Thin rice starch batter pastry from the 6th century AD
Just look at this. Wow. Have to re-think lots of things.
ca. 540 AD. Recipe (not direct translation). Take refined rice glutinous rice starch, add enough water to make a batter, heat a large pot of boiling water, set a copper pan in the water, push the pan to rotate it as you drop in a ladle of batter. The batter spreads to cover the whole pan (centrifugal force). Take the pan out of the water and peel off the film. It looks like suckling pig skin (cooked pig skin I assume).
Cut up and add to a savory soup or sweet sesame or fruit based soup.
Commentator Huang´s note.
Modern versions are still seen in the cuisine of Fukien. In the Foochow areas there is a much beloved dish called ting-pien hu which is made by spreading a thin layer of rice flour batter along the uypper wall of a large cooking wok. As the film dries it is scraped and allowed to fall into the hot savory soup in the center of the wok.
In southern Fukien thin round rice pancake called po ping are made on a flat bottomed pan. These are used to wrap chopped meat and vegetables to give spring rolls. When fried they are just like the ubiquitous egg rolls one sees in Chinese restaurants in America except than the skins are thinner than those made with wheat flour. In
In short, I finally did what I should have done earlier on, looked up thin pastries in H.T. Huang´s wonderous volume in Joseph Needham´s Science and Civilization in China. Huang, born and raised in China,worked as a food scientist for years in the US, ending up as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation, before writing this tome on Fermentation and Food Science in China. Never has a tome been more welcome.
He has a long discussion on ping or roughly Chinese pasta (Katy, I am following his terminology here which is why I use ping not bing. He uses it to describe the earlier wider meaning of the word, whereas as your links point out in modern times it refers mainly to round breads).
No less that 15 kinds of ping were described in the 6th century Chhi Min Yao Shu, Essential Arts for the People´s Welfare, an astonishing compendium of agricultural practices and food technology. The one above is the only batter.
Comments, please, please. Just love these hunts. Thanks Charles, Katy and Robyn for comments here and on Facebook about the Chinese thin pastries, and everyone else on those elsewhere. I will acknowledge them in future posts.
Thanks Jay. So much interesting stuff coming in on this.
Have you read Nawal Nasrallah’s Delights from the Garden of Eden: A Cookbook and History of the Iraqi Cuisine?
I’m just glancing through it now. But on page 17, she writes about Mesopotamian recipes, “Apparently they baked a lot of bread. Around three hundred kinds of bread were made, and in Sumerian records they were categorized as leavened, unleavened, excellent, ordinary, fresh and dry. They ranged in size from large to tiny…” They also made flat bread baked in a “tinura” (from which the Arabic “tannour” is derived), cakes, cookies (stuffed ones too)..
more later…
Did I say yes, Susan? I think all this comes from Bottéro, no?
On page 18, Nawal Nasrallah discusses Mesopotamian cooking techniqes, “As for baking, the exterior hot walls of clay cylinder ovens were used for baking unleavened bread…”
Those are your first “griddle” breads. There’s not a big leap there into very thin griddle cooked sheets of pastry.
And considering the origins of wheat and the grindstones required for milling wheat flour for breads, pastas, crepes, pastry sheets, etc., I do not find the idea of a Chinese genesis for thin sheets of cooked wheat flour dough compelling. Of course, your post is about Chinese rice batter pastries that came much later than the Sumerians.
Thanks again, Susan. What a wonderful series of commentaries and resources.
Wow! I have wanted that book forever but I can’t get any websites to ship it to me in Malaysia. Does he describe the 15 kinds of ping?
(BTW Ping=bing. Bing is just the pinyin (China mainland) spelling.)
Never heard of anything like that ting pien hu! (and trying to visualize the method — is it like popiah, ie dough is ‘spread’ from a lump? with a brush? ???). I assume it’s ting (=cooking pot) pien (=side).
I don’t know how many directions you want to go with this. He is also describing the method for making fen pi (lit. ‘flour skin’ ), bean/pea-starch ‘noodles’ (more like firm jelly, really, that’s cut into thick pieces), usually dressed with chili and sesame oils, soy sauce and eaten in Sichuan and elsewhere.
Substitute cheesecloth stretched over a frame for the copper pan, use the rice flour batter, and he’s describing the method for Vietnamese banh cuon wrappers.
Am I replying to everything again? My change of internet hosting service is causing some duplication. More soon.
This is like the rice noodle sheets I’ve seen Tai Lu women making in northern Laos, a technique presumably from China originally. I mean, they don’t put a pan on water etc, the sheets are instead steamed over water.
I agree with Robyn, that of course the Vietnamese do a steamed sheet on fine cheesecloth…
One thing is puzzling, from the quote: the idea that breads were baked on the “outside ” of the ovens in Mesopotamia – why? Surely, as with tannurs, tannirs etc, the hot surface is on the inside…
Maybe it’s a translation error? or?
Just seems strange. When baked on a hot insde surface, then there’s also cooking of the top surface because of the flow (convection currents) of hot air in the (barrel-shaped) oven.
Lovely to hear from you Naomi. Think Susan has a reply to this. She knows more than I about this kind of thing.
ting-pien hu is ding-bian hu in Pinyin – the first two characters as Robyn points out – cooking pot and side. hu as in paste (rice paste here) It’s popular in Fujiang and in Taiwan too. It’s of Hakka origin.
It’s cousin dish ding-bian-chuo is perhaps more popular in Taiwan. Chuo means to scrap, shuffle – which literally describes the ‘method’ of cooking this pastry.
Huang can confirm.
Regarding the 15 kinds of ping in Chhi Min Yao Shu — I’ve read the original in Chinese the section about ping/pastry. It struck me something ‘unusual’ from the types of cakes and pastries I’ve eaten in the modern days Chinese environment. There were several mentions of cow and goat dairy/fat ingredients and one of them Shaobing was filled with lamb – which is unusual for me descedent from South of China. I would point to the influence of Central Asia definitely. perhaps Huang or your food historian colleague can shed some light on this?
Thanks for both comments Katy. Yes northern China as extreme end of steppe is important, I think.
That ca. 540 AD. Recipe was called ‘suckling pig skin’ method – and sometimes called ‘Bo Ping’ – Bo means to peel.
“One thing is puzzling, from the quote: the idea that breads were baked on the “outside ” of the ovens in Mesopotamia – why? Surely, as with tannurs, tannirs etc, the hot surface is on the inside…
Maybe it’s a translation error? or?
Just seems strange. When baked on a hot insde surface, then there’s also cooking of the top surface because of the flow (convection currents) of hot air in the (barrel-shaped) oven.”
More from page 18
“As for baking, the exterior hot walls of clay cylinder ovens were used for baking unleavened bread. The domed clay ovens, known in the Akkadian as “tinuru”, were fueled with bramble or desert bushes, and generated less intense interior heat. When the top opening was closed, enough humidity was created to bake fermented breads, cakes and others”
I have seen photos of ovens like this still used in Algeria. I’ll try to find them.
Thanks Susan. Those tablets are full of pretty untranslatable words and phrases, guessing really.
http://www.el-milia-mico.org/article-kesra-45132438.html
Photo of Algerian Berber griddle made from clay for “kesra”, a flat bread, typically made with semolina. The brazier underneath is also used for tagine (the vessel with the conical lid) cooking. Interestingly, the Algerian use of the word “tagine” refers to a variety of pots and pans. For example, “khobz tagine” refers to griddle cooked breads.
http://herve.marchand1.free.fr/Maroc/Divers/divers.html
“Pain Berbere” Berber bread, scroll down just a little bit.
http://en.eyeka.com/photo/view/160709-le-four-pain
Le Four de Pain (oven for bread)
http://erfoud.viabloga.com/images/thumbs/DSC06167_t.800.jpg
This is the type of oven used in the Algerian countryside to also cook very, very thin flatbread on the exterior. I wish I could find the website that shows a very large version of this type of oven with photos of women actually cooking on them.
Great links. WE have to a have link round up.
Yes, Bottero.
I had an amusing thought about how warka (the seared method) was invented. A cook did not properly knead dough for cooking in or on a tabouna (tinuru) and the oven temp was also not high enough. So, the dough did not adhere to the walls of the oven, as it slid off, it left a film of cooked dough. Voila, first sheet of warka.
By the way, the ability to make extremely thin freshly rolled pastry sheets is a widely disseminated home cooking technique in Algeria. I have a lot of links for those too, if you’re interested. Charles might be tickled to know that the Moorish mania for making the thinnest sheets of dough possible, is still apparent in modern Algeria.