🍽️ Taiyuan Tounao

Mutton soup with astragalus and rice wine.

Taiyuan Tounao is a unique morning soup of Taiyuan, Shanxi, traditionally linked to a nourishing recipe created by the early-Qing scholar Fu Shan for his mother, and enjoyed for centuries. It uses lamb as the main ingredient with lotus root, Chinese yam and astragalus, simmered into a thick soup with rice wine and wheat-batter thickening. Served milky and faintly cloudy, it is sweet and wine-scented; the lamb is tender, the root vegetables soft, and the astragalus aroma gentle and warming. Taiyuan locals eat it with pickled chive and a hat-box baked cake, alternating sips of soup and bites of bread to drive off cold. It is a winter health breakfast, and old Taiyuan shops open before dawn through early spring; a bowl with pickled chive is Taiyuan's own winter ritual. The flavor is distinctive and may take getting used to, yet regulars are devoted—making tounao Taiyuan's most culturally weighty breakfast.