Three Ways to Cook Carp

Three Ways to Cook Carp

　　Zhengzhou also calls for the revitalization of Henan cuisine, but jokes self-deprecatingly: anything that needs reviving is probably not far from extinction. Three Ways to Cook Carp is a famous dish in Zhengzhou. In the past, the carp was claimed to be from the Yellow River. Restaurants would buy the carp and let it swim in a pool of clean water for two or three days to get rid of the earthy taste before it could be taken out and cooked. Nowadays, such fastidious preparation may seem a bit extravagant, but cooking one fish in three different ways still whets the appetite. Half is served dried, half as sweet-and-sour fish chunks, and the head and tail are cooked with shredded radish into a soup. The most interesting part is mixing the sweet-and-sour sauce with a nest of fine noodles — a clever echo of the way sweet-and-sour West Lake fish is served with noodles in Hangzhou.