A Social Hotpot

Hotpot, while originating in southwestern China, Sichuan, it has spread to fill most busy streets in China. The concept is simple; order the ingredients you want to eat, select a broth to cook them in, and then just drop them in the boiling pot in the middle. The pot sits on an electric convection-style stove. The most traditional hotpot is spicy, spicier than I can tolerate. The first time I tried “middle-spicy” hotpot with my students, the majority of them were sweating profusely. They loved the burning sensation and simply kept a handful of napkins nearby to catch falling sweat.

Now-a-days, hotpot has spread into the homes. Many Chinese homes keep a portable convection-style stove on hand and a large pot just for this reason. Anyone can stop by the grocery store and pick up a variety of flavor packets. Some prefer to make their own. My favorites are the mushroom broth and the tomato broth. I’ve even had hotpot with Pu’er tea as the broth.

When I went down to southern China to meet my girlfriend’s family for the first time over Spring Festival holiday in the middle of winter, their holiday feast was seafood hotpot. In other words, the broth was toned with seafood, and all the raw ingredients were seafood, spare a few veggies.

Likewise, when I made a new friend in Tianshui, he invited me over to his home to share hotpot with him, his wife, and one of their students. We three adults gathered in the kitchen to prep all the ingredients. I trimmed and cut the veggies, my friend, Yuan Bin, washed and dried them, and his wife brought them out to the table. It was a quick process to prepare a lot of food in this way and once it was all on the table, they filled a soup pot with water and dropped some packaged seasoning into it. We sat down around the electric stove and chatted while waiting for the water to boil. Once boiled, we all put in things that we wanted to eat. While waiting, we prepared our dipping sauces.

At restaurants, the dipping sauces are often a smorgasbord of ingredients; oyster sauce, garlic, sesame oil, sesame seeds, cilantro, peanuts, sesame and peanut butter (watered down a bit), hot sauces of five different levels and varieties, a variety of vinegars and other oddly-colored goos that are still unfamiliar to me.

At Yuan Bin’s apartment, we had a sparser selection of oyster sauce, oil, sesame oil, hot sauce, and sesame butter. I like mine with a lot of sesame butter to soften the spiciness of hotpot. I added some oil and dropped in a bit of the broth to lighten the flavor. Once something was done, more or less, I'd take it from the pot with my chopsticks and set it into my sauce bowl so that it could cool for a moment before popping it into my mouth. Every once in a while, I'd happen upon something undercooked or overcooked at which point I did the polite thing and just left it in my bowl. To avoid this, there is a standard of putting things in in batches to make it easier to cook properly. But such a standard is rarely followed. Mostly, people just do as they please.

It was a fun night with the three of them. Their student was particularly hilarious and loved to crack jokes. I didn’t understand a lot of her second-grade humor but I could still laugh along with everyone, nonetheless. By the end of the meal, I had to insist over and over “我吃饱了，吃饱啦。不用不用” that I was full. In fact, it was hard to even sit up straight which is the natural result when I eat an all-vegetarian hotpot.