For my last post on Taiwan, I want to write about the food. It might seem weird that this post is coming over a month after the actual end of my trip. I wish I could proffer some sort of deep, contemplative reason for as to why I had taken so long to come about it. That the taste of food is some ephemeral thing that takes a long time to think about describe in words. Or that I am the sort of person who likes to sit on a post until it is fully cooked (pun intended). Truth though is that I am a slow writer and this post stayed in my drafts folder. Other posts came ahead of it until finally finally I was able to finish it up. Memories have started to fade of what everything tasted like, but I think I have enough committed to long term memory to eek something like this.

My mother and grandmother cooked Taiwanese cuisine for me so in general I knew what to expect heading into my vacation. The funny thing is that though I was warned that there would be issues with an American eating overseas food (indigestion and all), I did not have any such things. My cuisine experience had gone as smoothly as it possibly could have - with the exception of ordering. Having safely arrived back in the States, I felt the need to read a little more about the history of the food that I ate there. Part of that research you find below.

Because so much of my memories of the food’s tastes have faded into the sands of time, I thought that I would take a different tack with this post.

###Breakfast

Everyone in here is chattering and they all sound like my Tab-guzzling, 50 year old grand-aunt with a Kim Jong-Il haircut. I had just walked out of a hot, steamy Taipei morning climate into a hot, steamy hole in the wall to indulge into what I hoped would be a decent breakfast. The previous day, I wandered over 4 miles (According to my iPhone, I walked an average of 11 miles a day while I was in Taiwan) across three highways, passing by two fish ponds, under 2 overpasses, three cats, and countless old people doing Tai Chi in order to find this one breakfast place (famous for its fried breakfast bread) only to come across a line so long it stretched literally vertically to the sky and into the heavens. So Operation Day 2 Breakfast had yielded amazing sights and photographs, but on the food front was a spectacular failure.

For Operation Day 3 Breakfast, Yelp had pointed this little place out to me, illustrating its fare with some delicious photography. Being slightly less than a mile away from my AirBnB, I sweated the trek to this tiny shopfront hidden down a side street across the way from a large, 4 story middle school.

Unable to read the Chinese menu (photographed below), I decided to get whatever everyone else was getting - and they were all getting the same thing. When it was my turn to order, I gestured to a nearby eating patron - trying to convey that I wanted what they had. They stared at me confused and the line behind me was growing. I glanced helplessly back at some of the people queuing up. Most of them being in their forties or fifties, they did not understand me at all. I remember back when I was a teenager and being at family gatherings. They would talk and talk and talk and then occasionally all pause to stare at me. What were they saying? What was it about me? Ugh!

Eventually it occurred to me the solution. I brought up the Yelp app up and showed them one of the photographs on the profile page. They got it immediately and I felt a wave of relief. Grabbing my stuff, I sat down at the table and waited for the food to arrive.

Dan Bing (Egg Crepe)

A simple egg wrapped in a piece of dough which is then cooked on a hot plate. It is so easy to make and so ubiquitous that I was unable to find detailed information about it. Ha!

It has a spongey texture that at first resists your initial chew. You should take extra time when eating this. The dough is relatively flavorless but the egg brings a salty roughness that I think played well on my tongue. In general this is a pretty ordinary egg crepe that many will be familiar with and though I got it the first time I was at the shop, the second time I skipped it.

Xian Dou Jiang (Salty Soymilk)

Xian Dou Jiang can be best described as a puree soup that is seemingly equal parts water and soybean slurry. Legend has it that both soymilk and tofu were invented by a legendary king but truth is that nobody really knows how it was first developed nor became popular (it first appeared in the historical record in 82 AD). Historians theorize that tofu first evolved from Dou Jiang as it does appear to be an easier dish to make and so might better serve as an “intermediate” form of soybean cuisine.

There are two versions of the dish: A sweet version called ‘tian doujiang’ and the savory, salty one that I had below. Tian doujiang I am told is itself a great breakfast food - though I never got to try it. I was never the biggest fan of sweet things.

(By the way, I have found that if there is one thing that Taiwanese food makers love to do, it is to make things sweet. Second day in the country, I was sweating and in need of hydrolyzing. I picked up a plum flavored tea at a 7-11, paid $1.50 for it, took a swig and then poured all of it on a plant outside the store. I am sure that plant died seconds later from sugar poisoning. It felt like my teeth were decaying literally that second from all that sugar. Over the next few days, I bought several drinks across that entire storefront, taste testing them for sweetness. Yeup, all effin’ sweet.)

It comes with a number of different garnishes including fried crullers (youtiao - which was the speciality of the breakfast place that I never got to try earlier), onions, and golden sauce I did not recognize. They cook it in a large metal pot that they scoop up into a bowl after you order so it comes steaming hot fresh. You might want to get to the youtiao early before it gets soaked in the liquid, making it a soggy sponge of an eat that might not be appealing. My palate values softness so it was fine for me.

The slurry itself is delicious, having a watery dulled taste that found itself pleasantly interspersed with other foods of different textures. It is a food that goes down the gullet relatively easily. I am a person who prefers to have a lot of different toppings along with his food so having all sorts of little ding a lings in my tofu slurry went fine with me.

The bowl emptied itself too quickly. I put the spoon back in the bowl and looked around to see if anyone else had been busing their own trays. It did not seem to be the case, but most of everyone had already left. They needed to get started on their day - work, leisure, shopping or whatever. I wiped the sweat off my brow - for eating hot food on an already hot-morning has consequences - and then surreptitiously as I could got up and paced out the building. I looked back on the little hole in the wall shop. The only thing I can remember thinking was that if you don’t look twice then it is just way too easy to miss.

Lunch

After enjoying a fun but frenzied tour around the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall, I stumbled (are you starting to note a pattern?) into Hang Zhou more desperate to escape the heat than to really gorge on a delicacy. It was close, accessible without too big a dose of the Taiwanese noon sun.

Feel free to pretend that you are engrossed in the local culture while you are in reality trying to dry off the buckets of sweat coming off your body.

Not wanting to appear too much the foreigner, I nod without a word as the waitress points me towards an empty table. She drops a menu and hurriedly rushes off, assuming myself familiar with the routine. There is a slip of paper where you check off the quantity of each item on the menu. The menu has English. The order slip does not. I have a bear of a time figuring which is which, marking off my boxes like I am back in high school and it is the SATs.

As the waitress walks off with my order slip, I glance behind me and four men hunch over unstable towers of bamboo baskets. It is early in the morning - are those baskets empty or full? Their little kitchen is settled in the front of the restaurant, an attraction for while you wait for your food.

“Are you eating alone?” The waitress is back. I nod uncertainly.

“Are you Japanese?” She presses and repeats the query in nihongo.

“No. I am American,” I respond in my shaky Chinese. “But I understand Mandarin.”

She blinks away a look of surprise. “Okay. This is way too much,” she points at my order sheet. I had ordered 3 baskets of Xiao Long Bao, 2 baskets of siu mai, and 2 plates of dumplings. This is too much?

“I am sorry,” I insist. “But I can eat this.”

“No no no. You cannot eat this much. This is too much! How about just 1 plate of dumplings and 1 basket of siu mai?”

This lady seems like she is pretty serious. What sort of restauranteur decides to forego business by telling a customer that he SHOULDN’T go buy something? On one hand I felt that she was insulting my masculinity: What kind of American man would not be able to eat 3 baskets of XLB? Are not the American men fat because their portions are larger than the Titanic?

She refused to take my order until I agreed to take off at least 1 order each of siu mai and dumplings so I nodded and she walked away satisfied. Dumb American, she must be thinking.

Xiao Long Bao

The famed Shanghai dumpling is a relatively new creation. While on the plane back I read this fantastic article about its history and emergence into the culinary spotlight. Of course, most of the lore around its original creation is exactly that, lore. Who knows what is real and fake. What does seem to be for sure is that it was an ordinary food until one store in particular - Din Tai Fung Dumpling House - started to gain traction amongst the increasingly wealthy Taiwanese populace. In the 1990s the restaurant gained some outside investors and opened in Tokyo, its first overseas establishment. They then opened up another place in Arcadia, a suburb of Los Angeles in the San Gabriel valley in 2000. It started to blow up from there. There are quite a few Din Tai Fungs in Taiwan but I never ate at one during my trip. Too crowded, too expensive, and being a lone traveler, I felt it awkward to be just one dude at a super fancy restaurant, eating on my own and staring at my phone.

To be honest, I had never heard of the damn things until about a year or two ago and even then I refused to eat them at first because I thought they were actually bread buns, and one of my weird cuisine tics is that I don’t eat bread. It was not until someone showed that they were filled with meat inside that I relented to try one. My roommate (a through and through Shanghainese man as he never fails to remind me, dismissive of the fact that I am also of ethnic Shanghainese descent from my father’s side) tells me that the best way to eat this damn thing is to first take a little nibble, then suck out the juices out before popping the rest of the thing into your mouth. The second they showed me how they did it, I immediately flashed to the brain-sucking bug from the famed movie Starship Troopers. You have to be careful when eating this. Sometimes even just the very act of biting (to create the initial hole to suck the juices out from) can cause the bonds of the bun to give away and for everything inside to relieve itself onto your lap.

Eventually all the food is eaten except for 5 dumplings. I ask for a container and they look at me like as if I were crazy. Asking for takeout bins in Taiwan seems to be verboten, right up there with asking for a cup of water (which to me is especially egregious). They figure out my possibly-profane hand gestures and they bring me something to take home with. I collect my things and with my bag in my hand, I quietly walk back out towards the sun. I give the restaurant one more look back. My table is empty, already cleared out for the next guest.

Dinner

You can tell that you are coming up to something big when the surroundings outside your Uber start turning from just normal streets and shops into bright bursting lights and luxury storefronts. And the people, oh the people! Maybe I am just not used to going towards huge groups of humanity but there are so many people out. And it is loud, loud in an energetic, happy way. People are having a good time. No matter how dour or low you are feeling, you get caught up in it.

The Shilin Night market is the largest and most well known in Taipei. The daytime market was established in 1909 near a small temple (like, where else can such a place start, right?) and officially inaugurated in 1913. In 1915, a small brick building was constructed to place the burgeoning number of food stalls that had sprouted up to serve the growing populace. Some time in the 1970s a second steel building was constructed to shelter the increasingly large night market. Thirty years later in 2002 this building needed to be renovated and so the market moved again. The new building was completed in 2011 and then four years later I showed up.

Some of the foods I did not dare to eat. For example, I did nothing more with this squid than take a few photographs.

People seemed to have figured out a loose walking structure, you go in one direction on one half of the path and the other direction on the other side. This rule is freely violated and I was jostled all the time by people in all directions. And then occasionally everyone gets out of the way for the rando bike. What on earth would a bike driver be thinking to drive his way in a footpath?

The stall I eventually chose offered two fantastic dishes. In some ways they are familiar, in other ways there is something about them dreadfully new.

Stinky Tofu

As with all old-timey, traditional foods, stinky tofu has an origin story. It is said to be invented by a scholar named Wang Zhihe in the Qing dynasty (which last from 1644 to 1911). He ran a tofu shop, preserved his wares in a jar of salt water and forgot about it. It stank to high heaven when he rediscovered it but too stingy to throw it away, he ate it instead and found it not too bad. Pretty nice story - Chinese guy is stingy and because he is stingy he is rewarded for eating moldy crap. Unfortunately it is not true.

The truth of it is that fermented tofu of the stinky (or “chou”) type existed long before Wang Zhizhe, being first mentioned in a 1578 treatise (note, created before the Qing Dynasty) on herbs by a man called Li Shih-chen. At the time, the product was called “milk spoiled” (other people theorize that the word for “spoiled” might also mean “mochi”. Who knows, really). It is likely that the Mongols rather than the Chinese first invented the food - the Chinese never having been partial to the food preparation concept of dairying (fermenting cheeses and other foods). It is likely that they were at first horrified by the practice, as hinted by the derogative implication of the Chinese symbols used for the word. Ironic then that it is now taken to be one of their core cuisines.

The tofu described in the above story (found here) is described as being green in color. Whatever I ate, it was not green and thus I am not so sure that it could truly be called stinky tofu. It also did not smell that badly, but I have a generally weak sense of smell so not catching onto a scent would not surprise me. It has a nice kick to it, a bit of sourness that I have lately taken to enjoy from food.

As I have gotten older, I have found that my sense of taste has started to fade from me. Only a few different tastes still resonate with me. What then has gotten to be just as important when eating is texture. Many times I find the enjoyment of eating has to take into account also the feel of the food on my tongue and rubbing against the insides of my mouth. Stinky tofu, fried tofu of any kind really, has a wondrous eating experience that I think is a mix of crunch (as a friend of mine used to say, “Love those crunchy bits”), sponge, and sour that I think everyone needs to try.

No time for savoring though! Cold noodles are coming.

Cold Noodle

Cold noodle does not have much of a history - it seems to have come about because people wanted a cool snack to eat during the unrelenting summer months. I wish I could offer some sort of origin story … how about this, I’ll make one up. So how about 600 years ago an old Chinese man … let’s call him Lin Bin-ling … he was making noodles when suddenly the sun got covered up by a horrible solar eclipse. An hour of darkness encroached upon the land and everyone was terrified. Bin-ling fell from the chair on which he was standing and then a boiling hot bin of noodles fell on him then. He died and then gained super cold powers. He then goes and fights Guan Yu from the Romance of The Three Kingdoms. He wins over the gYU (as the legend calls him), but before Guan dies in a rainbow multi-color explosion of hydrochloric acid, he says, “YOU MUST ALSO DEFEAT MY TWO OATH BROTHERS TOO!” Unable to defeat those two boss characters, Bin-ling goes back home and invents cold noodles.

Okay with the historical[references needed] part now over, the actual dish. It is a dish that my mother started cooking for dinner whenever she got too lazy to do actual cooking. It is noodles with some sort of peanut sauce (she got hers from Costco) and various other things. The example that you see above has cucumbers and ham - which is the same thing that my mom has. However my mom has also added bean sprouts, strips of fried egg, and a nice big fat dollop of nagging.

I kid, mom, don’t ground me. Anyway, this dish turned out to be one of the few dishes in Taiwan that I did not quite enjoy all that much. It is a cliche to say, but my mom made it better. The noodles were of a weird texture and softness, not offering the grainy roughness that spaghetti has. I am not sure what people would prefer, but for me, I liked having something that I can actually chew on.

Everything done, I stand up and automatically put my hands into pockets, fishing for change but I realize that I already paid (just $2!). I feel satisfied with my meal and think about going home, but it is just 1030 PM and there is still so much to see. The market has a whole lot more than just a few food stalls. The excitement of exploring more - of seeing more eats and sights - overcomes my encroaching tiredness. I weave between the cluster of people in line, hungrily eyeing my now vacant spot, and do my best to meld into the flow of pedestrians outside.