Simmering Soup Over the Stove, Tasting Every Flavor of Life

At Zuixianju, Jiangcheng’s venerable old restaurant, the head chef is Shen Zhaotang, a short-tempered woman known as the “Fire-Spatula Goddess.” Her live-in son-in-law, Lu Chen, comes from a once-great family of chefs. For five years, he has spent his days in the back kitchen tending the fire and simmering soup.

Everyone in the household sees him as a useless freeloader. They beat and scold him, and he never talks back. Hunched over beside the stove as he adds firewood, with a back bent like a shrimp and worn-out cuffs, he seems to everyone like a man who knows only how to take it.

Then an accident awakens his family’s inherited secret art, “Heart-Taught Flame.” With every pot of soup he simmers, he glimpses fragments of the diners’ lives: their joys and sorrows, their partings and reunions, the warmth and coldness of true feelings, all appearing in the broth.

This art gives his soup more than a soul-stirring freshness and fragrance. It also has the power to soothe the heart. A bowl of cabbage soup can help an old dog with indigestion, or bring someone in despair back to their senses.

Others simmer soup with secret recipes. He simmers it with a taste of life. The neighbors begin clamoring for the dregs of his soup, and even the food critics’ hands tremble as they drop their spoons, declaring, “You drink the bustle of everyday life, and taste the story of a life.”

Once dismissed as a son-in-law fit only to burn firewood, he now uses the flame of a single stove to simmer Jiangcheng’s finest soup. The clay bowl engraved with “Heart-Taught Flame” will one day shine again at the grandest feast in the land.