soupless

Din Tai Fung's instructions to nibble a little hole in them, sip the soup out, and then eat the soupless dumpling separately, seems to miss the point, rather like having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich as two separate slices of bread, or to eat a halo-halo layer by layer.

Anyway, the dangerously high-heeled woman was allowed onto the plane, while the old man had to board soupless. Crazy.

It's not been just the highborn women who sewed a skirt about him, and wrote him loving letters, or offered him castle space, eager ears and ceaseless devotion, who came to him as though they were soupless and he a kitchen; biographers have lined up to check out the contents of his life; studies have multiplied as if they had been introduced into a scholar-hungry Australia; and dozens of translators have blunted their skills against his obdurate, complex and compacted poems, poems displaying an orator's theatrical power, while remaining as suited to a chamber and its music as a harpsichord: made of plucked tough sounds, yet rapid and light and fragile as fountain water.