Dare to Eat Fly Heads?

Peculiar Foods with Strange Names

Part of visiting a foreign land is exploring its culinary offerings. For some travelers it can’t get exotic enough, and Taiwan certainly has its fair share of unusual snack food options. But don’t be fooled by some of the strange names you might see at night-market stands and on restaurant menus. The food is sometimes not exactly what the name might lead you to believe.

Coffin Bread

This is a well-known savory treat from Tainan City in south Taiwan. It was created in the 1950s by a restaurant owner surnamed Xu, who was asked by friends to create a Western-Eastern combo snack. He came up with what he called “Chicken Liver Plank,” a deep-fried thick toast, hollowed out and filled up with chicken liver and other morsels, with a thin layer of toast on top. Looking at the box-like shape, the delighted friends gave it a different name, “Coffin Bread” – the name that would stick. This treat is widely sold today, the filling usually a mix of roasted flour, stock, milk, onion, chicken, and octopus.

Nutritious Sandwich

While Tainan in the south is known for its Coffin Bread, Keelung City in the far north has its own Western-influenced snack food treat, the Nutritious Sandwich. Its name is somewhat double-misleading: first, unlike a Western sandwich, the bread has an oblong shape and is deep-fried; second, while the treat is rich in calories, the nutritional value is not especially impressive. The sandwich – filled with ham, soy-braised egg, cucumber, and tomato – was created in an attempt to satisfy American soldiers on R&R in Taiwan during the Korean and Vietnam wars who landed at the port of Keelung and were craving food from their homeland.

Cat Mouse Noodles

This is the name of a small restaurant in Changhua City, established over a century ago, and also the name of one of the main dishes on its menu. Do they serve cat and mouse meat? Of course not! The restaurant was named after the son of the restaurant’s first-generation proprietor. He was a small but nimble boy, which earned him the nickname “Little Mouse.” Father and son also happened to be born in the Year of the Mouse. The restaurant’s name contains the Chinese characters for cat and mouse because of the way “mouse” is pronounced in the Minnan dialect. Coincidently, the Mandarin pronunciation of the combined characters for cat and mouse, maoshu , is also pretty close to the pronunciation of the English word “mouse.” The Cat Mouse Noodles on the menu is a simple noodle soup with a shrimp ball, a mushroom meatball, and a chicken roll.

Fly Heads

Fly Heads is a simple stir-fried dish that, rest assured, contains no flying-insect bits. The dish was created by the chef at Wang Cheng Laoma, a restaurant in Taipei serving Sichuan cuisine. Not wanting to discard unused garlic chives, the chef came up with this idea: chop up the chives, mix them with ground pork and black beans, and add copious amounts of garlic, like a Sichuan chef would do. Originally meant as a simple dish to be enjoyed with white rice by his staff, the dish was received so well that it soon made it onto the menu, to become one of the must-order dishes at the restaurant. The “fly heads” are of course the black beans in the dish.