Ningguo Stuffed Griddle Cakes 宁国粑粑

How it is made

The fillings vary widely: pickled greens, cowpeas (long beans), radish, pressed dried tofu or bamboo shoots, with meat and egg as optional additions. The city's ingredient list adds wheat flour for the skin and spring onion, ginger, garlic and salt for seasoning. The filling is wrapped in a dough skin, rolled out into a round with a rolling pin, and fried in oil in a large flat pan until cooked, when it gives off a strong aroma.

Flavour and texture

What sets Ningguo Stuffed Griddle Cakes apart is the ratio: the skin is so thin and the filling so generous that it looks as if the dough cannot possibly hold it. The cakes are known for being fragrant and soft, rich with oil but not greasy.

Where it comes from

Many Ningguo people descend from migrants from Hubei, and the local word for breakfast, zaodian (早点), is said to come from Chu (楚) speech. Most people eat breakfast at small stalls at the mouths of lanes, some sitting down and some taking food away, and these griddle cakes are a fixture of the stalls.

The cake is said to derive from Huizhou (徽州): people in Ningguo reworked the Huizhou guo cake (徽州粿) into their own version. A local legend credits the Ming scholar Wang Tingxiang (王廷相), while magistrate of Ningguo, with eating a cake filled with mountain bamboo shoots and cured pork while passing through Shanmendong (山门洞). He liked its salty, slightly spicy flavour so much that he had his kitchen make it for every banquet, and the cake became known across the town. Stalls throughout Ningguo's streets and lanes make it today.

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