Wu Xiang Fen

Wu Xiang Fen (五香粉, literally "five-fragrance noodles") is a southern Chinese noodle dish built around a long-simmered aromatic spice mix of cinnamon bark, star anise, Sichuan pepper, cloves and fennel, which gives the broth and the sauce their warm, resinous, faintly sweet perfume. The rice noodles are cooked separately, drained and tossed in a wok with the spice-soaked oil, then finished with pickled mustard greens, sour bamboo shoots, peanuts, scallion, chili oil and a slick of dark soy. The broth underneath is a clear, deeply aromatic stock made from pork or chicken bones, rendered with the same five spices and finished with a long pour of rendered lard and toasted sesame.

It is a street and station food rather than a banquet dish, and the most common versions are sold from small stands in Changsha, Yiyang, Changde and Yichang, where the noodles are boiled to order and the spice mix is roasted fresh each morning. Outside Hunan and Hubei the same name covers regional rice-noodle bowls in Jiangxi, parts of Sichuan and Hubei's Three Gorges corridor, where the spice blend may be sharpened with extra Sichuan pepper and the pickle swapped for radish. It is typically eaten for breakfast or a late supper, with a side of pickled chili and a hard-boiled egg.