Passed Around the Table

There are rungs on the ladder of belonging in Taiwanese society. Last month, we continued our slow ascent by climbing another: we ate hotpot in someone’s house. While hotpot is one of the preferred social gathering activities in Taiwan, we’ve actually eaten it only a handful of times — mostly due to it typically not being vegetarian friendly and a little because of Covid restrictions — and always in restaurants. For those of you unfamiliar, it’s a similar idea to fondue, except instead of chocolate or oil or cheese it’s a very rich, boiling soup broth. Like the picture above, hotpots are often divided in half, with one half being a spicy broth and the other being a more plain one. Ingredients can include basically everything, from instant noodles to big leaves of cabbage to shrimp to beef to duck blood cakes. Here, vegetarian me got to indulge in baby corn, daikon, enoki mushrooms, adult corn, cabbage leaves, tofu skin, instant noodles, and a sweet dumpling for dessert. Many places also give you sauces to go along with the bites, but I’ve found the broth to be good enough that the sauce usually feels unneeded. <a href="https://medium.com/@GrahamMOliver/passed-around-the-table-8cc655da9d64">Click Here</a>