Fuqi feipian Period BOrigin theory DVerified

Fuqi Feipian is a Chengdu cold dish of beef offal (niuza), boiled and sliced thin, then dressed in a mala sauce of chili oil (hongyou) and Sichuan pepper. It is one of the liangban dishes, the dressed plates that Chinese cooking serves cold.

In late-Qing Chengdu, open-air stalls in the Shaocheng district and the Hui Muslim quarters sold a cold dish of cheap beef offal, boiled, shaved thin and dressed in mala chili oil. The sellers were street vendors whose names have not come down to us, and the dish also went by folk names such as bobo niurou and liangtouwang. Beef offal, the main ingredient, was a local ingredient that had long been on hand. The chili that gives the sauce its heat had, according to food historians, been taken up in Sichuan by the mid-eighteenth century, around 1749.

In the 1930s a married couple, Guo Chaohua and Zhang Tianzheng, took up this street dish and reworked it, and in 1933 they opened a shop at Banbianqiao. The name Fuqi Feipian, and the form the dish has today, were settled at that time.

'Fuqi Feipian was invented in the 1930s by a married couple, Guo Chaohua and Zhang Tianzheng': this is the widely told origin story. The Guos, it goes, found a clever way to sell beef scraps from a street stall, and when a merchant among their customers presented them with a gilded signboard, they took the occasion to change feipian (廢片), 'discarded scraps', to its homophone feipian (肺片), 'lung slices'. And so Fuqi Feipian, 'the couple's lung slices', was born. It makes an appealing story for the origin of a shop.

Whether the dish itself was the couple's invention, though, is another matter, and the sources do not tell it that way. A cold plate of cheap beef offal, boiled, thinly sliced and dressed in mala chili oil, was already being sold by nameless street vendors in late-Qing Chengdu. Cold beef-offal dishes of this kind, sold in the Shaocheng and Hui Muslim quarters, have also come down under folk names such as bobo niurou and liangtouwang. Xin Chengdu (New Chengdu), a book published in 1943, records 'beef lung slices / panpan niurou'; of the records that can be identified as referring to this dish, it is the oldest. A report by the Chinese news outlet The Paper (Pengpai Xinwen), tracing the dish back to its birthplace, likewise tells of its earlier life on late-Qing street stalls.

So the order runs like this. The dish began on the streets of late-Qing Chengdu, where a mala beef-offal cold plate was already on sale. In the 1930s the Guo couple took it up and reworked it, opened a shop at Banbianqiao in 1933, and, together with the tale of turning 'scraps' into 'lung slices', fixed the name Fuqi Feipian in public use. The couple were real, and they were the ones who made the name famous. But what they did was not to conjure a new dish from nothing; it was to polish a plate the streets already held and to give it a name. The inventor tale fails because it does not fit this earlier history. The moment a name first appears and the moment a dish is born are not the same.