Eating out is part of Shanghai everyday life, full stop. When there are places, literally holes in the wall, where you can get lunch for 20p (40p if you splash out on pork balls) then why would you go through the bother of cooking? Certainly not at lunchtime when instead of eating something cold and then reheated that you've dutifully brought in from home, you can eat something mouth electrifying, fun, and I think possibly medicinal.
Within two minutes of my office there are two places that do a furious business in ma la tung (spicy soup), which is not just soup, but a heady brew into which you add whatever you like from an array of baskets.
It's like grown-up and savoury pick-and-mix, and these places are incredibly popular. There is one a couple of kilometres further north from my office (at Jing'an Temple) where lunchtime sees a queue of 50 or so people waiting their turn for one of the very limited places inside. It's a low margin high volume business model though, and no sooner have people slurped their way through the noodles than they are up and out, leaving the seat free for the next one.
Anyway, today I was trying to shake off the last of particularly snotty cold. I'm no microbiologist, but I think the warmer weather here - the temperature change - has woken up several million strains of tropical germ, which had previously lain dormant in the icy Shanghai winter. The cold thanks to several people coughing over me (and truth be told, me over them), plus I had had a few late nights and been smoking far too many of the 30p-a-pack Chinese brand ciggies, and, well, it had all caught up with me. But bored with the snivelling I headed down to one of the two (not sure of its name, or even if it has one) and picked up my mini shopping basket.
Tooled up, I headed to the small table where the raw materials are arranged and sorted the basics first: two half-fist-sized knots of dried noodles, then to the fungi section for a stick of wood ear frills and a bunch of enoki, and finally a few leaves of baby bak choi (this is not what the Chinese call it here, but my Mandarin is not that specialised yet - sorry, watch this space). Then the treats: pork balls and a stick of hard boiled quails eggs.
You hand your bounty to the man, and all this gets decanted from your basket into an individual metal basket, which is then placed in a big vat of spicy soup, along with everyone else's. Three to five minutes later it's ready, and is then topped with a generous spoonful of crushed garlic and chilli flakes, plus a huge handful of freshly chopped coriander. All this is doused in even more soup and then wrapped up in a polystyrene bowl and plastic bag for you take back to your desk.
Half an hour and about half a roll of loo paper later, the bowl is finished and my blocked-up nose blown away. It was a spicy, aromatic soup - or broth really - that is infused with flavour from all the vegetables that have been cooking in it all day, and then given an extra kick with your own additions. The chilli gives a rich heat, and the coriander is an eye-waterer, but the whole effect is cleansing.
I swear I felt better for the rest of the day. I certainly didn't have to blow my nose again. While I'm not quite ready to embrace some of the more extreme elements of traditional Chinese medicine (deer penis wine for libido, say... though I'm not, of course, saying I actually need that one, ok?), but in most of China and in Sichuan Province in particular they swear by the healing powers of spicy food.
Certainly chilli is meant to be antibacterial and on this evidence its hard to doubt. Raw garlic has always done the trick for me anyway when I feel a cold coming on, so combined in this kind of concoction, those sickly little bacteria didn't really stand a chance. And all at a fraction of the price of paracetamol or a visit to the doctors. Ha!