*Illustrations for this piece will arrive shortly.
The world has a thing for the number four. The human heart steadies itself with four chambers; wild mustard opens in four neat petals; the end of the world, in the Book of Revelation, arrives on the backs of four horsemen. In the sphere of auditing and high finances, there is the inevitable quartet of Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC consulting infrastructure for nearly every major corporation on earth.
Most industries are defined by their giants, and sometimes there are only four seats at the table. Long before the Big Four of accounting, there was the Big Four of a Shanghai breakfast: Da Bing (sesame flatbread), You Tiao (fried dough sticks), Ci Fan (sticky rice rolls), and Dou Jiang (fresh soy milk). Canonically, they were quite the heavy hitters.
Until the early 2000s, you could still find them on nearly every street corner of the city starting at daybreak, when a pale slice of moon still hung overhead. In the breakfast stall, harsh white light spilled from bare bulbs, and red-blue flames licked the edges of iron griddles. The Shi Fus (generalized term for craftsmen) worked tiredlessly. Their work clothes had gone unwashed for days; where fabric rubbed against the counter, dark streaks had formed. Sometimes, an apprentice would crouch on the ground, wheezing as he pumped the bellows. When he pushed, his chin nearly touched his knees, and when he pulled, his back arched so far it seemed about to scrape the floor. In the summer, he would strip to the waist, sweat soaking the waistbands of his pants. It was grueling labor.
When the wind blew, customers hurried in from both ends of the street, clutching their coats closed, pushing aside the oil-stained cotton curtain at the door and ducking inside. Two Da Bing (or Ci Fan), one You Tiao, and a bowl of Dou Jiang cost only a few pennies, but it was the classic Shanghai breakfast.
Dou Jiang (Soy Milk)
Grinding soybeans was exhausting work. First they were washed and soaked, then ground with water (historically with a stone mill, which required even more muscles). The raw milk had to be strained of pulp, skimmed of foam, and boiled thoroughly. In the summer it spoiled easily, so the container had to be scrupulously clean, or else the milk would “turn.” It was the temperamental drama queen of the group: if it wasn’t fulled cooked and only half-boiled, it would upset your stomach without even bubbling.
At street stalls, soy milk was always steaming. Two tall wooden kegs stood by the counter, exuding a faint scent of pine resin. Inside were two iron pots fitted into the tubs, holding the hot milk ready. The Shi Fu would lift the milk with a brass ladle attached to a wooden handle. If you brought your own pot, he would fill it for take-out; if you ate there, he would pour it neatly into a blue-rimmed bowl. When the pot ran low, more was drawn up from the wooden keg.
“Savory or sweet soy milk?” the Shi Fu would ask.
“Savory!” Surprise–old Shanghai liked it salty.
Holding the ladle high, the Shi fu would pour the soy milk in a long arc so that it frothed and blossomed in your bowl. Into the bowl would enter bits of fried dough, chopped scallions, pickled mustard greens, dried shrimp (or dried seaweed), and a splash of soy sauce and vinegar. Finally, a drizzle of chili oil. The high pour created delicate “flowers” in the bowl–something you rarely see today, since the servers at Xinya Dabao or Yong He Soy Milk King in Taipei are (understandably) too concerned about burning their hands and earning their paychecks to practice the flourish. The result was beautiful to behold.
Sweet soy milk, with copious amounts of sugar, was for children. It had no character. Some shops now sell iced soy milk–refreshing in the heat, perhaps, but upsetting in the stomach. Good soy milk should taste richly of beans, thick, aromatic, and full.
Back then, members of every social class in Shanghai drank soy milk daily. “Have you had your soy milk today” was the what-is-up-my-dude of those days. Customers brought thermoses and queued in long lines. Some shops printed monthly tickets–“thirty coupons for thirty mornings”–so that you could tear off one for each bowl. It was convenient and humane in its own way.
Many of those small kindnesses disappeared with the tides of the market economy. Breakfast is gulped between subway transfers, ordered through E Le Ma (an app called “Are You Hungry” that was recently bought by TaoBao), or replaced altogether by a protein bar eaten over email. Margins are tighter, and hands are careful not to burn because there are quotas to meet and rent to pay. In a city that runs on speed and silent competition, there are fewer moments where a Shi Fu recognizes your face before you speak, and the high pour is too slow for a half-boiled society that rewards hasty relationships and careers.
Bring the good soy milk back for the patience it demands. Bring back the quiet rebukes it offers each morning, telling us to slow down long enough to taste it properly. If only we aren’t so afraid of falling behind and perpetually left with a faint discomfort we cannot quite name.
Da Bing (Sesame Flatbread)
Like soy milk, the flatbread came in sweet and savory versions.
Making the sweet flatbread is a simple alchemy. Mixing sugar with a bit of flour gives you the filling (the extra flour kept the sugar from leaking and scorching your skin when biting into it). Then, flatten the dough into a round shape, brush it with syrup, and sprinkle generously with sesame seeds. There was also a version with sweet red bean paste. The edges were crimped like waves to prevent the filling from bursting when heated. During the years of scarcity white sugar sometimes ran short, so you could bite into a Da Bing and find coarse brown sugar crystals inside.
Another relative was the so-called “Tiger Claw.” Sugar was kneaded into and brushed on top of the round dough, which was then scored with three equal cuts radiating from the center, like claws. When baked, it bloomed open, and truly resembled a tiger’s palm. Traditionally sold in the afternoon, it was thought too indulgent for breakfast. Recently, some old shops have revived it as a nostalgic specialty.
Savory ones, again, required more labor. The dough was rolled and coiled into a long strip (perhaps to resemble a sleeping dragon), brushed with oil, marbled with salt and scallions, and then flattened into circles that, in a previous life, were squares and rugged like ancient roof tiles.
They were baked in a small clay oven, the exterior of which was sealed in a layer of thick yellow mud for insulation. The raw flatbread was slapped onto the inner walls of the oven where the charcoal glowed. Soon, once the fragrance wafted out, the Shi Fu would bring it out with tongs: scallion flecks showed green and sesame seeds gleamed like pearls against the golden crust, with the undersides mottled and charred like the shell of a turtle. One bite in, and the crust shattered crisply with a defiant snap.
My grandparents used to say that if a single sesame seed fell into a crack in the table, you ought to shake the entire table just to free it and then savor it. Wasting a speck of anything wasn’t really an option, so I learned to maximize the ROI on my toothpaste at a young age.
There is a quiet dignity in this craft. You could often spot a Shi Fu by his smooth and bare forearms, the hair singed away by the heat as each flatbread was slapped onto the oven walls. Eventually, iron trough ovens lined with firebricks replaced the mud pits, and long paddles saved the Shi Fus from thrusting their arms into flames.
Older purists in the city often grumble that the flavor died with the danger, but frankly, if the cost of a slightly less smoky bread is a Shi Fu keeping his arm hair, I’d say the trade-off is more than fair. In the alleyways of Jing’an or Huangpu, there is a pervasive belief that the Shi Fu’s sweat is the secret ingredient. When the mud pits were replaced by iron troughs, many mourned the disappearance of struggle and even fetishized the labor we once fought to escape. Because of this, in some touristy areas, an elder flipping Sheng Jian Bao on a blackened cast-iron skillet with hands gnarled like ginger roots can trigger a city-wide pilgrimage.
This voyeuristic hunger for authentic struggle is outdated, and has birthed a “nostalgia complex” in the restaurant industry. Since those from “Old Shanghai” refuse to believe a clean, well-lit kitchen can produce a proper Da Bing, businesses have learned to perform the “old ways” to replicate the atmosphere of a Lao ZiHao (time-honored brand). We see shops in high-end malls purposefully designed to look “shabby,” with exposed bricks, old sepia photos and faux-soot on the walls and staff dressed in period-accurate undershirts. Are we really just in there to buy a flatbread? Not really. It feels like we are buying a curated memory of “scarcity” only to consume it safely from the comfort of a world with air conditioning and digital payments. We have outsourced our labor to machines so we can live our lives, yet we still want to indulge in the image of manual toil?
As a side note, the frantic shaking of the table for a fallen sesame seed has also lost its original meaning. While the older generation’s obsession with “not wasting a speck” was born of genuine caloric desperation, it has evolved into a performative thrift. You’d see a wealthy patriarch insist on taking home a single leftover chicken wing in a plastic bag—perhaps a vestigial reflex from the years of brown sugar crystals and ration coupons—only to drive home in a car that costs more than the restaurant.
We have one foot in the future and another in a famine-haunted past. We industrialized the kitchen so hard to escape the back-breaking work of the old days, but also decided to spend the rest of the century chasing the ghost of a manually slapped dough and recreating a theater of labor.
You Tiao (Fried Doughstick)
If the Da Bing was the sturdy foundation of a classic Shanghai breakfast, the You Tiao is its flighty companion. The long, golden baton of aerated dough could be eaten alone, dipped in soy milk, or, for the truly decadent, slathered in sweet bean sauce and wrapped in a warm blanket of sticky rice. In Hangzhou and some southern parts of China, they are known as Youzha Hui, a phonetic jab at a traitor named Qin Hui. Even without a historical deep dive, there is a grim satisfaction in the fact that an entire nation has spent centuries breakfasting on the symbolic deep-frying of a villain.
In the past, those dough sticks were honest and well-measured. Inspectors used to patrol the stalls with actual rulers, as if they were measuring the caliber of artillery shells. If a dough stick came up short, the vendor was fined–quality control back then was more of a matter of civic pride and a communal agreement on what constituted a fair morning’s meal. Some shops sold “aged” You Tiao made by re-frying the unsold sticks from the day before. They were crisper and good with sesame paste.
As the city grew and the traditional flatbread stalls declined, You Tiao fell to outside vendors. To satisfy a modern public that demands bigger, crispier, and faster, some vendors turned to a perverse kind of kitchen magic: adding laundry detergent to the frying oil to create a magnificent froth that forced the dough to puff into an impossibly light, golden version of itself. Great optics, but eating it is really a gastrointestinal gamble.
The scarcity of food in the past has been replaced by a modern scarcity of trust. Dinner tables have become minefields where we are forced to navigate a landscape of fish shimmering with carcinogenic malachite green and noodles filled with borax.
Even when we try to escape the street stalls for the perceived safety of big-brand “heritage” chains, we fail. Yes, this is about the Xibei restaurant scandal, which felt like a collective slap in the face to anyone searching for the “Taste of home.” Here was a massive chain charging premium prices under the banner of “traditional, handmade” authenticity, only for the public to discover that their “hand-rubbed” grains were pre-made products of factory processing and chemical shortcuts.
Are we paying tax on authenticity now, because why are we charged five times the price for a story that turns out to be marketing scam? We all recognize the golden hue of the doughstick and the hiss of the oil, but what about the ethics of the hand that fried it? We don’t need to measure the dough sticks with a ruler anymore to ensure customers got their money’s worth, but we also don’t need lab reports on them just to make sure whatever tradition we hope to keep isn’t a slow-acting poison.
Ci Fan (Sticky Rice Rolls)
Finally, there was the Ci Fan, a blend of sweet/sticky and regular rice soaked overnight and steamed in wooden tubs. When the lid was lifted, the steam smelled like straw and warm grain. A proper roll had to be soft but resilient; I remember watching Shi Fus who could wrap a You Tiao with just two quick scoops of rice, pressing it into a tight, neat baton that held its heat all the way to school or work. Sometimes, they’d steam red beans with the rice. The beans would stay whole but bleed just enough color to tint the surrounding grains.
The standard routine was two rice rolls and a single fried dough stick. If you had the time, you’d wait for a You Tiao fresh from the oil before having it wrapped, ensuring the center stayed crisp against the chewy rice. But now, they’ve replaced the fresh dough sticks with pork floss or bits of stale, pre-packaged crunch. If you ask for a fresh You Tiao inside, the person behind the counter often hits you with “We don’t do that here.” The old Shi Fus have retired, and the street stalls that used to anchor every neighborhood have largely faded away. The epic era of the Big Four has mostly come to an end.
The fragmentation of the breakfast table is perhaps the most honest reflection of the city today. We’ve moved from a time when these four items were a unified, non-negotiable set to an era where they exist as isolated survivors, often stripped of the labor that made them whole. It’s a strange trade-off to have more food security in the abstract, but less connection with the people and the craft that feed us.