This legendary Chinese snake soup was all but lost. How 2 chefs are reviving it

Thirty years ago, Dong Zhenxiang ate a bowl of snake soup at a small Hong Kong stall. In the years since, he has built his Da Dong catering group into one of China’s most celebrated restaurant empires. But of all the delicacies he has encountered throughout a career that has taken him from the kitchens of Beijing to collaborations with Alain Ducasse in Paris, the memory of that single dish – and one ingredient in particular – refuses to fade. “I still remember the fragrance of the kaffir lime leaves,” he says. “They were cut thinner than a strand of hair.” The dish was, more specifically, Taishi five-snake soup. Although Dong does not remember the name of the shop or know if it still exists, what has stayed with him is the “ingenuity of the cuisine”. This memory resulted in a recent collaboration with Li Chi-wai, the executive chef of The Legacy House at the Rosewood Hong Kong hotel. Together, they set out to revive a dish that has all but vanished. The origins of Taishi five-snake soup To understand the soup, one must first understand the man who gave it his name. Jiang Kongyin (1864-1952) was one of the last scholars to pass China’s Jiachen Enke, or imperial examinations, before the system was abolished in 1905. He earned the title Taishi, or Grand Historian, and served briefly in the Qing court. After China’s 1911 revolution, he retreated from politics and turned his attention to the dining table. His estate in Guangzhou’s Henan district, known as Taishi Di, sprawled across four city blocks. Some 50 to 60 family members dined there daily, served by a team of four master chefs. Jiang entertained politicians, merchants and foreign dignitaries with banquets so elaborate that he became known as “the first gourmet of Cantonese cuisine”. The dishes that emerged from his kitchens formed an entire lexicon – Taishi chicken, Taishi tofu – but none achieved the legendary status of the five-snake soup. The recipe was exacting. Five snakes were mandatory: typically golden krait, silver krait, Chinese cobra, water snake and beauty snake. To these were added chicken, abalone, aged Yunnan ham, fish maw, mushrooms, wood ear fungus and bamboo shoots. Everything was julienned into threads so fine they were said to dissolve on the tongue. The broth had two stocks prepared separately: one from old chicken and Jinhua ham, simmered for five to six hours; another from snake bones, aged tangerine peel, longan, red dates, sugar cane and ginger, cooked for four hours. The soup was then finished with a thin cornflour slurry and accompanied by three garnishes: the petals of a white chrysanthemum grown on the Taishi estate, kaffir lime leaf shredded to near-invisibility and tiny, diamond-shaped crisps of fried dough. Li, who has spent more than three decades cooking Cantonese cuisine and reviving forgotten recipes, offers a practical reason for all that knife work. “The legend is that the Taishi had trouble chewing,” he says. “That’s why every ingredient had to be cut impossibly fine. If you see a snake soup without that julienne, it cannot truly be called Taishi.” The decreasing popularity of snake soup For much of the 20th century, snake was often celebrated in Cantonese cuisine. The belief driving this appetite was deeply rooted in traditional Chinese medicine, as snake flesh was held to nourish the blood and dispel “wind” ailments. Then came the 21st century’s ruptures. The 2003 Sars outbreak triggered temporary bans on snake sales in cities like Guangzhou, but these were gradually relaxed. In early 2020, mainland China enacted a permanent national ban on the breeding and consumption of wild animals, including snakes, in direct response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Hong Kong, with its separate regulatory framework, still permits snake soup, but the establishments serving it have dwindled to a handful. Ser Wong Fun, the city’s most storied snake-soup institution, is now in its 131st year of business. But even here, what is served bears only a distant resemblance to what the Taishi once had at his banquets. With its controversial status, snake was off the table at The Legacy House. For Dong and Li, the question was what to put in its place – and the answer came from Dong’s repertoire. “In Shandong cuisine, the most refined soup that comes to mind is hot and sour wu yu dan soup,” he says. “It enters the mouth clean and mild, with nothing too heavy or overpowering.” It was refined for Beijing’s Diaoyutai State Guesthouse and became a fixture of banquets for visiting heads of state. Making cuttlefish a substitute for snake Much like the Taishi’s five-snake soup, once the centrepiece of gatherings of politicians and merchants, this Shandong classic earned its reputation at the table of power. Its signature is a paradox: sour without visible vinegar, hot without visible chilli, fragrant without visible oil. The sourness comes from pickled cucumber juice, the heat is coaxed purely from pepper and the base is a clear chicken broth. The ingredient at its centre is obscure even to many Cantonese diners. Wu yu dan translates to “cuttlefish roe”, but it is not technically roe. It is the nidamental gland of the female cuttlefish, salted and processed, then sliced into thin pieces that absorb the broth’s hot-and-sour clarity. Its texture is what Dong calls shuang tian hua – a clean sweetness with a slippery, almost crisp bite. For Dong, the ingredient tells a larger story about Shandong cuisine and its relationship with the sea. Shandong cooking is often divided into three branches: the Jinan school, which favours hearty, accessible dishes; the Jiaodong school from the coast, built around seafood; and the Beijing school, refined through centuries of imperial and diplomatic kitchens. Beijing is inland. Historically, fresh seafood did not arrive quickly. “We don’t eat seafood the way they do in Hong Kong, straight from the water,” Dong says. “We developed a preference for salt-curing, and wu yu dan is one of those delicacies, similar to yuxiang in the Zhejiang region.” The glands are cured, shipped and reconstituted in the kitchen, emerging with a texture and flavour with no direct equivalent in the Cantonese repertoire. “When I told my team we would be using wu yu dan,” Li says, “one of my chefs asked: ‘What is that? Is it some kind of egg?’ I think these culinary exchanges are necessary to educate both the diners and the kitchen team. It’s a chance to discover ingredients that aren’t usually in your pantry.” A blank canvas with infinite possibilities Li also brought his own signature to the pot: chenpi (dried tangerine peel). Traditional snake soup calls for it, and in this collaboration, it found a natural partner in the kaffir lime leaves that Dong had never forgotten. Li chose a 10-year-old peel from Tianma, in Xinhui, a region famous for producing the finest chenpi in China. He deliberately avoided anything older. “A very aged chenpi is powerful, almost medicinal,” he says. “I didn’t want it to dominate. This one is young enough to keep its fruitiness. It bridges the citrus notes, adds a fresh aroma, but doesn’t steal the conversation.” The dish they arrived at is neither the Taishi’s five-snake soup nor the Diaoyutai’s hot-and-sour classic. The broth is built on old hen, chicken feet, pork, sugar cane, water chestnut and conpoy, carrying the sweetness and deep umami that a snake would have provided. The heat of the Shandong tradition comes through the white pepper. Chenpi threads steep in the broth while kaffir lime leaf is scattered on top, the citrus notes echoing each other. Thin slivers of cuttlefish roe offer their slippery, faintly sweet bite. And drifting through it all are clouds of egg white, stirred in at the end to add texture. The result, Dong says, is a blank canvas with infinite possibilities. “If I were adapting this for Beijing, I would add Sichuan pepper,” Dong says. “Maybe shredded swamp eel. Or even hai chang [fat innkeeper worm], the darling of Shandong seafood.” What’s next? Li is already thinking about the next forgotten recipe. He wants to tackle ge zha, another Taishi dish. Its origin is itself a story of north-south fusion: likely inspired by a Beijing street snack of pea purée called ge zhe, it was later transformed by Jiang Kongyin’s household chefs, who incorporated Cantonese ingredients like chicken testicles and superior stock. The result is a thin, crisp shell that gives way to a burst of soup. “For a uniquely Beijing spin, I would add dou zhi, the traditional fermented mung bean drink, instead of soup,” Li says. The ingredient is virtually unknown in Hong Kong and an acquired taste. But that is precisely the point – it is another revival, another improbable bridge between north and south, in Taishi’s insatiable, cross-pollinating spirit. It is a spirit Dong knows intimately. He built an empire on the conviction that tradition and reinvention are not enemies. Ask for the Peking duck pizza, a hidden-menu item at his Beijing restaurant, and you will see. He points out that the Chinese word for gastronomy – mei shi – is made of two characters: mei, beauty, and shi, food. “One of the beauties is the beauty of confluence,” he says. “Of peoples meeting, of ingredients mingling, blending, folding into one another. Jiang was someone who understood this, and I think he would have liked the dish we created.”

This legendary Chinese snake soup was all but lost. How 2 chefs are reviving it

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Once the centrepiece of political and business gatherings, Taishi five-snake soup is making a return in a form more suited to the modern era

The origins of Taishi five-snake soup

Once the centrepiece of political and business gatherings, Taishi five-snake soup is making a return in a form more suited to the modern era