My dad's Lotus Root Soup: A Warm Bowl of Comfort

One of my favorite childhood soups!

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Surprisingly, we haven’t covered lotus root yet on our blog or YouTube channel.

So, as a part of our cookbook’s vegetable deep dives, one of the first veggies I wanted to cover was the almighty lotus root.

I’m still working on synthesizing the full lotus root guide, but today I wanted to share one of my favorite childhood recipes from our cookbook shoots:

Lotus Root Soup

This relatively simple soup is brimming to the top with lotus root, shiitake mushrooms, lean pork, dried scallops, dates, and carrots :)

It’s a traditional homestyle “old fire soup” (an entire category of Chinese soups that are simmered for a very long time), which a lot of you have been asking my parents for.

Here’s where our current recipe draft is at

Headnote

I’m experimenting with a POV where I’m writing directly to my kids. Thoughts?

Much like you toddlers right now, I didn’t fully appreciate lotus root as a little kid. For you, as toddlers, I imagine you don’t like lotus root just because you can be picky eaters.

But for me, I grew up in a time where I just wanted to feel, eat, and live a little more like an “American”. Lotus root looked and tasted like the antithesis of what I thought my white friends ate at home – hot dogs, instant mac and cheese, hamburgers, and pizza.

Yeh Yeh used to spend hours patiently simmering a pot of lotus root soup for us, just like his mother did for him. When Yeh Yeh was little, his mom would throw in preserved meats and dried jujube dates to make a nourishing soup for him. For my sister and I, Yeh Yeh’s soup usually had peanuts and chunks of carrots softened by hours of loving heat, with bites of pork that melted away.

I remember Yeh Yeh and Ngin Ngin always had to try very hard to get me to finish the soup, whether it was a bribe, a scolding, or through sheer will.

Not that I have anything against hot dogs and instant mac and cheese, but I wish I appreciated those soups. In my youthful ignorance and naivete, all I wanted were crappy, mass-produced hot dogs. With lotus root soup, all I saw was a chore, a bowl I had to chug to appease my parents. I couldn’t appreciate the hours that went into making each pot of soup, the nourishment I received by drinking each bowl of lotus root soup.

Ingredients