Fuchsia Dunlop

My mom has been making xueha soup since I was kid. This is my first time to officially know what they look like…… I have no idea they are frogs……speechless.

Jeebers, Ms. Dunlop, I love your blog but couldn’t you have hired a psychic or a stripper or a psychic stripper? What’s next, muntjac nipples? Good grief! I love your books, your blog & your adventurousnessocity – thanks:)

Ah, I was in Hangzhou in January and I neglected to pick up some frog ovarian fat. You mention you made the purchase in a medicinal food store and I was wondering if you or a colleague know what the purported medicinal benefits of eating this are.

Some interest in your more staple fare over here:
http://thepauperedchef.com/2010/05/serious-eats-roundup-sichuan-dishes-sawdust-and-a-mexican-fondue.html

My mother has also been cooking this since I was old enough to eat and i never knew they were from frogs! We call them xu kap in Cantonese and they were often boiled with rock sugar. I remember my mother used to spend endless afternoons with a tweezer, picking at the black thready bits.

Thanks for all your comments!
Yes, baobabs, picking out the black thready bits was a somewhat tedious job…
Do you and Audrey think that Chinese mothers deliberately avoid telling their children where xueha comes from? If your mothers had told you, would you have still enjoyed eating it?

I thought my first time having frogs ovarian fat was at Yu Jia in Chengdu (where I met you very briefly, actually, with a group of friends I was dining with). But I’ve had the cantaloupe dish so many times and never knew what the white slime was!

My friend and I had these while we were in China. It was served to us in a soup inside of a papaya half, and neither of us had any idea what it was. Someone tried to explain what it was and between my poor Chinese and the description of it as being “good for the complexion”, somehow the two of us settled on the idea that it was Aloe Vera. My friend loves Aloe Vera and so she devoured it. Of course, some time after the fact, it was properly explained to me that what we ate was, in fact, frog ovaries. But learning it was ovaries way after the fact took the shock value out of the whole thing, and my friend’s reaction was essentially a shrug of the shoulders at having eaten the ovaries of a frog.

Ah, I never knew they were the ovaries, learn something new every day.

My mum makes this quite often and it is a weekly tonic which is both good for your complexion and also has the same anti ageing properties of birds nest. It is used interchangeably in some desserts as it’s so much cheaper.

Best way to prepare it is to double boil or slow cook it with some dates and rock sugar.

Just come back from southern china having been served frogs ovaries with coconut milk & liquid sugar. At first I thought it was a sweet congee, as my HK Chinese colleagues didn’t want to say what it was, until after I’d tried it. It was ok as sweets go, no worse than the Tapioca pudding I had as a school child in the UK and probably far better for me!!

My Mom used to cook this as a dessert soup with rock sugar too! She also made this with coconut milk & rock sugar a few times. I love the coconut milk one!

The reason Chinese eat these is because in the days before modern medicine, there was no other way to get estrogen. Ovaries contain small amounts of estrogen and other hormones, which obviously helps with your skin, complexion and a whole host of other stuff.