Mr Crab’s soup is an old Jiangnan dish known as yipin guo or ‘top-ranking pot’. The ideogram for ‘rank’ (pin) is made up of a stack of three ‘mouths’ that once represented dishes filled with sacrificial food and here refers to the three ingredients of the broth. The same word pin, appropriately enough, also means ‘to taste’ in modern Chinese. The broth is a particularly lavish example of a whole genre of Chinese dishes that attempts to present, without interference, the ‘root tastes’ of fine ingredients. Such dishes are the progeny of the old sacrificial soups, those flavourless geng in which
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