The Cookbook

Miso Master, an American manufacturer of artisanal miso, have been in the habit of printing recipes on their inner labels; this one encircles a recipe for quick miso soup with illustrations of the manufacturing process:


At one point, though, someone at Miso Master decided to devote the inner label of Country Barley Miso to dissing the competition:



“Quick Miso”
BAG OF TRICKS

For Making Inferior Quick Miso:

1. USE ACCELERANTS like yeast and alcohol
2. HEAT MISO DURING AGING for faster maturing
3. “ALMOST PASTEURIZE” MISO so it can claim to be unpasteurized when it actually isn’t

“Quick” miso is not uncommon and, predictably, is a modern innovation. This commercially produced miso uses every trick in the book to quicken maturing, making two or three runs of inferior product to one run of naturally aged, superior miso such as Miso Master.

Not exactly the sort of sumptuous food porn that zhemao and underusedhave been posting here, this downright minimalist recipe comes from How to Cook and Eat in Chinese; once more, the author's remarks are italicized:

When you are absolutely out of soups, you can always make shên-hsien-t'ang, Soup for the Gods. Since it is too simple to count as a dish, I am numbering it 15.0
(Chapter 15 dealt with soups.)

6 cups boiling water
2 tb-sp. soy sauce
Some dozen 1/2-inch sections of garlic shoots or 1 scallion cut to 1/8-inch
sections
1 t-sp. sesame oil or salad oil or lard

Put seasonings into a bowl and pour boiling water in it.

Soup for the Gods is a good drink to go with rich foods, such as Eggs Stir Rice (what nowadays is termed "fried rice" in English.)

Not having brought up with traditional Chinese cookery and its surrounding cultural context, I've long wondered a couple things about the above concoction (which does serve as a useful quick-and-dirty soup base):

1. Why is it called "Soup for the Gods"? Is the name ironic, is it used in ritual offerings, or just what?

2. Just about every iteration of Soup for the Gods I've found online also includes ginseng:

https://recipeland.com/recipe/v/soup-for-the-gods-41328

http://www.recipesource.com/soups/soups/12/rec1258.html

http://www.cookingindex.com/recipes/74909/shen-hsien-tang-soup-for-the-gods.htm

The third link above cites The Ginseng Book (1973, Ruka Publications) by Louise Veninga; this would've been during an era that a lot of non-Chinese Americans exalted ginseng as a miracle substance that's Good For You and should be consumed at every opportunity (a characteristic product of the period was Ginseng Up, a root-beer-flavored ginseng-infused pop sold in health-food stores.) (See also the current adulation of things like açaí berries, quinoa, and goji.)

Now, according to Dr. Chao, one use of Soup for the Gods is as a light drinking soup/neutral palate-cleanser between banquet courses; I doubt that a powerful traditional medicinal herb would be added indiscriminately to such--particularly without specifying the type of ginseng, which would be an important consideration in Traditional Chinese Medicine; Chinese, Korean, and American ginseng have different effects (and the last is a different species entirely.)

So: how authentic an option is the ginseng?