Cold silken tofu scattered with fine spring onion: the Chinese dish that became a byword for honesty
Origin: Jiangnan & Eastern China
From the journey of Spring Onion.
There is a Chinese phrase, yī qīng èr bái (一清二白), one green and two white, which means transparently honest, with nothing whatever concealed. It describes this dish. That a plate of tofu and spring onion became the language's standard image for probity is a fair measure of how deeply the combination sits in the culture, and of how plain it is: white tofu, white shank, green leaf, and nothing else to hide behind. It is the simplest thing in the Chinese cold-dish repertoire and correspondingly unforgiving. There is no cooking, no browning, no reduction, and nowhere for a poor ingredient to conceal itself. Bad tofu tastes chalky and sour. Tired spring onion tastes of nothing. The dish is a straightforward test of both. What makes the good version good is a set of small decisions. The tofu should be silken and very cold. It is not diced but broken, or cut into large blocks and left to sit, because the fractured surface holds the dressing where a clean cut sheds it. The spring onion is sliced as finely as the knife allows and scattered rather than mixed, so the first mouthful is onion and the last is not. The traditional addition is pídàn, the preserved duck egg with its translucent amber white and dark green yolk, which turns the dish into pídàn dòufu and is how it most often appears in restaurants. Sesame oil, light soy, and sometimes a spoonful of the crumbled fried scallion from a batch of scallion oil complete it. It is eaten cold in hot weather, as a first dish, and it takes about four minutes to make.
Silken tofu, not firm. The whole texture of the dish depends on it, and firm tofu makes something quite pleasant that is not this. Slice the spring onion with the sharpest knife you have. A blunt blade crushes rather than cuts and the onion weeps and tastes harsh. Adding the preserved duck egg makes pídàn dòufu, the restaurant version. The eggs are sold at Chinese grocers and keep for months; their flavour is deep and faintly ammoniac and they are worth trying at least once. A spoonful of the spent fried onion from a batch of scallion oil, crumbled over the top, is an excellent addition and connects the dish to cōng yóu bàn miàn. Eat it the moment it is dressed. This is not a dish that waits.
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