MUZIChinese Matrix
Street Snacks · FFET10191
A thin wrapper rolled around vegetables and pork, fried crisp in Shanghai and Guangdong and left soft in Fujian and Taiwan.
A plain white porcelain plate holds spring rolls with crisp golden wrappers revealing a filling of pale pork loin, napa cabbage and dark dried shiitake mushrooms, with wooden chopsticks resting beside the plate.
Snacks sold in portions on streets and at markets.
Spring rolls are small snacks of a thin wheat wrapper rolled around vegetables and pork. In Shanghai and Guangdong they are fried until crisp; in Fujian and Taiwan the wrapper stays soft and unfried. They are tied to eating spring pancakes with fresh vegetables at the start of spring, or biting into spring. Historical accounts include a Jin-period plate of five pungent vegetables, a Tang-period spring plate and a filled, fried rolled pancake in the Yuan household manual Jujia biyong shilei quanji. These accounts are secondhand; this entry did not consult the original texts or find a reliable year.
A spring roll is a snack of a thin wheat wrapper rolled around a filling, often vegetables and pork. In the Shanghai and Cantonese styles the roll is fried until crisp, while in the Fujian and Taiwan styles it is not fried and the wrapper stays soft.1,2,3,4
Spring rolls belong to the foods of the start of spring and are often eaten at the Lunar New Year. A Shanghai-style recipe author recalls eating them only at New Year. Eating spring pancakes with fresh vegetables, called biting into spring, goes back to a Jin-period plate of five pungent vegetables and a Tang-period spring plate; the Yuan household manual Jujia biyong shilei quanji describes a filled, fried rolled pancake. These historical accounts are secondhand; the original texts were not consulted and no reliable year was found.1,2,3
Spring rolls are made across China, with their own fillings in Shanghai, Guangdong, Fujian and Taiwan. The Shanghai and Cantonese rolls are fried, while the Fujian and Taiwan ones are not.1,2
Both recipes cook shredded pork, cabbage and shiitake first, cool the filling, wrap it in spring roll wrappers, seal with starch paste and fry. The Cantonese-style recipe adds carrot and bamboo shoots and chills the filling for about 1 hour; the Shanghai-style recipe uses about 1.5 tablespoons of filling per wrapper.3,4
The roll began as a pancake wrapped around the new vegetables of the season. In Shanghai, golden fried spring rolls are a New Year food.2,3
The Fujian form traveled abroad, and related snacks with local names are made in Southeast Asia.1
Legend has it that early Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish traders took Chinese workers and dishes back home, and that this is how the Dutch word for the roll came about. It is a story from the sea trade, with no dated text to back it.
Told in: A tale of the sea trade, told in the Chinese Wikipedia article on spring rolls, which records it as a legend and gives no dated source.
Grandma Li
This is a simplified home version, not the traditional restaurant method.
This is the fried spring roll I make at home, in the Shanghai style: shredded pork, shredded napa cabbage and shiitake are cooked, cooled, rolled, sealed with a starch paste and fried until golden. I looked at two published recipes, one Shanghai style and one Cantonese style, by two different authors on the same cooking blog. The filling follows the Shanghai-style recipe, and cooling the cooked filling before rolling is how both do it. The amounts are those of the Shanghai-style recipe, cut down to about a dozen rolls and rounded off at home, and I judge the frying by color.
Allergens: wheat, soy, sesame
