While in Xi'an, Mom and I returned to a restaurant that a Chinese friend (long story; my friend Lee in Jingzhou had a cousin in Xi'an, and called in a favor for her to meet me and help me with a train ticket issue, and we ended up hanging out and going out for dinner, at which she introduced me to a local specialty) had taken me to three years before. I'm glad I was able to locate it again, although what I was looking for is a common dish in Xi'an so I'm sure we could have found it elsewhere if I hadn't found it.
Paomo is a hot lamb (traditionally; you can also get beef these days, which we did since Mom doesn't care for lamb) stew with chopped up steamed leavened bread in it. It's a bit of an experience to eat at this place because you are given your empty soup bowl and big round pieces of bread and you tear it into bits yourself. Once you have the bread all torn up, they add the stew overtop of it. The waitress was amused by us foreigners and used charades to supplement my limited Chinese to give us instructions. She came by a couple of times to fuss that we weren't tearing the bread into small enough pieces. The stew comes with chilli sauce and pickled garlic on the side so you can season it to your taste.
This dish would be wonderful on a cold winter day (and as Xi'an is fairly far north, there are plenty of winter days to eat it on). We, of course, were there in July and so were sweating a bit while eating a heavy stew, but it was worth it.
According to legend, in the late Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period (10th century), Zhao Kuangyin, the founding emperor of the Song Dynasty, was on his way home after a visit to his fiancee. He and his party had eaten most of their food and spent most of their money already on the journey (this was long before he was emperor, and so just the song of an army officer at the time), and had only two big pieces of bread that were too hard to eat left. They found a shop selling lamb soup and broke up the bread to add to the soup to make it more filling. His memory of that meal stuck with him, and years later after becoming emperor he passed that way again and asked the cook to make it again the same way. He loved it, and gave it the name yangrou paomo, which translates roughly to lamb-meat puffy (swollen)-bread. And thus it has now been a popular winter dish in the region for over a thousand years.
