Jian Bing: Background information when reading Land of Milk and Honey

Jian Bing

This article relates to Land of Milk and Honey

In C Pam Zhang's Land of Milk and Honey, which takes place in a fictional near-future of worsening climate change and severely reduced biodiversity, the main character chooses to work as an elite chef for a wealthy employer on an isolated mountain in Italy rather than give up access to the ingredients she loves that are rapidly vanishing from mainstream society. However, she experiences doubt about this choice when she takes an uncharacteristic trip into the smog-ridden depths of Milan, where a Chinatown vendor serves her a reimagined version of the beloved street food jian bing (pronounced "JEN-bing"), cobbled together from the scant forms of nourishment still available to people of ordinary means. It reminds the narrator of her childhood with her Chinese mother, and awakens her to the possibility of innovating cuisine to accommodate a more limited ingredient profile.

Jian bing can contain a variety of elements but typically consists of a crepe layered with a beaten egg, bao cui (a type of fried cracker), cilantro, scallions, and sauces, such as huang dou jiang (a popular soybean paste). A breakfast food, it is served folded over multiple times, making for an easily transportable meal of varying flavors and textures.

Jian bing is generally cooked and eaten on the street, but food blogger Wei Guo shares an approachable recipe on Red House Spice for those who want to try making it at home. While the usual batter is made of mung bean flour as well as white flour, Guo suggests that a combination of whole grain and all-purpose will also work, and explains that other types of flour (such as cornmeal or soybean) are sometimes used instead of mung bean in China.

While this recipe makes jian bing more accessible to people living outside of China who may find it difficult to track down the most commonly used ingredients, the Chinatown vendor in Land of Milk and Honey must adapt to an entirely different set of circumstances. In the world of Zhang's novel, mung-protein flour is actually plentiful in the West — formulated as an ideal food capable of surviving Earth's conditions, "a miracle of nutritional science, engineered from plants that tolerated dark."

Zhang's narrator watches the vendor add sauces, sausage, and egg substitute to the bing. When she tastes it, she guesses that the batter includes mung-protein flour, that one of the sauces is brewed from fermented beans, and that the sausage contains soy. However, she fails to correctly identify an additional mystery ingredient, which she believes to be peanut butter — remarking, "My mom liked peanut butter on her bing, too" — before the vendor shows her that it is hazelnuts "padded with almonds, mung starch, stabilizers, substitute sweeteners."

This situation exemplifies one of the recurring themes of Zhang's novel, the fluidity of the concepts of abundance and scarcity. In this future, mung products are more easily attainable than many others, making jian bing not just possible but logical to sell on the streets of Italy — with Italian hazelnut butter, of course.

Jian bing, photo by WFan (CC-BY-3.0)

Filed under Places, Cultures & Identities

This "beyond the book article" relates to Land of Milk and Honey. It originally ran in October 2023 and has been updated for the September 2024 paperback edition. Go to magazine.