Conpoy & Melon Soothing Broth

How to Prepare

1. Soak dried scallops in warm water for 30 minutes. Drain, reserving the soaking liquid.
2. Bring water to a boil. Add pork and blanch for 2 minutes, then drain.
3. Return pork to the pot with fresh water, scallops, scallop soaking liquid, and Shaoxing wine.
4. Simmer for 1.5 hours over low heat.
5. Add sliced melon and cook for another 30 minutes until tender.
6. Season with salt. Serve warm.

Why This Combination

A cooling, hydrating, very light soup, and the logic is the opposite of most of the sleep pages here. Conpoy — dried scallop — carries a strong sweet and salty profile and is considered nourishing to the yin, while winter melon is emphatically cooling and moves fluid. Together they make a broth that is sweet, savoury, and about as heavy as a cup of tea, which is why it is classically served as a light evening dish. The dried scallop is doing the nourishing and the melon is doing the clearing, and neither is doing much to the qi. This is a dish for someone who is thirsty and hot and not hungry, and it is worth being honest that it is much lighter than the other recipes on this page rather than pretending otherwise.

What Each Ingredient Is Doing

Dishes are combinations, not lists, and the reason for including an ingredient is often not the one you would guess from the name. Here is what each one is actually contributing.

• Dried scallop (conpoy)

  Sweet, salty, and strongly yin-nourishing. A small amount — four or five — because they are concentrated and expensive.

• Winter melon

  Cooling and fluid-moving, and the reason the soup is not heavy. It does most of the work of the bowl.

• Ginger

  Two slices. Balances the cooling so the soup does not make you colder, and moves the fluid rather than letting it pool.

• Salt and a few drops of sesame oil

  At the end. The sesame oil is there to carry the flavour of a very light broth, and it goes in off the heat.

The Properties of This Dish

The three properties each of these ingredients carries, so you can see what the dish as a whole adds up to. The full profile for each is below the table.

The Key Ingredients in Full

How each is described in the traditional material, what the research says about it, and the safety notes. Where those two accounts disagree, both are given.

When and How to Eat It

Adjusting the Dish

• Add a few goji berries in the last two minutes. Warming and nourishing, and it offsets the cooling without making the soup heavy.
• Add dried shiitake for a more savoury and less sweet version, which some people find more filling.
• Use winter melon with the seeds and skin, which is how it is normally prepared and where most of the cooling property sits. Peeled melon is considerably milder.
• Add a handful of mung beans if it is the damp-heat version you want — a soup that clears more than it nourishes.

Practical Notes

• Salt at the end. Scallops bring their own salinity and salting early makes it easy to overshoot.
• This is a cooling dish, so it is a poor match for someone who runs cold. In winter make it with daikon instead and add extra ginger.

Substitutions & Swaps

Cook This Alongside

FAQ

Sources for This Dish

Every claim on this page falls into one of two groups, and they are sourced differently. Statements about the traditional use of an ingredient are references to the classical and modern literature that describes it, and they are not claims that it works. Statements about research point at the published work, including the work that came back negative. Where a search link appears it goes to the current results for that query rather than to a single paper, so you can see the whole record for the ingredient instead of the most favourable part of it.