"The surface is really rough and uneven, so when you pick it up, it just feels good in your hands," Chen said. (Wrapping it in a plastic bag helps, but only so much.) Proper roujiamo is filled to bursting, regardless of the potential consequences for one's clothes and dry-cleaning budget. Despite its comparison to a hamburger, it's notoriously hazardous to eat on the go. To be sure, roujiamo is far from the perfect food.
And even in bustling southern Chinese cities like Shenzhen, it's often possible to find a roujiamo vendor somewhere deep within the local food courts, albeit with the pork simmering away in an electric slow cooker rather than over an open fire.
Its enduring popularity has spawned numerous nationwide chains such as Zhang Family Ziwu Road Roujiamo (子午路张记肉夹馍) and Bingz Crispy Burger (西少爷). But roujiamo is still much-loved in China, and it's in little danger of disappearing. Sadly, thanks to rapidly rising standards of living and government regulation, the more rustic styles of roujiamo have largely been chased out of the alleyways of Chinese cities. Today, in a modern nod to simplicity and expedience, it's often cooked to blazing-hot crispness in a pan. Baijimo was traditionally made by sticking partially leavened dough against the wall of a wood-fired, Central Asian-style oven. Sitting some 130km northwest of Xi'an, the town was once a horse-resupply post along China's equivalent of the Pony Express system, which ran far west to the most distant reaches of the empire. The flatbread bun, called baijimo (白吉馍), takes its name from what is today known as Beiji township. Once the stock is made, thick slices of pork belly take their turn in the pot, simmering for hours. A special premium is placed on "aged" stock (陈年老汁) – the most legendary examples of which are purported to have been lovingly tended to and bubbling away for decades, if not centuries. First comes the lazhi (腊汁), or stock, which includes a list of spices that reads like the cargo manifest for a Silk Road caravan: ginger, star anise, cassia, Sichuan peppercorn, loquat and two medicinal herbs called Fructus Amomi and Lanxangia tsaoko (all originally domesticated in China) dried tangerine peel (likely domesticated in the Indo-Burma region) white pepper, sand ginger and cardamom (from South India) cumin (from Western Asia) and nutmeg and clove (from the Spice Islands of Indonesia), to name just the most common ones.
The introduction into China of Central Asian-style flatbreads, like the kind used in roujiamo, is often credited to Ban Chao, a Chinese general who spent more than 30 years battling a confederation of nomadic tribes during the 1st Century to regain control of the farthest western reaches of China.Įvery family has its own roujiamo recipe, but there are some constants. The meat preparation used to make the filling for roujiamo is traditionally traced back to the Warring States period (475 to 221 BCE). Since 202 BCE, Xi'an has been both the eastern terminus of the Silk Road and the capital for 13 more-or-less successive Chinese dynasties. The sandwich is closely associated with the north-central city of Xi'an in Shaanxi province. Cooked and sold in the elements, it's a street food that comes wreathed in an aura of ancient dynasties, the Silk Road and far-off desert frontiers. In the fading light of that winter afternoon, roujiamo – the crunch of the bun, the meltingly tender pork with its scalding burst of juice and the bracing tang of coriander – was a revelation. I gingerly peeled back the edges of the bag and took a bite. When he handed it over, wrapped in a plastic bag, it was so hot that it scalded my fingers. Next, he used a cleaver to mince the pork together with what seemed like an entire fist's-worth of coriander, added a dollop of rich broth from the pot, and wielded the cleaver once more to deftly slice open a crisp, hand-sized freshly baked flatbread and nestle the glistening pile of meat inside. From a bubbling, soot-black cauldron suspended over a blazing puck of coal, he ladled out long-braised morsels of pork and plunked them onto a tree-stump chopping block. There, I stumbled across a weather-beaten itinerant vendor, braced against the chill in a thick padded-cotton jacket and fur hat, making roujiamo to order off the back of a three-wheeled bicycle cart. My first encounter with roujiamo (肉夹馍) was on an early winter's day a quarter of a century ago, in a bitterly cold, wind-scoured Beijing alleyway.
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