“We can safely and speedily pass over this business of a Chinese breakfast. It leaves much to be desired.” With a single dismissive paragraph in her 1935 cookbook, The Chinese Festive Board, Corinne Lamb came a lot closer to closing the book on Chinese breakfasts than to writing it. Admittedly, her conclusions were difficult to challenge: how many mouths would water at the prospect of “a cup of tea, accompanied by...some sort of prehistoric doughnut...cold, limp, insipid, and shining in its coat of cooled grease”? It’s no wonder she spent the rest of her otherwise flattering book discussing dinner.
But that was sixty years ago. Much has changed since then, and today the Chinese breakfast table as represented in Taiwan is planets away from the hardship post Corinne Lamb described. Nowadays, the island boasts one of the most highly developed and diversified breakfast cultures in the world. Freshness, abundance, and variety characterize the meal, and people who call themselves aficionados of East Asian cuisines—or of breakfast foods anywhere, for that matter—without having greeted at least a few dawns in Taiwan are pulling your leg.
A dozen or so breakfast items predominate, brought into high relief by an endlessly permutating backdrop of local, regional, and ethnic specialties. For a Taiwan-born septuagenarian, for example, the breakfast of choice is likely to be the watery rice gruel hsi fan (稀飯), accompanied by one or more side dishes of dried shredded pork, fermented tofu, peanuts, and pickles. A native islander of middle age, particularly one living in the west-central city of Tainan, might prefer a bowl of rice flecked, cilantro-topped milkfish soup, jazzed up with a succulent portion of the fish’s belly. But a former soldier born in Beijing who came to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek in 1949 likely prefers various steamed breads, either plain or stuffed with meat or vegetables. An old-timer from China’s farthest northern reaches might seek out the ever-scarcer millet porridge. For a mainlander from Shandong province, it could take a bowl of sturdy noodles to start the morning right, whereas some one from the far-south city of Guangzhou will prefer noodles of a more delicate type or, if not pressed for time, a round of dim sum. And the great many people not included in this list? Most would gladly settle for the ubiquitous bread duo shao-ping yu-tiao (燒餅油條), accompanied by its classic partner, a steaming bowl of sweet or salty soymilk. But this list leaves dozens of morning meal items unaccounted for.
The rich variety in culinary options does not mean that the dining surroundings are glamorous. Breakfast is by nature the most purely functional and unromantic meal of the day, and it is eaten without flourish or fanfare in settings that range from dingy at worst to inoffensively neutral.
Most morning diners buy from the neighborhood vendor and either get their meals to go or pull up a metal stool at the makeshift dining area along the sidewalk. At one end of this spectrum is the curbside spot in downtown Taipei where a grizzled army veteran stands behind a pushcart selling no-mi tuan (糯米團), a flattened bed of sticky rice folded over shredded pork or turnip, pickled cabbage, and fried bread and pressed into a hand-sized ball. At the other extreme are permanent breakfast restaurants so modernized in their garish fluorescent lights and white tiles that the venerable foods they serve, some of which are made using centuries-old recipes, don’t seem to fit—imagine popping into a McDonald’s for, say, a goblet of mead. (Western-style fast-food restaurants also have an increasingly prominent place in the current Taiwan breakfast scene as do Western bakery items such as doughnuts, croissants, and prepared sandwiches.)
Despite the wide range of morning treats that fan out across local tables, there is a workable framework for classifying the island’s breakfast foods. Its categories are a little too broad, and they don’t take in every item, but they do provide a good starting point. This approach focuses on three basic types of food: rice, noodles, and bread.
Rice is the raw material for hsi fan, the Taiwan breakfast par excellence for most native-born residents. The dish is not to be confused with the well-known Cantonese chou or congee, a sturdy, bracing porridge flavored with broth and often including meat or seafood. By contrast, hsi fan is merely waterlogged rice. Its origins lie in the Chinese tradition of cleverly husbanding food resources. It began, after all, as little more than water added to what stuck to the bottom of last night’s rice pot and was used as a way to stretch the family rice supply. A few decades ago, sweet potato was a customary addition to the porridge. This made it more flavorful, but was primarily a nutritional strategy because sweet potato was one of the cheapest and most filling foods around. Nowadays, only the most traditional vendors adulterate the rice this way. In the minds of many adults, sweet potato is a food linked with the poverty of the island’s past—a taste they’d rather forget.
The remedy for hsi fan’s blandness is the items eaten with it. Nearly any dish, and any number of dishes, is permitted. This allows restaurateurs to give free rein to their imagination and entrepreneurial spirit. The humblest porridge stall may offer four or five side dishes, a larger one perhaps twelve. One establishment in the Taipei suburb of Yungho daily mounts an extravagant array of at least forty hot and cold items, including fried mackerel steaks, pickled vegetables, sausage, seaweed, tofu, and the translucent black pi tan (皮蛋) or leather eggs, also known as thousand-year-old eggs. Surprisingly, many customers treat these side dishes as precisely that: they eat them on the side and don’t mix them in, preferring to maintain the pristine look and taste of the rice.
Rice shows up in other forms at break fast time as well, such as congee, milkfish and rice soup, and the savory steamed rice dumplings called tsung tzu (粽子). Tsung tzu, which are wrapped and steamed in bamboo leaves, are generally associated with the yearly Dragon Boat Festival, when heaps of them issue from family kitchens or, increasingly, takeout restaurants. But in some places they also constitute morning food. A hsi fan vendor in Tainan’s cornucopian Ah-Buh-Liao (Mother Duck’s Hut) market sells a vegetarian tsung tzu that is a Taiwanese specialty. Unlike the more common meat-and-egg-stuffed version, this one contains nothing but rice and boiled peanuts and is topped with peanut powder and sweetened soy sauce.
From a cart outside the same market, you can buy a local rice item called wa guei in Taiwanese (it has no Mandarin name). This delicious but mysterious looking concoction—it bears a strong resemblance to a bowl of mud—consists of sticky rice flavored with meat and ground into a paste. Pork, shrimp, and an egg yolk are added, and the mixture is steamed to firmness in a bowl and served with a sweetened, thickened soy sauce.
Almost as diverse as morning rice treats are noodles. Writing of Fujian, the mainland province whose cuisine provided the basis for native Taiwanese cooking, E.N. Anderson, the author of The Food of China, says. “Nowhere else in China does the noodle reach such apotheosis. In most of China it is basically a fast food or snack, but in many Fujianese areas it becomes the body and bones of much of the most favored cuisine.” The description applies no less to Fujian’s island neighbor Taiwan, where some non-noodle items are fashioned into imitations: shredded seaweed, shredded jellyfish, shredded tofu “skin.”
Many if not most breakfast noodle dishes are even more popular for lunch or dinner. The most common is probably some version of kan mien (乾麵), which means simply “dry noodles” and refers to a number of dishes featuring cooked noodles with sauces and toppings but no broth. Two of the most popular versions are a Taiwanese-style featuring jou tsao (肉燥, stewed pork) with a dash of pork broth and a few drops of oil, and a mainland-style including sesame paste. Both are topped with bean sprouts and fresh cilantro. Another well-loved dry noodle dish, chao mi-fen (炒米粉), features clingy, threadlike rice noodles served with pork, dried shrimp, mushrooms, slivered carrots, scallions, and soy sauce.
Cha-chiang mien (炸醬麵) is a popular dish any time of the day. Sturdy wheat noodles are topped with ground pork fried in fermented soybean paste, then garnished with cucumber, carrot, chives, and bean sprouts. Cooling, Sichuan-style liang mien (涼麵) is reserved for hot-weather meals. Known on Chinese menus in the West as “cold noodles in sesame paste,” they are made in Taiwan with yellowish wheat noodles that are round like spaghetti. One noodle dish that includes broth is guie-a, a Hakka specialty: thick rice noodles served in soup with jou tsao, chives, bean sprouts, and plenty of fried shallots.
Bread, the last category in the tripartite breakfast classification scheme, got its boost as a morning treat after the postwar influx of roughly two million Kuomintang soldiers, supporters, and their families from Mainland China. The new arrivals came from allover China and they brought many long-established breakfast bread favorites with them. These items are now standard morning fare from one end of the island to the other.
Dominating the field are two types of breads: shao ping and pau tzu (包子). The name “shao ping” applies to a family of flaky, flat, sesame-seed-topped breads of Persian origin but now found in all locales along the old Silk Road. These were originally cooked tandoor-style, that is, plastered to the inside walls of a hot charcoal oven. A precious few exponents of the old style of baking survive in Taiwan; most bakers have adopted the more convenient pizza-type ovens. But the delicious, slightly scorched taste produced by the charcoal roasting is enough to turn any discerning eater into a sworn enemy of technological progress.
Shao ping are sold plain, or with shallow fillings of green onion, shredded radish, sweet black sesame paste, or mixtures of sugar with peanut, sesame, or almond powder. Meat is another eligible filling, but is not so common. Among the tastiest variations of these breads, but one that is most often reserved for later in the day, is hsieh ke huang (蟹殼黃) These small, medallion-shaped buns, which are filled with meat and shredded turnip, or vegetables, can be especially succulent.
Combining a plain shao ping the size of an adult hand with the long, deep-fried cruller called yu tiao (literally “oil stick”) produces a breakfast item that qualifies for the title World’s Strangest Sandwich. Shao-ping yu-tiao takes the sandwich concept to ridiculous extremes. It follows the dictionary definition closely enough—“two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between”—but in this case what separates the outside panels of bread is a second and different type of bread! In other words, a bread sandwich. Yet somehow, this strange combination works beautifully, pairing the chewy, dry texture of the shao ping with the crispy yet oily yu tiao.
Pao tzu of various kinds provide shao ping’s chief competition. These spongy steamed breads range in size from weighty pads as big as your fist to the delicate, plum-sized hsiao-lung pao (小籠包), which are served in batches of half a dozen or more and arrive at your table in the bamboo basket in which they were steamed. The most common pao tzu filling is pork, but vegetarian versions can contain chopped vegetables and mung bean noodles, or a sweetened, heavy paste of red beans. Unfilled buns or man tou (饅頭), some made with brown sugar or lavender colored taro, are also popular.
Many other wheaten options tempt the tastebuds. Kuo tieh (鍋貼), or potstickers, are yesterday’s boiled, crescent-shaped pork- or vegetable-filled dumplings brought back to life by pan-frying to crustiness; shui-chien pao (水煎包) are a bigger and fatter version. Scallion pancakes, or tsung-yu ping (蔥油餅), are unleavened, flaky disks of bread flavored by the combination of the onions and the oil they are fried in. A handful of northern Chinese vendors sell pizza-sized slices of a yeasty near-twin to Italian focaccia called ta ping (大餅, big bread). The popular, tan ping (蛋餅) is topped with a beaten egg and, if done well, is as thin and light as a crepe.
One essential breakfast item lies entirely outside the threepart framework, but no survey of Taiwan breakfasts is complete without it. That item is soymilk.
Soymilk is made from the high-protein soybean, whose many uses include some of China’s most elegant and ingenious culinary innovations, such as tofu and soy sauce. To make it, the beans are soaked for half a day, pureed with boiling water, then strained to extract the white liquid. At breakfast, people drink it in two different ways. Tien tou-chiang, (甜豆漿, sweet soymilk) simply includes varying quantities of sugar and is served hot or cold. The hsien (鹹) or salty version has a very different taste. Cooks add vinegar, soy sauce, pickled vegetables, dried shrimp, chopped scallions, and hot pepper oil, or some such combination, to hot soymilk, then drop a couple of pieces of yu tiao cruller on top. The acids cause a slight curdling, changing the drink’s milky look and consistency.
The inventory of foods on the current breakfast scene goes well beyond what is described here. There are islandwide specialties, town specialties, and neighborhood specialties, as well as dishes sold only at a single stall or cart. Some items make their appearance only in the morning; others are available all day and even all night. And while the surroundings may not always abound in charm, a Taiwan breakfast more than makes up for it in taste, texture, and variety.