《汕尾菜茶：「唔係茶嘅茶」，卻暖咗幾代人》Shanwei Cai Cha: The "Tea" That Isn't Tea, and Has Warmed Generations

[Zheng Ge's Take]

People in Shanwei do not always greet you with "have you eaten yet". Sometimes they ask, "have you fried the tea tonight?" That "tea" is cai cha — vegetable tea.

A Piece of Urban Legend That Became Everyday Food

Cai cha is not brewed from tea leaves. It is a bowl of hot soup rice, "rinsed" with pork-bone broth or with a special oil tea. It has an older name — chao ding cha, "fried ding tea". The older people here will tell you it used to appear only in the first month of the lunar year, above all around the Lantern Festival. And there is a story behind the name: the seventh to the thirteenth of the first month were the ding days, when villages took turns frying cai cha for relatives and neighbours. Ding means a new addition to the family, a household that keeps growing.

These days cai cha has moved into ordinary life. I am told that moving house, the three days after a bride arrives, a new home warming — plenty of Shanwei families fry cai cha for their guests, tea standing in for wine, cheaper and, honestly, better company.

How It Is Made: Every Hailufeng Household Has Its Own Formula

The base ingredients (a dozen or so to start):

First fry or boil each of these separately —

• shredded pork, Chinese sausage
• fresh prawns, dried shrimp, shredded squid
• glass noodles, bean-curd sticks
• white beans, red beans, wheat grains
• spinach, snow peas

Then tip everything into a bowl together and scatter over it:

• fried peanuts (the soul of the dish)
• puffed rice (crisp, like popcorn)
• sesame seeds

Last comes the broth, and there are two kinds:

A shake of white pepper, and it goes to the table scalding hot — a bowl of cai cha you can smell from the house next door.

Hailufeng Style vs Hakka Style: With Rice or Without

In Shanwei town, in Gongping in Haifeng county and around Donghai in Lufeng county, people eat "rice tea": the cai cha has cooked rice stirred into it, so one bowl carries the staple as well, and a bowl goes a long way.

In Hakka areas it is usually the plain version, no rice, because the point there is the dishes that come with the drink.

Which is why an experienced eater will tell you: if you want to know whether someone is really from Shanwei, ask them whether cai cha takes rice.

"Frying the Tea Is Not Hard — the Hard Part Is the Ingredients, and the Care"

"Frying the tea is not hard. The hard part is the ingredients, and the care that goes into them."

I have watched people who have made cai cha for decades go about it. The dried shrimp have to be the thick-fleshed ones. The squid is cut by hand, never bought ready-shredded. The puffed rice is the real test: not enough heat and it is not crisp, too much and it turns bitter. Set a bowl on the table and one look at the colour of the toppings tells you whether the person who made it put their heart into it.

Where to Eat the Real Thing

• Gongping, Haifeng — one of the places it is said to come from; I am told the old shops still fry the ingredients in a big wok over firewood, and the atmosphere is half the meal.
• Erma Road, Shanwei — night stalls packed side by side, fresh cai cha every evening, the one visitors should try first.
• Luhe county — the Hakka version. I am told the seven-vegetable cai cha is a seventh-day-of-the-new-year custom, and you have to time your visit for it.

In One Line

Cai cha is the Hailufeng people's liquid homeland — one bowl of hot broth holding mountains, sea, fields, houses and several generations. The weather turns cool after the start of autumn. Go and make yourself a bowl.

Shanwei Food Coordinates

• Erma Road night market: a whole street of seafood noodle soup, cai cha, flatbreads and oyster omelette.
• Chenzhou, the oyster village: you have to get to the coast for the real thing — there is a local saying, "seafood under heaven, Shanwei ahead".
• Zhelang, Red Bay: sunset, steamed sea-urchin egg, and a coffee at the old fort.