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Gai Grun Yung Waa
This is Birds Nest Soup. Combine 1/2 lb. Irish moss with 2 cups chicken stock, 1/2 lb. cooked breast meat of chicken, 1 cooked egg, 1/4 cup minced ham, salt and pepper. The Irish moss or seaweed is first boiled 1/2 hour, until very soft, then drained and put in cold water. The chicken meat is pounded to pulp and 1 cup of the cold stock, in which the moss was cooked, is added. The moss is then removed from the cold water, drained and put into sauce pan to cook 1/2 hour, being covered with water. The chicken meat and egg are added.
A texture soup built on carrageen seaweed rather than swiftlet nest. The method as printed doubles back on itself in places, so read it through before starting.
- Irish mossThis is carrageen, the dried red seaweed sold in Irish and health-food shops and by weight online. Half a pound of dried moss is an enormous quantity by modern standards — it swells many times over — and the recipe almost certainly assumes the bulky, twiggy, sand-flecked dried form rather than anything refined.
- Rinse before boilingDried carrageen carries salt, sand and shell fragments. Soak it in several changes of cold water and pick it over before the first boiling, or the finished soup will be gritty.
- The double cookingThe moss is boiled half an hour, chilled in cold water, then simmered another half hour. The printed method gives no reason for the cold-water stage; it appears to be there to firm the strands so they hold their shape rather than collapsing.
- Keep the cooking liquidThe instruction to add "1 cup of the cold stock, in which the moss was cooked" is the gelling agent — that liquid is where the carrageenan is. Drain it into a bowl and cool it rather than pouring it away when you drain the moss.
- Pounded chickenHalf a pound of cooked breast pounded to a pulp is what a food processor does in twenty seconds. Loosen it with the cold stock to a smooth slurry before it goes into the pan, or it will seize into threads.
- The egg and hamThe "1 cooked egg" is presumably hard-boiled, and it and the minced ham can be shredded fine and scattered over the surface as garnish. The printed method never says when the ham or the seasoning go in; add both at the end, tasting, since the ham and stock already bring salt.
- YieldTwo cups of stock plus the moss liquor should make roughly four small first-course bowls. It is meant to open a meal, not to be the meal.
Bird's nest soup is made from the hardened saliva nests of cave swiftlets, harvested in Southeast Asia and among the costliest ingredients in the world; its appeal is almost entirely textural, a faintly gelatinous, slippery thread suspended in clear broth. That made it unusually easy to imitate, and this 1929 cooking-school book reached for carrageen — Irish moss — which had been a standard household jelling agent in Britain, Ireland and North America since the mid-nineteenth century, used for blancmange and invalid puddings long before it appeared as a soup. The transliterated title appears to reflect the era's ad-hoc romanisation of Cantonese, of a piece with the chop suey menus that had been familiar to American diners for a generation by 1929. Whether such a dish belongs to Chinese cooking or to American ideas about it is the question the whole menu raises.