Whenever he reached a bustling major city, Cui Jiuyang lowered his sword light, slipped into the city unseen, and found a lively eatery for a meal.
In Henan, there was carp with fried noodles, prepared Yanjin-style. A prime Yellow River carp was fried until its skin was golden and crisp and its flesh tender, then covered in sweet-and-sour sauce. Sweetness, saltiness, and sourness blended fully under the high heat, each evenly balanced without overpowering the others, with sourness beneath the sweetness and a hint of salt beneath the sourness.
The fried noodles were made from dragon's-whisker noodles, as fine as hair, airy and crisp. Grip them a little too hard with chopsticks, and they would crumble.
Cui Jiuyang liked dipping these noodles in the carp's sauce, though he could not dip them too deeply. He merely touched them to the sauce and hurried them into his mouth. Having absorbed just a little sauce without becoming soaked, the noodles were soft outside and crisp within, their flavor rich and mellow.
Once in Shanxi, naturally, he had oil-blanched pork and a bowl of knife-cut noodles.
The pork was richly fragrant, while the noodles were thick in the middle and thin at the edges, slippery outside and chewy within. Aged vinegar brought out the fragrance of both noodles and meat. Add two cloves of raw garlic, alternating a bite of noodles with a bite of garlic, and the flavor was exceptional.
Once he entered Xi'an, lamb soup with crumbled flatbread became a must.
After hours of simmering lamb bones and meat, the broth shimmered with fat released from the marrow and flesh. Cui Jiuyang could not enjoy a meal without meat, so he simply added a full half-bowl of meltingly tender lamb to his bowl of soup.
As for flatbread broken into soybean-sized