Lo Foh Tong Is the Cantonese Soup that Tastes Like Home
By Lisa Wong Macabasco
This lo foh tong is simmered with pork, star anise, jujube dates and daikon. Photo by Adrian Chang.
For the Cantonese of southeast China, the humble but fortifying broths known as 老火湯, or lo foh tong (literally, “old fire soup”), are as essential to the dining table as rice. But among members of the diaspora, these modest yet meaningful tokens of familial kindness have sadly been in short supply amid the coronavirus pandemic, with many families unable to see each other, much less share a table.
“There is a saying in Cantonese,” says Yao Limei, a doctoral student of folklore at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, about 75 miles northwest of Hong Kong. “One would rather eat a meal without meat than one without soup.”
Slow simmered for hours to draw out and deepen the flavor, they’re composed of a handful of simple ingredients: usually a protein combined with fruit, vegetables, and nuts or seeds, sometimes with medicinal herbs, but often not. They’re served at the beginning of the meal and may be drank throughout as a beverage. (Acclaimed cookbook writer Grace Young’s grandfather “never drank a drop of plain water,” she writes in her 1999 James Beard–nominated cookbook, The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen, only soups and tea, like most traditional Cantonese.)
Lo foh tong is about nourishment on a primal level, the comforting essence of home and clan. Photo by Yao Mi Lei.
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Lo foh tong is a cornerstone of the traditional Chinese medicine tenet of food as therapy, which aims to restore the body’s equilibrium through diet according to one’s age, gender and constitution, as well as the climate and seasons.
“Baba and Mama...cooked us mustard green soup in the autumn to fortify us against flus, herbal winter-melon soup to cool us from the summer heat, watercress soup because it was just plain good for any time of the year,” Young writes in her chapter on soups.
But the consuming lo foh tong for its healthful properties isn’t always so deliberate. Cook and food writer Adrian Chang likens it to the instinct to give milk to children.
“Lo foh tong is just so ingrained in our culture as something your body needs,” he says. “It's the elixir of life without even thinking twice about whether it's important as food as medicine.”
No less an icon than Martin Yan, bestselling author and inimitable host of Yan Can Cook, praised the broths and their therapeutic properties in a 2009 foreword to a lo foh tong cookbook.
“Whenever I feel worn down and haggard, I remember my mother’s words of wisdom at the dinner table: Drink your soup! Soup is my way to get back to basics.… In China we believe in the preventative and curative power of our soups.… For years I have tried to stress in my cookbooks the importance of soups and the prominent place they deserve in our diet.”
But they’re much more than just another course in a meal or a healing tonic; they’re about nourishment on a primal level, the comforting essence of home and clan.
“Soup is not just soup—soup is a sign of caring between family members,” says Canson Tsang, owner of Toronto fine-dining Chinese restaurant Lai Wah Heen. It’s cooked in large pots, perfect for serving the multiple generations that often live under one roof, he notes. “If you have to work late, your parents will save a bowl of soup for you on the table. Even if it’s not hot, you’ll still enjoy it.”
Yao underscores the association with familial warmth and maternal caring, pointing out that the soups feature frequently as a cultural symbol in the works of well-known Hong Kong author Li Bihua (best known on these shores for Farewell My Concubine).
“Li always uses lo foh tong as an utmost expression of love,” she says. “It is often described with abstract notions of a warm and caring caress from a loving mother.” This relates to the role of soup in families’ daily lives: Generally, the soup will be cooked only when the whole family eats together, for dinners or on weekends. “Whenever I hear that my mother is making soup, I make sure to be home on time for supper,” she says. “Through long periods of osmosis, it has become a body memory.”
And it’s usually the mother who makes these soups, Yao notes, not only because of the traditional Chinese division of labor but because mothers are supposedly more attuned to the physical and emotional conditions of each family member.
“Have they been in a bad mood? Do they have a dry cough? Mothers choose which kind of lo foh tong to cook based on these circumstances. It’s this attention to detail and this specificity that makes this soup particularly heartfelt.”
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Duck soup with winter melon and mandarin peels (which are believed to soak up oils and fats to lower cholesterol) is one of Lai Wah Heen’s lo foh tongs. Photo courtesy Lai Wah Heen.
Last fall, one of Tsang’s regulars asked if Lai Wah Heen could prepare the traditionally homemade soups for their grown children who lived near the restaurant. The parents wanted to ensure their kids could still get a soothing, restorative dose of tong even if they couldn’t dine together.
Using his grandmother’s classic recipes, Tsang added three soups to the takeaway menu in December, the perfect time for foods that warm you from the inside. There’s duck soup with winter melon and mandarin peels (which are believed to soak up oils and fats to lower cholesterol); pork broth with Chinese almonds (which are thought to help with respiratory health) and pear (believed to be moisturizing for parched winter skin); and consommé of chicken and fresh coconut (which is known to soothe inflammation—and Tsang just likes the taste). Sold for CA$12.50 for two portions or CA$16.50 for four, they’re ready to consume after minutes in the microwave and can be stored for up to a week in the freezer. They must be ordered at least a day in advance: “This is not the kind of soup that can be made on the spot when you order it,” Tsang says.
He has noticed that Lai Wah Heen’s soups seem to be especially popular among the younger generation who are homesick and perhaps never learned to make them. (The restaurant’s tempting Instagram account likely also appeals this demographic.) A third-generation Chinese American, Chang, for one, is now making an effort to learn the recipes from his mother.
“I didn't grow up with that knowledge and actually even kind of rejected it because I wanted to feel more American.” He believes he’s not alone. “Within the last year, young, progressive Asian Americans are starting to delve very deeply into what their roots are. I think that there is actually a lot of enthusiasm for young Asian Americans to take back control of the narrative of our traditions.”
Lai Wah Heen’s to-go soups are perhaps the only specially packaged lo foh tongs appealing to the diasporic Chinese communities yearning for them while also trying to introduce them to a wider audience. Tsang sought soups that would be familiar to Chinese diners but also accessible for non-Chinese ones, and so far the feedback has been positive among a diverse clientele, with customers asking for even more variety. (He would love to include broths with squab and fish maw but says he can’t get “too exotic” for his non-Chinese patrons.)
By and large, however, the soups remain undiscovered by non-Cantonese. Young’s cookbook is one of the very few to include lo foh tong recipes.
“Nobody writes about it,” she tells me, laughing. “I thought this was the most interesting aspect of my book, the fact that nobody had ever talked about these soups. There wasn't even one article written about them. Everything ever written about the Chinese kitchen was about kung pao chicken, sweet and sour pork, all the usual stuff. There really isn't any interest among mainstream America in these medicinal soups at all.
“The western concept of soup is thick, chunky, creamy, full of flavor,” Young continues. “[Tongs] are very flavorful, but it's a very pure, simple flavor. Some of these soups don't even have salt in them. Some have, like, three ingredients!”
What’s more, Young says, most westerners are still fundamentally unconvinced of the idea of food as a remedy, something the Chinese have long and widely recognized. Fourteen hundred years ago, Sun Simiao, called China’s king of medicine, prescribed to doctors when treating a disease, “Use food to treat it, and if food will not cure it, afterwards apply drugs.”
Young notes that’s the primary reason she wrote The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen.
“There is a wisdom to this cooking—it's not just about, this is my mother's meatloaf recipe, this is my uncle's favorite macaroni and cheese. This food is delicious, but it's governed by the Chinese principle of food as medicine.”
For perhaps the most concrete example of this philosophy, look no further than the centuries-old tradition of new mothers drinking fortifying soups featuring ingredients like ginger, seaweed, and pig’s feet to heal and replenish their bodies in the first month after giving birth. A common folk practice throughout Asia passed down by mothers and their mothers through generations, it survives today among Asian American women thanks in part to specialty food-delivery services and popular books like The First Forty Days.
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Lo foh tong epitomizes the food and drink of Guangdong province and the Pearl River Delta, which includes Hong Kong, Macau, and Guangzhou, also known as Canton and the capital of Guangdong Province. The broths’ roots stretch back 3,500 years to when they were used as an early form of Chinese herbal medicine. Locals sought relief from discomfort related to the region’s heat and humidity; fortunately, the subtropical climate and fertile soil also produced a rich diversity of animals and plants, with Chinese medicinal herbs in abundance to cool internal body heat or mitigate the sweltering. To temper the bitterness of these herbs, Cantonese people incorporated the local flora and fauna into soups. This climate also tends to unsettle stomachs, so easily absorbed liquid foods like porridge and soup are popular there.
Today, the region’s restaurants tout seasonal soups in ads, culinary masters publish recipes and the government promotes them in sightseeing guides as a local specialty. The soup is even namechecked in the theme song of a popular TV series about non-Cantonese wives navigating the area’s cultural differences: “The hardest part is making Cantonese soups every day…”
“Almost everyone here can recite the different soup recipes for the different seasons and different medicinal functions,” says Yao. “It’s almost an innate ability of the locals.”
Back stateside, many find the soups’ clean, pure flavor outweighs any health benefits. Chang says he’s always loved the taste since he was a child.
“Lotus root, daikon, pork ribs, maybe a jujube date—you can't go wrong with pork-ribs soup, slow cooked, with some the root vegetables, right?”
Young concurs. “Ninety percent of my focus is on the fact that it's just a really delicious soup, and I'm also aware that it has health benefits. It's not like I’m eating it primarily for the health benefits, and I can sort of stomach the taste of it. I genuinely like the taste and flavor and aroma and that the lotus root is a little firm and it has these strands that are a little bit like okra, and the sweetness of the mushrooms and they're sort of meaty, and the genuine fruit sweetness of the red dates—all of it I like so much.”
But she admits it can be an acquired taste. “At least 50 percent of people I know who aren't Chinese would go, ‘Eh, I can drink it but it's not my favorite.’”
Four-flavors soup, for example, one of the most famous of the Cantonese herbal soups (Young’s recipe includes lotus seeds, Chinese yam, lily bulb, and wolfberries), is one where “I think you sort of need to grow up with it.”
It certainly took me a while to appreciate them. As a child I was frequently last to leave the table, sullenly sitting alone long after the dishes were washed and the kitchen lights switched off, sentenced to finish my soup before I could be dismissed. Glaring down the tiny, now lukewarm bowl, I brainstormed ways of surreptitiously disposing of its contents. (I’m sure more than one houseplant has been fortified by broth.)
Years later, I realized that my partner, also Cantonese, was a keeper when he unprompted asked my grandmother if he could have seconds of her soup. She took special pride in them, and my aunt learned the recipes only recently, when my grandmother became too frail to make them. Po Po passed away two years ago, at age 91. Making them now—the chopping, the stirring, the spoon sipping, the pot peeking, the windows fogged, the air fragrant for hours—“is a way of keeping her memory alive,” my aunt said recently on a family Zoom. Turns out these soups can be a salve for many things.
