Squid thick soup, oily rice, rice cake, and congee scent the old city of Taipei, challenging Tainan's cuisine with flavor

"Wait a moment, wait a moment, bring the bowl back, it is not complete without rice wine." Ke Delong, the third-generation owner of A-Cai Grandma Sweet Soup, called out to a customer to come back. Sweet soup cannot do without rice wine to lift the flavor, he says; this is his insistence when it comes to snacks. The rice grains must be plump and the soup must have an amber hue for it to count as a perfect bowl of sweet soup. In the eyes of food critic Jiao Tong, such stubbornly made food is a blessed old-time flavor of winter, and combined with squid thick soup, oily rice, and other snacks with decades of history in Taipei's old city district, it has become Taipei's first challenge to "Tainan, the city of gourmet food."

Old flavors in the old city district: stubborn snacks that carry historical memory

Jian Yu-Yan, Commissioner of the Taipei City Department of Information and Tourism, cultural history worker Qiu Yi, and writer Jiao Tong, known as the "godfather of culinary literature," spoke today at the launch event for the new book "Tasting Taipei's Old City District" about the culinary historical memory of the old city district. Looking at modern Taiwan's development history through snacks, Qiu Yi, a local of Bangka, used squid thick soup as an entry point to bring out the memory of an old man from Shandong who came to Taiwan from China to make a living. He said the squid thick soup, filled with childhood memories, is a dish from Fuzhou and was also the old man's support when he came to Dadaocheng; relying on the skills he learned from local Fuzhou people, the old man blended them into his own flavor. Now, after being sold for decades with an unchanged taste, it has been passed down to the third generation, and the historical memory has been passed down along with it to this day.

"Old-time flavor is not just decorated with old bamboo hats and old red bricks; it is honestly made, and it is a cooking approach that honors nature, just like simmering a pot of soup. You have to feed the pot with bones and meat; when the pot smiles, the soup will naturally be good," Jiao Tong stressed. Returning to old times is not necessarily going backward, but rather recalling the food flavors of childhood, with fewer frills, fewer additives, and less deception. Doing away with single-use plastic tableware is also an important task for protecting a good life for the next generation.

If such flavors can be recovered, building Taipei into a "big night market" that draws all food lovers at night and returns the space to the people in the morning might also be a good way to taste history.