ChineseCookingDemystified

Early Look: Three (Traditional) Chinese Egg Salads

Added 2025-03-14 03:54:12 +0000 UTC

Pictured is a humble Chinese dish called jidansuan (“Garlic Eggs”) from the North of the country, from around Henan, Shandong, and Northern Jiangsu.

Let’s call a spade a spade: it really looks like an egg salad sandwich. And that’s because, in some ways, it is an egg salad sandwich - depending on the strictness of the definition of ‘egg salad’ and ‘sandwich’. It’s a dish that’s designed to be downed with steamed mantou buns, as the swath of China from which it hails is squarely flour country.

Now, we’ve talked at length about xiafancai (“over rice dishes”, “send the rice down dishes”) – dishes meant to be eaten with rice. But home kitchens in the North also have a similar relationship with their staple grain: in certain areas meals are designed around noodles, elsewhere mo flatbreads, still others the flour-tortilla-like Spring Pancakes (eating in a way not totally unlike what you’d see in Mexico). Mantou bun regions are interesting in their potential applicability to the western kitchen as well... because what goes on a Mantou, in my opinion, also tends to work quite well working with bread (though a bagel might be a better match).

Besides that, we've also got for you in the video an herbaceous Yunnan Dai dish called chongdan (舂蛋) - excellent with sticky rice, as an aside - as well as a simple modern liangban sliced boiled egg that you can find throughout China.