The fade-in after the credits reveals Joyce Chen behind the kitchen counter. She explains that when Americans eat at Chinese restaurants, they like to have tea or water with their meal, but it is in fact more typical in China to have soup, so she is going to explain how to make a variety of soups. The basis for any good Chinese soup is generally chicken broth so she starts with the making of that. One should have a good fowl (she spells it out: f . . . o . . . w . . . l) and that if it is freshly slaughtered, it needs to be cleaned and rinsed. To get off any traces of feather, one should scald the fowl (and she spells out 'scald' in the same manner). Since the Chinese do not like to waste anything, a good Chinese chef will use the head and feet. These are typically removed before the birds get to an American supermarket, so one needs to arrange for them with one's butcher. She shows a large bag she has bought that is filled with chicken feet. These are considered a delicacy in China and she is going to have her family help clean them so as to serve them at a big feast later in the evening. The feet need to have toenails and excess skin removed, and in close-up she shows the viewer how to do that. She then returns to the preparation of chicken broth. One puts the whole chicken in water. Other ingredients include ginger slices and, in contrast to American chicken soups (which, she notes, use onion, celery, carrot, and bay leaf), scallion. She recommends tying the scallion into a loose knot and, after failing to get the knot to hold the first time around, she drops a tied scallion into the broth. The knot makes it easier to remove the scallion at the end. It is essential to simmer the broth, not boil it, and she insists on this point several times. In China, she tells us, the cook listens for a vague popping of a few bubbles -- "Boop, boop, boop" she mimicks -- and nothing more intense that that in simmering level should be allowed. Once more, she reiterates that a good soup starts with good fowl and simmering, not boiling. She shows how to make an elegant Chinese soup by adding to a broth Virginia ham (which she says is like Chinese ham, only better -- since American pigs get better quality feed), cabbage, bamboo shoots, and black mushrooms. Another soup that can be made from the stock is egg drop soup which is pretty much as its name indicates: one drops beaten egg (or bits of it) into the hot broth. The soup can be dressed up with chopped scallion. She returns to the first soup -- the more elegant ham soup -- and brings it to the dining room. The Chinese way to drink such soup, she clarifies, is to hold the bowl near one's mouth and blow on it so it is not too hot. She begins to drink the soup with a Chinese spoon and, as she signs off, she reminds the viewer one last time that the broth should be made by simmering, not boiling.