The third winner in our Adventures Start at Stanfords competition is Leah Eades! Leah shares her memories of trying the more unusual local speciality street food while visiting Furong Jie in the Shandong province of China.
You can smell Furong Jie before you see it.
Ok, you can hear it too. And the sight of people cluttering the pavements clutching their steaming hot jianbings is also a bit of a giveaway. But it’s the smell that really draws you in: at once sharp and bitter, sometimes smoky, imbued with the oil of a thousand fryings, and sweetened with azuki bean paste, it’s as if all the smells of China have been crammed into the one sprawling street.
Furong Jie: the place to go if you want a crash course in Jinan streetfood. Although capital of the industrial Shandong province, and just a few hours south of Beijing,Jinan doesn’t appear much on the tourist radar. But perhaps it should; for any visiting foodie,Shandong’s Lu cuisine is the perfect introduction to Chinese cooking. Not too spicy like southern Szechuan, and lacking the softness of Jiangsu cuisine, what we know as “Chinese food” was mostly cooked up in Shandong’s kitchens.
Restaurants are fine once in a while, but if you want to see all life crammed into one place, it’s got to be street food. Or so my friend and Shandong-native Daisy explains to me as she leads me through the busy streets, pointing out the various appetisers that are frying, smoking and sizzling all around us. “Is it a… mushroom?” I ask, as she waves her hand across a pile of something distinctly slimy.
“No,” she replies, before adding casually “It’s beef tendon!”
“What about this?” I ask, stopping to examine a pot of something simmering that has the look of fried vegetables but the smell of sausage.
“That’s… what is the word? The tube inside the cow’s stomach?”
“The intestine?”
“Yes!”
It’s then that I come across the skewered golden cicadas. I shriek and the woman barbecuing them glowers at me.
“It’s alright, they’re a gift,” Daisy reassures me, but as my eyes move from the vendor’s offended face to the sightless faces of the insects I can’t help but feel torn.
Such delicacy does not last long in Furong Jie however, and soon Daisy is standing there grinning, cicada-laden stick in hand. They look… crunchy. “You must try it,” she coaxes me. “It is traditional Chinese food. Most delicious. It will be an adventure.”
Who can resist that siren call of adventure? I close my eyes and gulp it down.
There’s still time to enter our Adventures Start at Stanfords competition to win a £50 Stanfords voucher. We will be choosing the final winner this Friday 13th September – good luck!
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