Once winter arrives and the sky darkens, people hurrying home in the cold wind instinctively start longing for boiling delicacies, like a bowl of soup.

When I was a child spending the Spring Festival at my grandma's house, in the evenings, after having a sumptuous meal with wine, our large family would sit on the kang, cracking melon seeds and chatting. Grandma would stand beside the stove, boiling newly brewed sweet fermented oats for us to drink. The scalding hot soup water, licked by the flames, bubbled with a "gudong gudong" sound. The naked oats grains rose and fell, rolled over in these bubbles, releasing the aroma of wine.

Before long, everyone was holding a steaming hot bowl in their hands. While blowing on it, they slowly swallowed the soup. The warm soup seeping into the stomach made one feel the warmth of the whole year.

It was a winter several years ago. I was alone in Beijing and suddenly missed the pork rib soup stewed by my mother. On the weekend, I spent most of the day on the phone with my mother several times and finally managed to cook a pot of soup. When the fragrance wafted from the kitchen to fill the whole room, the rented house suddenly felt like home.

Soup is a rather delicate kind of food. It doesn't fill you up. From the perspective of modern science, it doesn't provide a lot of nutrition either. However, it silently permeates the Chinese diet, giving rise to diverse emotions.

Most of the time, rather than saying we love soup, it's more that we cherish the emotions contained in a bowl of soup: about certain times, certain memories, and certain love that's hard to put into words.

Soup is the consolation that time offers to the stomach.

In 2023, topics like "white people's food" and "pre-made dishes" were frequently discussed. Behind all the doubts and ridicules was a group of stomachs that couldn't find comfort.

In this era of fast pace and high pressure, with a long list of tasks to be done, having a proper meal has become a matter of low priority. We've accepted the food packages that only need to be heated in the microwave for a few minutes. We've gotten used to takeout food that makes the flavor of the food much less appealing. Even when having a bowl of noodles, we can't help but pick up our mobile phones several times.

Food has become a standardized product on the assembly line, fulfilling its functions in a stable yet cold manner. Among the doubts about "pre-made dishes", besides the concerns about safety, there is also a longing for "slowness" and "handmade".

And soup, as a kind of food, carries the emotional projection of many Chinese people towards food. It's a kind of food that requires exceptional patience. The Cantonese people, who love soup the most, have a saying called "boiling for three hours and stewing for four hours" - time and waiting are the necessary conditions for a good bowl of soup.

Behind this lies a value that people are willing to spend time on food. The Cantonese have a saying, "Work hard to earn a living and enjoy eating at leisure." They work hard and strive for a living so that they can have a meal in an unhurried manner. In order to cook a pot of "slow-cooked excellent soup", the Cantonese will go to the mountains to fetch spring water, go to the vegetable market to look for seasonal ingredients, and will attentively watch over the pot for an entire afternoon.

This kind of leisure is probably the most luxurious thing for modern people who find it hard to have a meal without being interrupted by the Internet.

Soup is also a kind of food that's hard to standardize. In Guangdong, many families have their own ancestral private soup recipes. Mothers will cook a unique pot of soup according to the season, the weather, the family members' physical constitutions, and the taste of the day.

Perhaps it's not just in Guangdong. In many family kitchens, there has been such a pot of soup cooked. Inside the bubbling bubbles are the feelings for specific people, the emotions and flavors that can't be replicated. When thinking of it and remembering that one has been treated so carefully in the past, both the body and the mind are nourished simultaneously.

So when thinking of one's hometown, there will always be that steaming hot bowl of soup.

The gourmet Brillat-Savarin once said, "Just tell me what you like to eat, and I'll know what kind of person you are." Food tells where a person comes from. The soups and broths that nourished us in our childhood will permeate our bodies and memories in the days that follow and become an existence like the background color.

I once saw a joke that for the Cantonese who are used to drinking slow-cooked excellent soup, the tomato and egg soup and the laver and egg drop soup in the north are equivalent to "dishwashing water" in their eyes. The words are a bit exaggerated, but that's probably how food shapes people: some preferences are formed unconsciously and become standards that only the taste buds understand and that can't be shaken.

It also silently influences the character and lifestyle of a city. The Luoyang Water Banquet, which originated in the Tang Dynasty, has one of its characteristics as "all hot dishes have soup". This half-soup and half-dish imperial banquet has elevated the art of making soup to an art form. And on the streets of Luoyang, large and small soup pots can be seen everywhere, indicating that the habit of drinking soup has continued from history and has long been deeply rooted in ordinary people's homes.

The Cantonese say, "I'd rather have no meat than no soup." People in Luoyang often greet each other not by asking "Have you eaten?" but by saying "Have you had soup?" The earthen pot soup in Jiangxi, the "yandu xian" in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai, the sweet soup in Fujian, the Song Sao Yu Geng in Hangzhou... Behind a bowl of soup is the landscape, products, and human connections of a region, as well as the steaming hot memories of the hometown.

And people who have left their hometowns will, one day, learn to cook a pot of soup in the kitchen of another city for someone.

A friend who got married not long ago told me that she used to seldom cook before, but now she would take the initiative to make some time-consuming foods, like making soup. It's a spontaneous wish to share wonderful food with the people she cares about. Between one pot of soup and another, new bonds are formed, and we also have a new home that needs to be nourished by soup.

It was also this friend who talked to me about the love of our parents' generation. She said that her parents didn't usually drink soup at home, and making soup was more like an expression of love. When her mother was ill, her father would cook chicken soup for her mother in the rented house beside the hospital.

She didn't think there was love between her parents before, but looking back now, that love was really deep. Love can be a major decision, like two people deciding to become husband and wife and experiencing the storms in life together. It can also be a very small thing, like cooking a pot of soup.

The Chinese are not used to expressing their feelings through words and body language. Food is often the carrier of love. "I miss you" often turns into "Have a good meal" when it comes to the lips. A lot of love seems impossible to put into words clearly, so we might as well not say it. Instead, we can spend one afternoon after another, using all our sincerity to cook bowl after bowl of soup.

In fact, it's not just the Chinese. The Irish writer Jan Carson wrote a story called "Soup". The grandmother, who was good at making soup, used soup to heal everyone in the town who was having a hard time in life. The grandfather wasn't good at sweet talk, and the most romantic thing he ever said was, "Your grandmother is no ordinary woman. She can make the best tomato soup in the whole East."

Later, when the grandfather passed away, the grandmother didn't make soup for a month and survived on biscuits and tea. One morning in the second month, she got up from the sad chair and went to the kitchen to make a pot of soup. "This soup is made from the most primitive and sincere ingredients and is the best soup my grandmother has ever made."

Although the taste of soup varies due to different regions and cultures, human emotions are the same. The Cantonese say that the best soup is "the greatest flavor is in simplicity, and the soup is as clear as tea." Isn't love the same? The most intense and deep feelings are often things that can't be explained in words and finally turn into something as simple and ordinary as soup.

In the snowy moments of life, those who have love in their hearts can still find a place of solace by the soup pot on the stove, watching the steaming hot air form fine water droplets on the pot lid, like a letter written with soup.