Many years ago I saw a Japanese TV program that explored the food of southern Taiwan and one of the stops was a restaurant that had a 106-year old vat of broth. It was tall and narrow and had a giant hump of crust on one side.
If it's still open, it would be going for 130+ years at this point.
ETA: Found it. Established 1895, the year Taiwan was annexed by Japan. It's not soup, it's a meat sauce (滷肉) used on a noodle dish. Scroll down to the middle of the page, which shows the chef with the pot in front of him.
Yes, 滷肉 ("braised meat") is highly concentrated. You can't eat the sauce by itself like a stew, it would be too rich. So it's usually served on white rice or in this case noodles.
The ingredients are typically finely minced fatty pork with soy sauce and strong flavorings like dried mushroom, garlic, star anise, and a fermented bean sauce that's super salty. Plus other ingredients that make the taste unique to the chef or shop.
I think there is an optimization question buried here. In tech lots of people have experience with A/B tests, which function on the assumption that you have a stream of fresh sessions which are independent. Multi-armed bandits, Thompson sampling etc give us frameworks for generalizing this towards finding the best option among a finite set of candidates, if goodness is fixed over time. This is kinda the opposite end of a spectrum: you get to run one policy at a time and the whole premise is that goodness is heavily state dependent. How do you decide whether to keep going with your current policy vs when to start over with another?
Sure, the soup is good ... but is it the best they could have after 52 years? By committing to maintaining one pot for so long, they pay the opportunity cost of not being able to explore related long-lived methods. If there's a different recipe that surpasses this one after only one year of simmering, they'll never find it.
At first I thought this might be related to the secretary problem, but of course if after 50 years of recipe B, you have the option of switching back to recipe A if it's better.
I've gone without a fridge for 8 years now and do something kind of like this usually - I'll cook a pot of food and then steam or boil it again after ~24 hours to reset the clock on it rotting. It's handy for things like eating a whole chicken or other large soup. I switch between being home and on the road a lot so my pot just comes with me and can be re-cooked on my car stove or my home stove. I tend to cook or re-heat once a day. Ideally I'd rather be sharing freshly prepared food with other people every meal and I do that when I can, but this works for when I'm feeding myself alone - cheaper and easier than any other approach.
One of my grandfather's favorite jokes whenever we visited was to yell across the house that guests had arrived, and to add some more water to the soup.
Of course, my grandmother was a farmer all her life before I was born, so she was always making far too much food (nobody ever left hungry was a mark of pride) but it took some growing up before I really contemplated the kind of life that joke would have come from.
Long time since reviews on the internet mattered one squat. Reviews can be because of everything from a jealus competitor, the platform asking the restaurant to pay to unblock favorable reviews/remove unfavorable ones, doing the opposite when you don't pay, or simple a bunch of people who basically fill the web with junk.
More often than not I have a great experience in restaurants with 2-3 out of 5 in ratings, and shit experiences with restaurants with 4-5/5 ratings, I've simply stopped reading reviews at all, anything with numbers on the internet is basically fuddled with nowadays.
I discovers this 10 years ago with Yelp. I refused to pay, but still kept an account linked to Faceboook. When I deleted that account, apparently Yelp knew that and released some old negative reviews that previously had been hidden. One review was filled with lies, and I never had the chance to see it (much less respond to it) when I still had the account. That was the day that I learned what legal online extortion looks like.
This was something I was genuinely excited to try while in Bangkok, took a Grab across town to make it happen, but it was it is honestly not good, the Google reviews seem to coincide with the consensus that while the concept is cool, the execution isn't and it tastes very meh.
I do wonder if there’s some pluralistic ignorance going on, where travelers convince themselves it must be amazing because everyone else seems to think so.
It didn't give off the vibe of years of collected flavors; it was a thin broth and it didn't taste like much else other than beef broth from a fancy instant noodle packet and a ton of MSG (and to be clear, I'm normally a proponent of MSG but it genuinely was overdone here).
Maybe it really is just the volume that they're going through that's affecting the taste and composition, because they were doing decent business, but this was the biggest disappointment on my short visit to Bangkok.
I wouldn't expect this to be better tasting than a regular soup/stew. If you keep eating it, new stuff added today has been almost completely consumed in a week.
I would eat it out of respect for the craft and the values that are being preserved.
Seems reasonable to conclude that people might do it to say that they did it, for the same sort of reasons why one might get a warm pint in a run-down, cramped, 500-year-old pub instead of a cold pint at a newly-opened, comfortable pub
Haven’t heard of forever sauce but my family makes sauce by cooking it pretty much all day. If we ate it every day then yeah we might as well keep a pot on the stove all the time
If you cook the tomato too long you lose the tomato flavor[1]. My Italian-American neighborhood has a sauce competition at the community center every year, and the winners never do an all day cook.
Why Italian Americans instead of just normal Italian? Aren’t Italian Americans just regular Italians? Or are you asking about the customs of Americanized Italian families or people who were born and raised in America but with Italian ancestry?
Because those are the Italians I have experience with, and the Italian Sugo al pomodoro isn't to my knowledge ever cooked for hours. The slow cooked variety in Italy is the ragù which is cooked up to 4 hours. If you cook any tomato sauce much beyond 4 hours you lose the actual tomato flavor[1]. So I sincerely doubt forever tomato sauce is a real thing.
No. The term generally refers to a groups of people descended from Italian immigrants who formed their own culture in America that blended regional Italian languages and cuisines with local American ingredients, language and customs. The big pot of red sauce in question doesn't exist in Italy, it's an invention of early 20th century Italian immigrants to the US.
Italian-american cuisine is quite distinct from Italian cuisine (which is really a lot of regional cuisines with a shared language and some shared staples)
It is typically the custom of Americans to hyphenate our ethnicity and claim descent from some European country or another. (Or African or Asian, or wherever the family had migrated from.)
Indeed, an Italian-American is not a "regular Italian" because they enjoy neither citizenship nor residence in that sovereign territory. Italian-American cuisine is also unique, and distinct from "regular Italian" cuisine. Sure, they draw a lot of ideas from the Old Country, but c'mon: tomatoes originated in the Americas!
I could be known as an "Irish-American" but really, I was adopted by a non-Irish family, and the Irish clergy/religious who educated me were fully inculturated into the United States, so we learned a patriotism for our homeland, along with a very American faith and culture, and not a futile nostalgia for some long-lost European territory. There was not a trace of Celtic spirituality or "Irish Republican rebellion" taught to me or my classmates.
I do appreciate Irish culture from afar, and I enjoy the St. Patrick's Day festivities that are not drunken orgies, but I am constantly reminded that I was never "Irish" and I do not derive my identity from hyphenating such things.
I've seen this done for a few years (2-3?) but only in a crockpot sized container, honestly still tasted alright. Not sure I'd have a full bowl of stew 52 but seems [great] for fermenty-salty dipping sauce like saltwater.
Many years ago I saw a Japanese TV program that explored the food of southern Taiwan and one of the stops was a restaurant that had a 106-year old vat of broth. It was tall and narrow and had a giant hump of crust on one side.
If it's still open, it would be going for 130+ years at this point.
ETA: Found it. Established 1895, the year Taiwan was annexed by Japan. It's not soup, it's a meat sauce (滷肉) used on a noodle dish. Scroll down to the middle of the page, which shows the chef with the pot in front of him.
https://ksdelicacy.pixnet.net/blog/posts/5067270713
Cool. The pot is surprisingly small. Is the sauce in it highly concentrated or something?
Yes, 滷肉 ("braised meat") is highly concentrated. You can't eat the sauce by itself like a stew, it would be too rich. So it's usually served on white rice or in this case noodles.
The ingredients are typically finely minced fatty pork with soy sauce and strong flavorings like dried mushroom, garlic, star anise, and a fermented bean sauce that's super salty. Plus other ingredients that make the taste unique to the chef or shop.
I think there is an optimization question buried here. In tech lots of people have experience with A/B tests, which function on the assumption that you have a stream of fresh sessions which are independent. Multi-armed bandits, Thompson sampling etc give us frameworks for generalizing this towards finding the best option among a finite set of candidates, if goodness is fixed over time. This is kinda the opposite end of a spectrum: you get to run one policy at a time and the whole premise is that goodness is heavily state dependent. How do you decide whether to keep going with your current policy vs when to start over with another?
Sure, the soup is good ... but is it the best they could have after 52 years? By committing to maintaining one pot for so long, they pay the opportunity cost of not being able to explore related long-lived methods. If there's a different recipe that surpasses this one after only one year of simmering, they'll never find it.
At first I thought this might be related to the secretary problem, but of course if after 50 years of recipe B, you have the option of switching back to recipe A if it's better.
I've gone without a fridge for 8 years now and do something kind of like this usually - I'll cook a pot of food and then steam or boil it again after ~24 hours to reset the clock on it rotting. It's handy for things like eating a whole chicken or other large soup. I switch between being home and on the road a lot so my pot just comes with me and can be re-cooked on my car stove or my home stove. I tend to cook or re-heat once a day. Ideally I'd rather be sharing freshly prepared food with other people every meal and I do that when I can, but this works for when I'm feeding myself alone - cheaper and easier than any other approach.
Perpetual stew: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew
One of the speculations as to how life was created on this planet: stable environments hosting hydrothermal vents over long periods of time.
Could perpetual stews over decades act in the same manner?
Maybe! Let's try it in a sterile environment, a few million of such stews over a few millions of years.
https://archive.is/syGNG
Forever soup isn't new, of course.
Poor families do it to cheaply make long lasting meals.
My late maternal grandmother used to have a pot of forever soup on the stove, and she would put whatever she had on hand in.
Spare ribs, check. Leftover veg, check. McDonalds fries, gross, but check.
One of my grandfather's favorite jokes whenever we visited was to yell across the house that guests had arrived, and to add some more water to the soup.
Of course, my grandmother was a farmer all her life before I was born, so she was always making far too much food (nobody ever left hungry was a mark of pride) but it took some growing up before I really contemplated the kind of life that joke would have come from.
And yes, always had soup going.
https://archive.ph/syGNG
I'm currently in bangkok atm. where can I go try this soup?
https://www.tripadvisor.com.au/Restaurant_Review-g293916-d87...
Actual customer reviews are less gushing than the WSJ article....
Long time since reviews on the internet mattered one squat. Reviews can be because of everything from a jealus competitor, the platform asking the restaurant to pay to unblock favorable reviews/remove unfavorable ones, doing the opposite when you don't pay, or simple a bunch of people who basically fill the web with junk.
More often than not I have a great experience in restaurants with 2-3 out of 5 in ratings, and shit experiences with restaurants with 4-5/5 ratings, I've simply stopped reading reviews at all, anything with numbers on the internet is basically fuddled with nowadays.
I discovers this 10 years ago with Yelp. I refused to pay, but still kept an account linked to Faceboook. When I deleted that account, apparently Yelp knew that and released some old negative reviews that previously had been hidden. One review was filled with lies, and I never had the chance to see it (much less respond to it) when I still had the account. That was the day that I learned what legal online extortion looks like.
When publishing, it's always important to get a fresh viewpoint from an unrelated account/device to ensure nothing looks amiss!
City-level reddit subs have a fair idea where to avoid, I find.
Its on Ekkamai rd, "Wattana Panich"
This was something I was genuinely excited to try while in Bangkok, took a Grab across town to make it happen, but it was it is honestly not good, the Google reviews seem to coincide with the consensus that while the concept is cool, the execution isn't and it tastes very meh.
I do wonder if there’s some pluralistic ignorance going on, where travelers convince themselves it must be amazing because everyone else seems to think so.
It didn't give off the vibe of years of collected flavors; it was a thin broth and it didn't taste like much else other than beef broth from a fancy instant noodle packet and a ton of MSG (and to be clear, I'm normally a proponent of MSG but it genuinely was overdone here).
Maybe it really is just the volume that they're going through that's affecting the taste and composition, because they were doing decent business, but this was the biggest disappointment on my short visit to Bangkok.
I wouldn't expect this to be better tasting than a regular soup/stew. If you keep eating it, new stuff added today has been almost completely consumed in a week.
I would eat it out of respect for the craft and the values that are being preserved.
Seems reasonable to conclude that people might do it to say that they did it, for the same sort of reasons why one might get a warm pint in a run-down, cramped, 500-year-old pub instead of a cold pint at a newly-opened, comfortable pub
Is this like how Italian families sometimes a forever pot of tomato sauce continuously on a low heat on their stoves?
This Italian here has never heard nothing like that. Tomato sauce can be simmered for several hours, but there is no refill.
I've never heard of anyone doing this among any Italian Americans I know. Is this something you've seen first hand?
Haven’t heard of forever sauce but my family makes sauce by cooking it pretty much all day. If we ate it every day then yeah we might as well keep a pot on the stove all the time
If you cook the tomato too long you lose the tomato flavor[1]. My Italian-American neighborhood has a sauce competition at the community center every year, and the winners never do an all day cook.
[1] https://www.seriouseats.com/the-best-slow-cooked-italian-ame...
Interesting! I’ll have to try a cooking the recipe for shorter. I am a bit skeptical since my family’s sauce is the best in the world already :)
They're all good sauces.
Why Italian Americans instead of just normal Italian? Aren’t Italian Americans just regular Italians? Or are you asking about the customs of Americanized Italian families or people who were born and raised in America but with Italian ancestry?
Because those are the Italians I have experience with, and the Italian Sugo al pomodoro isn't to my knowledge ever cooked for hours. The slow cooked variety in Italy is the ragù which is cooked up to 4 hours. If you cook any tomato sauce much beyond 4 hours you lose the actual tomato flavor[1]. So I sincerely doubt forever tomato sauce is a real thing.
[1] https://www.seriouseats.com/the-best-slow-cooked-italian-ame...
> Aren’t Italian Americans just regular Italians
No. The term generally refers to a groups of people descended from Italian immigrants who formed their own culture in America that blended regional Italian languages and cuisines with local American ingredients, language and customs. The big pot of red sauce in question doesn't exist in Italy, it's an invention of early 20th century Italian immigrants to the US.
Probably because they don't know any Italians (in Italy), just Italian Americans.
I am an Italian-American and would presume to speak for Italian-American foodways but not the foodways of Italians living in Italy.
I do or have, but they aren't tomato sauce Italians if that makes sense.
Italian-american cuisine is quite distinct from Italian cuisine (which is really a lot of regional cuisines with a shared language and some shared staples)
Are you a non-American?
It is typically the custom of Americans to hyphenate our ethnicity and claim descent from some European country or another. (Or African or Asian, or wherever the family had migrated from.)
Indeed, an Italian-American is not a "regular Italian" because they enjoy neither citizenship nor residence in that sovereign territory. Italian-American cuisine is also unique, and distinct from "regular Italian" cuisine. Sure, they draw a lot of ideas from the Old Country, but c'mon: tomatoes originated in the Americas!
I could be known as an "Irish-American" but really, I was adopted by a non-Irish family, and the Irish clergy/religious who educated me were fully inculturated into the United States, so we learned a patriotism for our homeland, along with a very American faith and culture, and not a futile nostalgia for some long-lost European territory. There was not a trace of Celtic spirituality or "Irish Republican rebellion" taught to me or my classmates.
I do appreciate Irish culture from afar, and I enjoy the St. Patrick's Day festivities that are not drunken orgies, but I am constantly reminded that I was never "Irish" and I do not derive my identity from hyphenating such things.
I've seen this done for a few years (2-3?) but only in a crockpot sized container, honestly still tasted alright. Not sure I'd have a full bowl of stew 52 but seems [great] for fermenty-salty dipping sauce like saltwater.
The grime around the pot convinced me they’re telling the truth about 52 years :)
> The grime
Oh, you mean the flavoring!
*52 years concentrated heavy metal soup.
Why concentrated?
Disgusting.