Danzai noodles

What it is

Danzai noodles (擔仔麵) are a Tainan snack: a small portion of noodles, or rice vermicelli (米粉), in a little shrimp broth under a spoonful of the shop's own minced pork sauce (肉燥). A peeled shrimp, bean sprouts, coriander, garlic paste and a splash of vinegar finish the bowl. At roughly two mouthfuls, it is a between-meals bite rather than lunch.

Where it came from

The name refers to the shoulder pole (擔) on which early hawkers carried their wares. The usual account starts with Hong Yutou (洪芋頭), a Tainan fisherman, in the late Qing period. From Tomb Sweeping Day until about the Mid-Autumn Festival, typhoons kept the boats in port, and fishermen called this lean stretch the 'small months' (小月). At 20, Hong began selling noodles to tide himself over, first from a pole and later at a stall in front of Shuixian Temple (水仙宮). His lanterns read 度小月, 'getting through the small months', still the name of the family business. Its founding date of 1895, the year Japanese rule began, comes from the shop's own lore.

The writer Tsao Ming-tsung (曹銘宗) traces the pork sauce, shrimp broth and noodles to the cooking of Fujian. Poets of the Japanese era wrote verses about Tainan's pole noodles, and gentlemen and merchants ate them under the lamps as an evening snack. Wheat flour long cost far more than rice in Taiwan, which kept noodles in the snack category until large shipments of American aid flour arrived in the early 1950s. In 2017 an online vote run by Tainan's Cultural Affairs Bureau put danzai noodles first among keywords for the city's culture.

How it is made

The cook blanches the noodles, tips them into a small bowl and adds a ladle of shrimp broth, then tops it with pork sauce, a shrimp, sprouts, coriander and garlic. Each shop keeps its spice mix and proportions to itself. Du Hsiao Yueh picks leg meat for its sauce, stir-fries it with Taiwanese spring onions, seasons it and stews it for a long time. At Small Park Danzai Noodles the owner still blanches noodles while seated at a low table, as the stall's founder did.

How to eat it

Order it as a snack or as one small bowl among several. It suits the Taiwanese saying 食巧毋食飽, roughly 'eat for the taste, not to fill up'. It comes in soup or dry, tossed in the pork sauce. Yellow wheat noodles are the classic, though some shops swap in rice vermicelli. Many also sell braised items to add on top.