As a common rule, you’ll acquire a good figuring out of any a part of the sector by way of consuming its regional specialties. This holds very true in a rustic like China, with its nice measurement and deep historical past. Go back and forth to the southeastern province of Fujian, as an example, and also you’ve were given to take a look at guang bing or “glossy biscuit,” the Chinese language identical of the bagel. “With flour, nutritional alkali and salt, the cake, no larger than a palm, may also be merely cooked, and sells for roughly 1 yuan ($0.14) at the streets,” says China Day-to-day. “Locals like it, now not handiest as a result of the crispy and salty style, but in addition as a result of a mythical tale.”

The unique dishes of border or coastal spaces all the time appear to have in particular intriguing histories, and so it’s with the only at the back of Fujian’s guang bing. “Right through the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), Normal Qi Jiguang introduced a military to battle Jap invaders in Fujian. As a result of steady rain, they might now not cook dinner for the warriors, so Qi created a type of cake with a small hollow within the center. Infantrymen may string the truffles in combination and lift them whilst preventing the enemy.”

The outcome seems — and probably tastes — like a necklace of bagels, the preparation of which might be achieved in underground ovens that didn’t give away the warriors’ place as obviously as open campfires would.

You’ll be told extra about this bagel-powered victory of 5 centuries in the past from the Nice Giant Tale video on the best of the put up, and extra concerning the persisted preparation and sale of guang bing by way of a couple of devoted bakers in the Atlas Obscura video simply above. Regardless that a variety of Fujianese take them directly, “some like so as to add red meat, or dried shrimp and Chinese language chives in it; some fry it with chitterlings, duck’s gizzard or inexperienced been; and a few spoil it into items and boil it with soup.” Written data of the bagel as Westerners understand it date again to early seventeenth-century Poland, with obvious predecessors noticed in that nation as early because the overdue fourteenth century. It’s going to naturally happen to an American traveler in China to unite those two lengthy however far-off culinary traditions, through which case he’d do smartly to pack his personal with lox and cream cheese.

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Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on towns, language, and tradition. His tasks come with the Substack publication Books on Towns, the e book The Stateless Town: a Stroll thru Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video collection The Town in Cinema. Apply him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Fb.