The craze for hot pot started small–now everyone is bringing it home

Fifteen years ago in Shanghai, a dinner of hot pot was an unimaginable luxury. Well, perhaps imaginable, but it was hardly within reach of the majority of the population. The average Joe (Zhou?) could only stand outside small restaurants which offered the dish and salivate as they watched, through steamy windows, wealthy or well-connected diners dropping blood red lamb meat into a boiling hot pot. Often the soup was no more than salted water to begin with but after having been infused with strip after strip of fatty meat, it was transformed into a deeply flavorful broth replete with floating specks of lamb, the ideal vehicle for flavoring the vegetables and noodles which followed. At the end, the fragrant liquid was savored like a fine soup. A Shanghai friend of mine vividly recalls his gustatory excitement the first time he was invited to hot pot in the early 1990s by a well-off friend.

Hot pot rapidly evolved and restaurants specializing in the dish were born. The salted broth would be enriched with countless new permutations, and the "yuanyang" pot (half spicy, half mild) was heartily embraced. Today Shanghai has a welcome surfeit of hot pot restaurants boasting broths seasoned with fish heads, pork bones, wild mushrooms or the fiery oil slick that Chengdu is so proud to call its own. But the ubiquity and affordability of the electric hot pot is what truly brought the dish home to everyone. With this one tool, an impromptu dinner party can be thrown together in an hours' notice.

At the supermarket, I buy frozen rolls of fatty beef and lamb, tubular shrimp dumplings, a tray of quail's eggs (in my hot pot, if lamb is the fat of the land, then quail’s eggs are the crown jewels), and a soup base (guodi). Then I head to the wet market for greens which look bright and crisp. For dipping sauce I mix sesame paste, deep red fulu, jarred shacha, cilantro, and a teaspoon each of garlic and toasted sesame seeds. For me, hot pot brings together many of my favorite aspects of eating—communal cooking, legion colors and textures, the bounty of mounds of raw vegetables, and a celebratory flush in everyone's cheeks as the steam rises and encircles us.

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