy, sweet, hot and cold: there are noodles of all flavors.

Snails cooked with hot pepper and other natural spices,

Spicy and sour blended in the soup of Liuzhou Snails Rice Noodle(柳州螺蛳粉);

minced pork stir fried with ginger slice, garlic and pepper flakes, becoming the soup of Nanning Old Friend Rice Noodle(南宁老友粉);

Fresh filtered dry rice noodle poured with marinade(卤汁), roast pork and beans, here is comes the Guilin Marinade Rice Noodle(桂林卤菜粉) ;

Wide rice noodle, sweet and sour sauce, pork, pickled cucumber and so on, combine to form the Binyang’s Acid Rice Noodle(宾阳酸粉);

Guiling jelly(龟苓膏) and golden sponge cake(黄金糕),

Silk like soybean milk, sweet and fresh, filled the paper cups,

mung bean soup, strained of impurities, clear drink, cool and refreshing;

Here are laid out the patterned ladles, and here is sparkling wine!

I choose to imitate the the piece “The Summons of the Soul” from Chu Ci by Qu Yuan because Qu Yuan is a very famous ancient poet and I have learnt some of his pieces when I was in high school in China. Also, the piece start with an exclamatory sentence and a question, which interests me. 

The summon “Oh Soul, come back” is what makes the piece so special. In the old times, people believe that when the should leaves, it is necessary to hold a soul gathering ceremony and call for the return of the soul. The purpose of Qu Yuan to write this piece is to “summon” the soul of the King Chu Huai(楚怀王), the old king who died years ago, to come back. In the piece, Qu Yuan listed various delicious food, which explains the importance of food in ancient China and how delicious food is enough to “call the soul back”.

In my writing, I summon the souls of people who leave home to study or work to come back. I listed the various kinds of noodles in my hometown Guangxi, because those are definitely what can “call my soul back” to my home town. At the beginning, I list different shapes of noodles, corresponding to “Rice, broomcorn, early wheat, mixed all with yellow millet” in Qu Yuan’s piece. Then I list many flavors of noodles and their major ingredients in response to the main dishes Qu Yuan wrote in his piece. And finally, I talk about some Chinese style desserts and drinks like he did. Through imitating Qu Yuan’s piece, I notice that in both ancient China and Modern China, desserts and drinks are also indispensable in a meal. For dessert, Qu Yuan mentioned “ried honey-cakes of rice flour and malt sugar sweetmeats” and I bring up “Guiling jelly(龟苓膏) and golden sponge cake(黄金糕)”. For drink, Qu Yuan described the wine in detail as it is the most common drink when people are going to express their feeling, but I talk about soybean milk and mung bean soup as they are what we usually have with noodles. Moreover, I find that noodle is the core of Guangxi cuisine. There are many kinds of noodle in Guangxi, and almost every city in Guangxi has its signature noodle. For example, Nanning has Nanning Old Friend Rice Noodle(南宁老友粉), Binyang has Binyang’s Acid Rice Noodle(宾阳酸粉).

Both the piece I read and the piece I wrote explain how food can gather people together and demonstrate Chinese people’s love of food. Qu Yuan use food to summon the soul of the King Chu Huai to come back, and I use noodles to appeal people to go home. Food has the power to make people home and food is something that people miss the most when they are away from home; food is an embodiment of hometown. Also, Chinese people love to eat, so people are willing to put so much effort and use their creativity to make various kinds of food, like the multiple dishes Qu Yuan mentioned and the various flavors of noodles I wrote.

Work cited:

https://www.gushiwen.org/wen_1058.aspx

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My Shanghainese friend’s kitchen table (Helen Zeng)

My family and I moved to Shanghai two years ago and settled there. As a new incomer, I cannot speak Shanghainese and often feel distant from the city. I am eager to know more about the place that I live in each day, and more importantly, about the local culture. Food, as an important part of every Chinese’s daily life, is the key to fit in.  

Moreover, since my family just bought our own apartment in Shanghai and we are going to decorate it, I am also interested in learning what kind of kitchen table can last for a long time and carry beautiful memory. That’s why I am conducting a study about a kitchen table of a Shanghainese family.

My friend Lu is a traditional Shanghainese girl, and from her character, I know that she must live in a harmonic family. I contacted her and she welcomed me to have lunch with her in a lovely Saturday noon. The first thing I saw when I went into her home was the kitchen table. The kitchen table is different from the one in my home. They are both made of mahogany, but Lu’s is rectangular and mine is a round one. There were only two boxes of napkins on it. Lu told me that nothing would be on the dining table except for dishes. They all have their own desks and thus they won’t work on the kitchen table. Even all three of them are at home, they work separately in their own rooms. But they would eat together around the kitchen table, and during the meal is when they communicate the most. Kitchen table brings the family together.

As we were randomly chatting, her parents brought the food they just cooked to the table and we started eating. We talked about some rules in the kitchen table during eating. For example, you should not make noise while eating, should not put the piece of food you touch back to the dish, should eat everything up in your own bowl. Her parents said they have been serious about these rules ever since Lu was little. They believe that eating habits can reveal one’s manner; they want her to be not only educated, but also genteel. They all obey these rules while we were eating together. And I did the same as well. I used to have a bad habit of leaving a little bit of food in my bowl when I finished, but this time I ate everything in my bowl like them.

After the lunch, we had some cheesecake together on the kitchen table. Lu’s mom talked about the history of the kitchen table. It’s a mahogany furniture that follows the decoration style back in Ming dynasty. Different from the design style of Qing dynasty, the Ming one is simple yet serious. There are exquisite carve patterns on the woodwork, while those patterns are decent enough so that people won’t be tired of looking at it even after a long time. Lu’s family redecorated their home two years ago and gave away many things but the kitchen table.

When I conduct the study, I choose the anthropological method of  participant-observation. As the author said in the “Eating Culture”, “participant observation involves trying to gain an insider’s to epic perspective on a culture and simultaneously apply an outsider’s or metic perspective to draw wider conclusions about how the culture and society works.” I think that compared to interviewing Lu and let her to tell me about her kitchen table, going to her home, looking at and eating on the kitchen table by myself would be a more direct way for me to learn about the culture and story behind the kitchen table. It helps me to not only learn about the objective facts but also to have my own feelings about it. 

During the study, I also think of my own family. Like Lu, I also study in emory far away from home and my parents are busy in work even at home, so eating in the kitchen table seems to be the some of the precious time we share together. Same things happen to my parents, too. They don’t live with their parents for a long time. Now, the most of the time they spend with their parents is on the kitchen table. When they go back to Nanning, they call their parents, “hey mom, I want to have a lunch at your home today.” Then they share their recent condition during the meal and leave after the meal to deal with other things. 

Kitchen table is a carrier of love in the family. Parents teach children about the culture and rules about eating; the child is cultivated. When the children grow up, kitchen table brings the busy family members together, offer a place where the family can focus on only eating and each other. Parents prepare food and bring to the kitchen table for us and we don’t need to think about food problem, it is also an act of love.

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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.