On Jian Bing
1. Beijing
The first time I ate jian bing was in Beijing, but in a rural area far from the city’s massive urban core. I was the only foreign tourist around. We — my girlfriend, her uncle, and I — were visiting the city’s botanical garden, a historically important site that includes the farmstead of one of China’s most famous classical novelists, Cao Xueqin, along with the rocky, wooded spot where Chinese university students once gathered to protest the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. JoJo’s uncle, Chun, gave us a tour of Cao’s home and related many aspects of the author’s humble life, but looking back to the day, my strongest memory remains the pleasure of trying jian bing for the first time. (Sadly, my curiosity about culinary achievements may be stronger than my interest in the weight of history.)
The evening before, a few days after our arrival in China, Chun had taken us to Donghuamen, a night market in the center of Beijing, near the shopping street Wangfujing. JoJo remembered having liked this market a lot on previous visits to the city, but as we were to discover many times on our trip, everything in China is in a state of constant, accelerated flux, and much had changed even since her last visit three years earlier. The market was unrecognizable. It was overrun with foreign tourists like me, and its jumble of ad hoc stalls had been replaced, in the intervening years, by a long boulevard of shiny, regimented booths emitting fried, evil smells. We walked along the road from booth to booth, quickly inspecting the food on offer. Besides the expected street foods — dumplings and buns — there were grasshoppers, sea horses, scorpions, and other ‘exotic’ animals fried up and skewered for easy consumption. We ordered fried cornstarch and dumplings, but grease was the predominant flavor. The food at the market, pitched both to foreigners’ presumably blander palates and exoticizing instincts, was really disappointing.
But here, at the botanical garden, was something else. Chun woke us very early that day to beat the garden’s weekend crowds, and after an hour’s drive we arrived early enough to score one of the parking lot’s last spaces. Outside the park gates, at the base of a hilly incline just beyond the lot, past a few stands selling bottled soda and cheap toys, stood a lone woman at a glass-encased pushcart. Within the glass enclosure were a griddle, a few bowls filled with batter, sauces, and green onions, and a looming stack of large, crispy, fried-bread rectangles. When I expressed slight interest in the sight, JoJo’s uncle immediately ordered us a jian bing from the woman.
I watched her make it with great precision, as if from muscle-memory. First she ladled the batter onto a circular griddle — like the kind used to make crêpes — and spread it around. After letting that sit for a moment, she broke an egg onto it and spread it about with a squeegee, cooked the batter a few moments longer, and flipped it over while the egg was still runny. Watching the jian bing take shape — a ritual I was to witness again and again in the following weeks — seemed as important to the experience itself as actually eating it. Well, almost as important. As the eggy side of the wrap cooked, the woman used a brush to slather three kinds of sauce onto the newly exposed side, and topped it with finely chopped green onions. With a spatula, the cook planted one of the fried rectangles in the center of the crêpe, folded the circular edges over it, and expertly cut the resulting rectangle into thirds. Folding this over itself so that the crispy bread was completely enclosed within, she used the spatula to cut the resulting large, rectangular mass of dough and fillings in half again — doubling it onto itself once more, and making it even thicker. We soon had a neatly tucked, steaming jian bing in our hands; greasing up its waxed-paper sleeve, it seemed to be the perfect Chinese street food.
As soon as I took my first bite, I understood that jian bing was different from the market food we had encountered the night before. This was not novelty Chinese street fare, like crispy grasshoppers or excessively fried dumplings dribbling oil. This was that rarest of street food encounters for a tourist — the Real Deal. My first bite initially revealed the crêpe-like nature of the jian bing’s outer wrap, but this was quickly complicated by its explicit eggy-ness, which set it apart from any savory crêpe I’d ever tasted. Of course, these impressions came before I had even finished my first bite. Digging deeper, what really surprised me were the ways in which the sweetness of the hoisin sauce, the garlic chili sauce’s burn, the mysterious flavor of the third sauce, and the kick of the green onions intermingled with the eggy outer layer. And as I bit deeper still, I discovered the unexpected crunch of the fried-dough center — the ingredient that gives jian bing (or ‘fried bread’) its name.
Before we had finished the jian bing, I knew I wanted another one, but decided to wait and get it on our way out of the park. The wait, and the consequent drain on my concentration, ensured that I won’t be able to tell you too much about Cao Xueqin or what the student protesters had to say about the Manchurian situation. Two long hours later, as we prepared to leave the park, I was momentarily distraught when I didn’t see the jian bing woman’s cart where it had been that morning. Fortunately, I realized a moment later, she had moved down the hill a ways. I eagerly asked JoJo to order me another one, this time with extra sauce.
2. Flushing
I ate jian bing many more times during our next four weeks in China, trying it in as many permutations as I could find. One of my favorite stalls was near JoJo’s aunt and uncle’s home, on a major street around the corner from their hutong. In addition to the rice-flour batter of my first jian bing, this stall sometimes sold a variety made from mung bean batter and sprinkled with black sesame seeds. At the slightest impulse, I would set off for this stall — sometimes alone, which allowed me to practice the few words of Mandarin I knew — and would return with a bulging plastic bag or two.
My absolute favorite jian bing came from a stall that also was not far from Chun’s home, on Dongdan Bei Da Jie, a shopping street offering fairly accurate bootlegs of the season’s most limited Nikes and Bathing Apes. The stall, perhaps frequented by the area’s sneaker dealers and hair dressers, produced a mung bean and black sesame jian bing with the usual sauces, but gave it a personalized, emphatic twist by adding cilantro. Fantastic. (And, in my experience, completely unparalleled.)
A few times, while out at restaurants for elaborate meals with Chun and his family (who had all learned of my growing obsession) a nominal, assemble-it-yourself jian bing would land among the many, many courses making the rounds on the lazy Susan. As good as it might be, it never compared to its street-reared namesake — though of course I was always grateful to JoJo’s family for their willingness to indulge my obsession. As carefully as you might make it, and as fresh as the ingredients may be, Chun himself acknowledged, there’s just something about the way street vendors prepare jian bing that can’t be replicated in a restaurant or at home. An undeniable jian bing essence, I suppose — though in truth it’s probably cooking the crêpe and constructing the jian bing, rather than gathering the ingredients, that are hard to get right in a controlled environment like a kitchen.
Since returning from that trip a year and a half ago, I’ve been seeking out jian bing here in New York; casually at first, and then, as the months passed, more and more desperately. The search has been brief, and not very promising — hampered, no doubt, by my complete lack of facility with Mandarin. Through friends of JoJo’s mom, who frequent the bustling Chinatown of Flushing, Queens — made up of more mainland immigrants than Manhattan’s Chinatown — we learned of an indoor market comprised of food stalls and bootleg DVD hawkers. With directions in hand, we set off in search of the perfect Beijing jian bing. But as many New Yorkers have discovered, what is plentiful to the point of excess in one city — say, the burrito perfection of San Francisco’s Mission district — may be next to impossible to dig up in our own back yards. And when finally found, this idealized food has a way of not stacking up against the Platonic Forms we carry around in our taste-memories.
So no, the jian bing at this indoor market was not as special. The flavors were there — the mung bean batter, the egg, the sauces (though used more sparingly), and some green onions — but the fried bread was, sadly, all wrong. It was far too big, and as a result of its size — and the fact that the preparers at this stall do not fold the jian bing in on itself in the Beijing fashion — something of a rambling, imperfect mess. Trying it made clear the importance that texture and construction lend to making a jian bing perfect — and it made me long once more for the grimy, bustling streets of Beijing, where you can’t walk a few blocks without being tempted by an inviting stall with a small griddle and a neat stack of crispy, fried bread just waiting for your order.