Cold Jellyfish Salad
Strips of rehydrated salted jellyfish tossed with vinegar, sesame oil, garlic and a little sugar, served cold as a crunchy starter before the hot seafood arrives.
How to eat it
It comes already dressed, so give it a quick toss with your chopsticks to redistribute the sauce and eat it straight from the shared plate in small pinches. The texture is the whole point: cool, snappy and closer to a pickled vegetable than to anything fishy, with almost no taste of its own beyond the dressing. Eat it early, before it warms up and softens, and do not expect it to fill you; it is a palate opener for the hot dishes that follow. Newcomers sometimes mistake it for glass noodles until the crunch gives it away.
The story behind the dish
Jellyfish have been salted and dried along the Zhejiang coast for centuries as a way of preserving a catch that spoils within hours, and the slabs are soaked in fresh water before use. Zhoushan waters produce large quantities of the edible species in late summer, and the salad is the simplest way to serve them. It sits on the table at weddings, festival dinners and ordinary weeknight meals alike, usually alongside other cold plates such as brined crab or pickled vegetables, and its role is to sharpen the appetite rather than to be the centre of the meal.
For reference
Every kitchen does it its own way. What follows is the typical version — ingredients, heat and price shift from city to city and from one restaurant to the next, so take it as a guide rather than a fixed recipe.