Deep-fried Dough Sticks and Dough Cake

These are popular snacks which the Chinese like for breakfast, with the southerners preferring the sticks and the northerners the cakes.

Their preparation is rather simple. A suitable amount of soda, salt and alum is mixed with water and flour to make dough, which is left to ferment for about half an hour. The dough is then cut into finger-sized lengths. Every two pieces are picked up together, stretched with the hands into 20-cm sticks and, by the same movement, twisted around each other. The twisted sticks, when deep-fried in boiling oil, swell in to the finished snack.

The cakes are cooked in a similar way except that the dough is not cut into long pieces but into cubes, which are pinrolled into thin cakes before deep-frying.

The deep-fried dough cake dates back to the Tang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.), earlier than the twisted sticks, which made their first appearance in the region of today's Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces in the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279). The following legend tells about their origin. In 1142, Yue Fei, the famous national hero, was framed up by the traitorous prime minister Qin Hui, and executed at Fengbo Pavilion. The people in a nearby eating house were making fried rice balls when they heard the sad news. In their indignation they picked up some dough, shaped it into figures representing Qin Hui and his wife and, twisting the two together, fried them in deep oil to give vent to their anger.

Thus started the deep-fried sticks, which have become a highly popular snack.

Not everybody knows its origin, though some still call it “youzha gui” (oil-fried Gui, a variant of Hui).