Made in Macao | Long-boiled soup – the Chinese secret to health and beauty

Jenny Lao-Phillips

A friend who works closely with expatriates in Macao told me that one of the questions she has often been asked is why we Chinese take so long to make soup. It came as culture shock when she was asked this question for the first time, as we never considered soup to be something that was supposed to be cooked quickly. I cannot speak for all Western cultures, but at least for North Americans and some Asian cultures like the Japanese and Koreans, soup is like fast food. Not in the literal sense, but something that can be cooked fast for a quick meal. But for traditional Chinese families, soup is not that simple, it is the center of our family lives, a symbol of love and care.

When I was a kid, I remembered going with my grandmother to the market every morning to buy fresh ingredients like pork ribs, fish or chicken for making soup. Because the community was smaller, everyone seemed to know each other, and the greetings of the wet market customers were usually ,“How are you?” followed by, “What soup are you making today?” Then the ladies would gather and discuss soups. This was not just a brainstorming session. They decided what soup to make based on the season, the weather and the health of their family members. For instance, if the humidity was high, the more senior market-goers would recommend young housewives make soup with melon, red beans, date and pork, just to name a few ingredients, some of which I still don’t know – they are mostly Chinese herbs. Unlike the older generations, from mine onward I’d say soup is just chopped up vegetables thrown together with some stock and boiled for 15 minutes. For the traditional Chinese family, however, soup is what keeps the family healthy and what the central person of the family, usually the mother, take hours each day to prepare.

But why does it take hours to make some soup? Well, for one thing, the slow boiling of the soup cooks all the ingredients till they are soft, especially the bones. Instead of using a broth to make soup, long-boiled Chinese soup is the broth itself, with no chemicals but with all the protein, calcium and taste from the ingredients gathered, making the soup an essence of the ingredients. One may be curious as to why Chinese chicken soup uses a whole chicken and is boiled till even the bones are almost melted, with not much meat to eat. The chicken is reduced to bowls of essence which is, some say, healthier than eating chicken itself, as the bones contribute collagen to the protein we get already from the food and enhance skin elasticity – that is why. I’m not sure if that is true, but many ladies have attributed their younger looking skin to having Chinese soup every day.

Also, having long-boiled soup to drink when one gets home from school or work was considered the basis of family lives. In fact, there is a Chinese saying that wives who can make good soup can capture the heart of their husbands. Therefore, the hours spent making a soup are not just part of the recipe for another dish on the dining table. The soup is for the health of family and is a symbol of love. Regardless of the scientific evidence of long-boiled soup having physical health benefits, the fact that someone spent hours going through the difficulty of sorting out numerous ingredients, and hours boiling soup every day for you is definitely healthy for one’s psychological health.