Jumping Over the Wall for this Soup

Abalone, sea cucumber and fish maw presented on a platter

Today is Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, and the Chinese like to mark the occasion with a dinner that could be equated to Thanksgiving. Family members get together around the table and have a feast that includes tong yuen, or glutinous rice dumplings filled with black sesame paste in a sweet soup.

This evening we were invited to a Christmas party that doubled as a Winter Solstice dinner at Grand Crystal Seafood Restaurant in Burnaby.

On the menu were dishes like lobster stir-fried with mung bean vermicelli, soy sauce chicken, sweet and sour deep-fried fish, bok choy with yuba, or tofu skin, and fried rice. We didn't have tong yuen, but baked sago pudding with red bean paste.

The highlight was Buddha Jumps Over the Wall, served in a massive tureen. The clear broth was so flavourful, soaking up the ingredients it had been cooked with -- abalone, sea cucumber, fish maw, Chinese ham, goose webs, shiitake mushrooms, and conpoy.

The soup was given this name with a tale that the smell of it was so tempting that a vegetarian Buddhist monk could not resist and would jump over the wall to try it.

This particular soup was delicious, the broth was clear and hardly oily; we ate the abalone, sea cucumber and fish maw separately with abalone sauce.

Whenever I get the opportunity to have Buddha Jumps Over the Wall, it reminds me of when I first tried it back in the late 1990s in Hong Kong.

I was a young journo at the time trying to learn as much as I could, and had one assignment to interview a chef about this dish. I went to a Chinese restaurant in a hotel and the chef explained all the different ingredients in the soup (at the time it included shark's fin), ginseng, and a curious slightly round disk about 1cm in diameter with a small hole in the middle.

The hotel public relations manager and I asked what this was.

"Deer penis," the chef sheepishly replied, adding it was supposed to be for men's virility.

We giggled and asked, does it have any effect on us women?

He didn't have an answer and went back to the kitchen.

We drank the soup and it was delicious, having been simmering for hours on the stove.

That evening I went home and could not sleep! I was tossing and turning for ages.

The next morning I called up the PR manager and asked her if she was able to get some shut eye.

"I couldn't sleep either!" she exclaimed and we wondered if it was because of the deer penis in the soup...