Runbing Fresh Spring Rolls 润饼菜

How it is made

Quanzhou cooks treat the wrapper as the key to a good roll. Making it starts with beating a flour batter by hand. One family shop in Quanzhou, open since the late Qing and now in its fourth generation, has nine flat pans set up at its door. Holding a lump of dough in one hand, the wrapper maker dabs it across a pan and lifts it away at once, leaving a thin film that sets into a wrapper; when its edges curl, he lifts it off with a small knife. He wants a wrapper thin enough to let light through, white, springy, and strong enough not to tear around the filling.

The filling is free-form but balances meat and vegetables. Common choices are pork belly, oysters, carrot, cabbage and soft dried tofu, with flat beans and peas. Coriander, peanuts and hutai (浒苔), a green seaweed, are called the "soul" of the roll and make up the classic way to eat it.

How it is eaten

Each person spreads a wrapper, adds the fillings they like, rolls it up and eats it holding it in one hand and supporting it with the other. At Qingming, young and old sit together in the traditional houses to wrap and eat runbing, and it is an important dish at Quanzhou family gatherings.

The rolls are also called bobing (薄饼, thin cakes) and chunbing (春饼, spring cakes). In the Minnan dialect (闽南语) chun sounds like the word for "surplus", so the name carries a wish for plenty left over every year. Quanzhou emigrants carried the dish overseas, and so runbing is also called a "homesick dish".

Where it comes from

Several origin stories are told, and none can be verified. One links the roll to the Taiping era, when unrest reached the Zhangzhou and Quanzhou area and people rolled all their food into wrappers to make grave offerings in a hurry. Another sees it as a survival of the Tang and Song "spring plate" of fresh greens. A third credits the wife of the Ming official Cai Fuyi (蔡复一). Seeing him too busy with military paperwork to eat, she shredded and stir-fried fish, shrimp, pork, shiitake, winter bamboo shoots, radish and dried tofu and rolled them into thin flour wrappers.

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