Dishes to dream about

But after one sip, he decided that it was delicious and finished it all up.

The soup base is clarified chicken broth, of course, and the shrimp balls were made with the freshest crustaceans. The chicken consomme is filtered several times for absolute clarity and slightly reduced to intensify the flavors. Then the cooked chicken skin is finely shredded and added to the soup again, to increase the tactile and taste contrasts.

YAM CAKE WITH DATES

Qin Keqing, one of the young ladies, had been feeling tired after a night out playing cards, and she fell ill, growing listless and even too weary to eat. There was only one thing she did put into her mouth, and that was a date-and-yam cake that the Grand Dowager had sent to her. She told Wang Xifeng: "I found it quite easy to digest."

The little cakes are made by steaming Chinese yam and the dried red dates or jujubes. These are then pureed and sieved several times until the texture was silky soft.

Then the puree is allowed to set into a layer that is then sliced into tiny slivers. Fresh dates are easily digestible and have lots of simple sugars like fructose and dextrose to replenish energy and revitalize the body instantly.

Steamed yams are also easy to digest, low in fat, high in fiber and packed with important nutrients. The yam-and-date cakes were definitely an energy booster.

Other dishes served in the Jia Family Mansion included deep-fried quails, lotus-and-jujube sweet soup, bamboo shoots braised in chicken marrow, buns made with tofu skin, lipstick-tinged goose breasts, salt-and-pepper wolfberry shoots, civet cat jerky and snowflake pastries.

By Fan Zhen (China Daily)