Rongjiang Yangbie

Rongjiang Yangbie

　　“Yangbie,” an unusual name. Those who don’t know might mistake it for another aphrodisiac dish like bull or sheep penis, but it’s not. Yangbie is a delicacy from Rongjiang County, a treasured dish served to guests by ethnic minorities such as the Dong and Miao. After slaughtering a fragrant sheep, the greenish liquid filtered from the partially or fully digested contents of the sheep’s stomach and small intestine is cooked with seasonings such as Sichuan peppercorn, ginger, cilantro, tangerine peel, garlic, and bird’s eye chili. When stir-frying the lamb or offal, yangbie is added for flavor. The resulting meat is aromatic, rich in juice, slightly cool, mildly bitter, appetite-stimulating, and is also believed to nourish kidneys, aid digestion, and reduce internal heat.

　　Yangbie is an extremely peculiar and bitter-tasting food. It is made by removing the small intestines and stomachs of freshly slaughtered cattle or sheep, pouring out the undigested grass and liquid inside them into a wooden basin, then filtering it three times through cheesecloth or more than ten layers of palm fiber to remove all plant residue. The resulting sticky, yellowish-green, bitter liquid is yangbie. It is a beloved food among the Dong and Miao people of Rongjiang County.

　　 In Rongjiang County, the person who makes this dish best is a woman named Pan Damei. She runs a restaurant in the county town called Damei and Ermei Yangbie Restaurant. Pan Damei prepares yangbie in two ways. The first is raw yangbie, where the yangbie juice is used directly to dress cold dishes. This type of yangbie has an intense bitterness, strong fishy smell, and bright color. The second is cooked yangbie, which is made by boiling yangbie together with about 40-degree rice wine produced by local farmers in a pot until it boils and is thoroughly cooked, then cooling it down to make a yangbie paste. When eating, it is stir-fried vigorously in oil with around two pounds of meat and half a pound of yangbie paste, along with more than ten fresh seasonings such as litsea cubes and pounded camellia seeds. Just before serving, celery, coriander, and others are added. Goats eat a wide variety of wild plants, able to climb even the highest mountains and most dangerous cliffs, thus consuming the freshest and best grasses. These herbs mix repeatedly within the goat’s digestive tract, as if refined in a giant herbal medicine cauldron. A local saying goes: “When butchering a sheep, separate the yangbie first — without it, the flavor is completely lost.”

　　 In recent years, thanks to the policy of reform and opening up, the people of various ethnic groups in Rongjiang have gradually become wealthier. Having eaten their fill of fish and meat and grown tired of the usual variety of dishes, exotic and peculiar flavors have become popular. Thus, yangbie—carrying the elegance of mountain streams, the freshness of wildflowers, and the simple folk customs—has quietly made its way onto the dining tables of city dwellers. Once introduced to urban areas, yangbie received widespread praise, with many lamenting that they had not discovered it sooner. Some enterprising visionaries were quick to recognize the market potential of yangbie. As a result, in 1991, at Rongjiang’s tallest building at the time—the Commercial Building—a “Green Garden Restaurant” run by a young Dong woman first served yangbie on the VIP table, carried by waitresses in sashes and offering first-class service, immediately earning gasps of admiration. Accompanied by the melodious and lingering sounds of Dong grand songs, the honored guests quickly became delightfully intoxicated. Since then, most restaurants in Rongjiang have followed suit, adding yangbie to their menus so that out-of-town merchants visiting Rongjiang could experience this mountain-flavored, ethnic-style dish on their plates. By the end of 1993, Rongjiang’s first restaurant specializing in yangbie, “Good Place,” opened. Several Dong girls (from Pingyang Township, Rongjiang) won widespread acclaim from local diners with their exceptional cooking skills and warm, attentive service, and business flourished. In March 1994, right next door to “Good Place,” another yangbie-specializing eatery, the “Weird Flavor Restaurant,” opened, enjoying extraordinarily brisk business.