Beijingers laugh proudly as their friends from other parts of China find with surprise that the famous "filled sausage" (guan chang) is not a real sausage, at least not one judged by the traditional meaning of the word "sausage."

Unlike the Cantonese or Sichuan sausage, Beijing's "filled sausage" has nothing to do with meat fillings. It is merely a mix of starch and water, which is steamed and rubbed into the shape of a sausage, and sliced, fried and dipped into garlic juice when eaten.

But in almost a mystic way cooks endow it with the taste of meat. The fried slices have crispy surfaces while their inner parts are soft, tender and a little sweet.

The 50-year-old Fengnian (Harvest) Restaurant allegedly offers the best "filled sausage" in the Chinese capital. It covers about 12 square metres in the Longfusi Street in the old part of Beijing, where restaurants cluster selling local foods.

"When I was a child my mother often took me here. We had to wait in long queues for a share of the fried sausage, and to stand against the wall with a plate in hand as we ate. It was always crowded," said Xu Tao, 29, a computer engineer, who was enjoying a regular piece priced at 3.5 yuan (US$0.4) on a nostalgic pilgrimage to the restaurant.

The "filled sausage" has been popular in Beijing since the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), according to historical documents. Vendors then walked around the city with sausages, a frying pan and a stove carried on a shoulder pole.

In the early 20th century, there were about six small restaurants in a hutong called Houmenqiao by the Shichahai Lake at the centre of the city, which offered "filled sausages" of different flavours. Labourers, vendors, rickshaw pullers and students swarmed there at night to have sausages with liquor.

The most famous restaurants in the hutong were the 200-year-old Fuxingju serving traditional Beijing sausage, and the Heyizhai established in 1927, which offered renovated "sausages" with a mix of wheat flour, water and more than 10 spices stuffed into pig intestines.

The renovated sausages were popular in the early part of the 20th century, but they can no longer be found in the city," said Yang Fengqi, manager of Fengnian Restaurant.

The restaurants in the hutong became State-owned like other private businesses in the 1950s and disappeared one after another in the following two decades.

And the popularity of "filled sausage," like that of most other local foods, lessened in the face of Sichuan dishes, Cantonese dim-sums and foods from all parts of China that are pouring into the capital.

Xu said he makes sausages two or three times a year now and came to the Fengnian Restaurant only when guiding his friends from other parts of the country on tours of the old Beijing. "I have moved out of my hutong and said goodbye to the kind of life symbolized by the 'filled sausage,' like many of my childhood friends," he said.

Source:China Daily