Hotpot history

Food is never just food in China; there's always a story, or maybe some kind of legend. And so it is with hotpot (huo guo). The Chinese phrase translates literally as "fire pot", and there are two popular versions in China of the soup's creation myth, both involving a pot and a fire. One holds that hotpot appeared fi rst in the time of the Three Kingdoms (220-280) as a bronze tripod, the other traces it to excavated relics of a dou (a dipper-like bin) from the Eastern Han Dynasty, said to be the original pot. One you won't hear much is the suggestion that it originated in

Mongolia but died out after the complexity involved in its preparation and serving became ill-suited to itinerant tribes people.

Hotpot was often eaten by people from the cold North. Then the main ingredients thrown in and boiled were di. erent kinds of meat (pork, beef and chicken). Up to the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127), hotpot was a winter dish for the masses; it wasn't until the Qing Dynasty that hotpot was promoted to the imperial menu, and it was here that it became larded with the extra features and ingredients we're familiar with today.

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