A Street-Cook Eats Her Way Through Tainan's Old Capital

Pork fat and dried shrimp, low heat, before seven in the morning. That's what got me out of bed in Tainan before the Confucius Temple gates were even unlocked. I followed it two blocks off Nanmen Road to a stall with three stools and a woman who'd clearly been standing at that same pot since before I was born. Danzai noodles, she called it, and the name means something like carrying-pole noodles, because vendors used to hawk this from two baskets on a shoulder pole. NT$50 a bowl. Thin noodles, a few strands of garlic chives, a single shrimp laid over the top like a flag planted on a hill, and underneath it all a spoonful of minced pork stewed down with shallot oil until the shallots had basically dissolved into the fat.

I make a pork sauce like this for my own noodle cart back home, and mine takes forty minutes over a low flame before I'll serve it. Hers had been going since five, she told me, over a burner about a third the size of what I run. Less stirring, more patience. My sauce is sweeter, more fish sauce in the balance. Hers leaned savory, almost bitter at the back from the shallots going dark. I'd call it a technique difference, not a mistake. Verdict: I'd eat this every morning of my life and still not get sick of it. Nine out of ten. I'm docking one point because she wouldn't tell me how long she cooks the shallots.

The Confucius Temple was three minutes' walk from the noodle stall, and I went because the roofline pulled me in before the smell of anything else did. Built in 1665, the oldest Confucian temple on the island, red walls and a dragon ridge that caught the morning sun hard enough to hurt my eyes. No food inside the grounds and no food smell either, which after two hours of stalls felt like walking into a quiet kitchen after service. I sat under a banyan tree by the Lingxing Gate for ten minutes doing nothing, which is not a thing I do at home. Then I went back out looking for the next smell.

Tainan beef soup runs on a clock I respect. The broth simmers all night off beef bone, and the raw sliced beef only meets the pot at the very last second, when the ladle pours the boiling broth straight over it in the bowl. I went to a shop near the Guohua Street market that opens at 4:30 a.m. specifically because that's when the day's cattle comes in from the abattoir outside the city, and by the time I sat down at nine the beef was still a soft, faint pink at the center, not grey through like most soup meat ends up once it's been sitting in a steam table. NT$180 for a bowl of thin-sliced beef soup, NT$30 more for the fattier cut with a little marbling in it. I paid the extra thirty.

The broth itself is the whole argument for this dish. No soy, almost no visible seasoning, just bone and a little rice wine and enough ginger to cut the fat without turning the whole bowl into a ginger tea. It arrived clear enough to see the bottom of the bowl, and that clarity is work. Cloudy broth means somebody let it boil hard instead of holding it at a bare simmer. Mine at the cart never gets this clear because I'm running six other pots at once and I don't have the luxury of babysitting one broth for eight hours. I'd cook it their way if I only had one burner and no customers waiting. Seven out of ten, and the point I'm withholding is for the beef itself, which needed one more minute in that boiling broth to render.

Between soup and the next stop I cut through Guohua Street market itself, where the milkfish congee stalls run in a row like competing cart owners at a night market back home, each one with a hand-written sign claiming to be the original. Milkfish, or virofish as some of the English menus called it, gets boned into fat clean fillets and simmered whole into rice porridge with a little pork floss and a slick of fried shallot oil on top. NT$60 a bowl. Fishy in a good way, the way a broth should smell like the thing that made it and nothing else.

Guan cai ban, coffin bread, gets its name honestly: a thick slab of white toast, deep fried until the crust goes hard as a box lid, hollowed out, and filled with a chicken and seafood chowder thickened with a roux, then capped with the fried lid you lift off like you're opening the thing the name describes. I got mine from a stall on Zhengxing Street near the old market for NT$70. The fry oil smelled clean, not the stale burnt-sugar smell you get from oil that's been reused past its life, and the bread held its crunch for the full two minutes it took me to eat it before the chowder started soaking through.

Two stalls down, the shrimp rolls: whole shrimp, three or four of them, wrapped in a thin sheet of pork caul fat and fried until the fat rendered into the shrimp and the wrapper turned lace-thin and crisp. NT$45 for two. This is the closest thing on the whole trail to something I'd actually put on my own cart, because it's the same idea as my fried spring rolls, just shrimp instead of pork and cabbage. The caul fat did work that a flour wrapper can't, basting the shrimp from the inside while it fried. I don't use caul fat because I can't get it reliably where I cook, and eating this made me a little annoyed about that. Eight out of ten, and most of the deduction is jealousy.