While I’m in DC for a few days Field Correspondant Beta Blognut has left us with arguably the most unappetizing photo I’ve ever seen. And is that a horseshoe crab?

Over some fresh seafood, our Chinese friends Max and Gin say that fried dough that is tián (sweet) gets served only in the morning. Which means 5am or so, when the Chinese get up and do exercises in the park. We chew on some eel and face-sized fried oysters and wonder if 11:15am is still morning enough for scoring Chinese doughnuts.

The next morning, Beta Blognut awakens to the sound of a nearby school, its uniform-clad children marching in formation, as well as having band practice, blatting on out of tune horns and drums. While green tea makes for fine afternoon fare (though nothing quite covers the sock-flavored stench of China’s municipal water), mornings must begin with a variant of canned, milky coffee by the rather-apt name of Mr. Brown’s. Much as his coffee habit has been compromised here in China, so too has his doughnut-for-breakfast routine. Instead, he’s become rather enamored with these egg crepes, smeared with chili paste and brown goop, then stuffed with what surely must be a massive pork rind and chives, with black sesames sprinkled atop. It’s the Breakfast of Champions for sure, on the 28 cents menu.

Stumbling down the streets of Shanghai, past a market full of live ducks, pigeons, chicken, eels, and snakes for sale (it’s not a pet store), we finally see a wok deployed for the work of frying dough. We spot that damned braid of fluffy bland dough, but other fried items are also drip-drying on a nearby rack. One particular substance of note has been floating in the boiling oil, which almost kills our appetite. Actually, we knew this stuff was cooking more than half a kilometer away, as said stuff, stinky tofu, is exactly that.

Now, Beta Blognut gave his grandmothers plenty of sleepless nights by eating tofu at Thanksgiving over the years, so despite the odious stank of the stuff, the vision of fried tofu is not inherently an ipecac. But stinky tofu is something else entirely. Fermented an extra long time (lord only knows where, though near wherever they bury those 1000-year black eggs is a good guess), to say its scent is fortified is an understatement. It uh…stinks.

On his first two chews of stinky tofu, Beta Blognut is downright enterprising about the taste: it’s the Chinese version of bleu cheese, he open-mindedly congratulated himself, proud of his cultural sensitivity, jaw and tongue cavalierly striding into a third chew. And then Beta realizes that stinky tofu’s fermentation container must be up a horse’s ass out on a rice paddy. It smells like horse’s ass, too. And now it’s all up in his mouth.

To think that it’s been barnyarding up that ancient wok oil gives pause, but then we see some doughy disc on the rack. Could this be a Chinese doughnut? Beta Blognut thus deploys the third Chinese phrase he knows: “Tián?” to the elder fry-master. (He knows a fourth, meaning roughly “I love you,” but he somehow doesn’t blurt it out, though he no doubt greeted the doughnut purveyor above with a hearty “Thank you.”)

Our chef points to this lump of fried rice flour and swaddles it in plastic. Somehow translucent and heavy, with a dash of sweet albeit mealy red bean paste inside, this is about as close as he gets to a Chinese doughnut. Not bad, but a ‘nut that even hints at galloping horsie should not be greeting our Olympians come summer.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 at 6:36 pm and is filed under Travelogue, Field Correspondent. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.