The Last Jianbing

A jianbing is a Chinese crepe. I may at some previous time said it as a Chinese burrito, but that was just to console myself when I was particularly missing burritos. In fact, it is a sort of crepe. It is made in the following way:

There is a circular metal griddle about the size of a medium pizza. The person making the jianbing uses some kind of solid fat in a paper cup to grease it. Then there may be a choice of several batters. One I know is made from black rice flour. It's purple and I often choose that one because it's easy to say. Another may be a sort of bean, and one a sort of wheat or millet. A ladleful of batter is dropped onto the griddle and spread around with a sort of scraper. Once it's thin and flat, the person cracks an egg onto it, breaks the yolk with the scraper, and spreads the egg around too. That's the protein. On top of that, a handful of cilantro and a handful of scallions, scattered about. With two flat turners, the jianbing chef works around the edges of the crepe and flips it. It almost always works perfectly. On the clean, cooked side of the crepe, the sauces get brushed on with an expressionistic brushing. One is dark reddish brown. The next is bright pink. The next is invisible against the other two, and the last (optional) is hot pepper sauce. On top of this canvas now is placed a crispy deep fried cracker sort of thing, which covers about half the surface. With the turners, the chef folds the two sides over the cracker thing, and makes two crisp, shallow cuts, dividing the rectangle roughly into thirds. The ends get folded on the cut marks, and what's left is a hot, savory, tasty, multilayered square of goodness, speckled with cooked egg and herb-green.

After several days of unlucky eating experiences, for dinner today I finally went to the Yannan cafeteria and got myself one of these perfect jianbing. It's always the same girl who makes them, not that she recognizes anyone in particular. I mean, how many dozens of these must she make? I arrived near the end of the dinner hour, and she looked tired. Still, she was perfectly neutral about my request for an extra egg. Like Pocket of Bolts, she can crack an egg with one hand, but unlike Pocket of Bolts, she doesn't do two at once. The jianbing came out perfectly, and I have had enough of them by now to count as a connoisseur. Gloating over it, and my little dish of lightly marinated cucumbers, I went upstairs to sit.

The table I was sitting at looked down over the railing, directly above where the jianbing chef was making her last few jianbing. I watched her, wondering if as a result of making jianbing every day she in fact has come to hate them. Does she hate the very smell? As I watched, her last customers walked away. Then she set to making a last jianbing. I watched with interest. Perhaps I was wrong, perhaps she was making her own dinner. Perhaps she gets to be the jianbing chef because she has a mad passion for jianbing. When she got to the egg cracking stage, I was surprised to see that the egg had a double yolk. Still, like me, she opted for a second egg, and I was even more surprised to see that this too had a double yolk. One double yolked egg is an accident, but two are by design. From doing this job every day, she must be able to get a sense for which eggs are likely to have double yolks, and furthermore she must save them out. She was extra-generous with the cilantro and scallions, and more precise with the sauces. When this big four-yolk jianbing was done, she put it into a to-go bag. Then she set to work cleaning up. She took the leftover crackers to the bread stall, presumably for storage. She dumped the wheat batter into the bean batter. She scraped the grill.

I had long finished my own meal, but was lingering over my cucumbers, wondering what was going to happen with the last jianbing. One of the other servers came by, a man of authority who gestured to the jianbing in the bag, as if saying, "What's that?" I was too far away to hear her response. I wondered if she was getting in trouble for making her own dinner?! For a minute it seemed like that. But her face had a bantering look to it. After several more exchanges, the man picked up the jianbing and took it away while she finished cleaning the griddle and stowed it under the counter. I wonder if she'd originally intended it for him? I wonder if he knew about those double yolks?