Despite a food-additive scare involving the use of bleaching agents in some white spring roll (runbing, 潤餅) wrappers, consumers were willing to wait in long lines at a store in Taoyuan’s Nanmen Market on the eve of Tomb Sweeping Day to buy freshly made wrappers.
One tradition on Tomb Sweeping Day is for family members to get together to make and eat runbing, a non-fried variety of spring roll.
A woman surnamed Wu (吳) was one of the customers waiting in line at the store at 10pm on Saturday night.
She said the store owner had not slept for two days because of the urgent demand for freshly made wrappers ahead of the holiday.
The store owner had also raised the price of freshly made wrappers from NT$120 per 600g to NT$200, hoping to encourage people to either buy less or buy frozen wrappers, which were marked at the original price, Wu said.
She said she told the owner that she wanted to buy 4.8kg of the freshly made wrappers, no matter how much he charged, because that was what she needed to feed her entire family.
Wu ended up waiting in line until midnight and did not arrive home until 2am on Sunday.
Wu was not the only consumer undaunted by concerns about additives used in making runbing “skins,” as lines were seen at many shops and stores selling them.
An essay by Taiwanese gourmand and food writer Lucille Han (韓良露), The Story of Run Bing, says runbing can be eaten on any major family holiday, including Lunar New Year’s Eve.
“Eating spring rolls is basically a family matter, and normally you would not eat them if you have only three to five people,” Han wrote. “It is a feast that you have when you have a large family gathering. People make their own spring rolls. Instead of sitting around a table, people leave the table with the runbing they have made, find whatever place they can to sit and eat and talk with relatives at the same time.”
Han said that people in Taiwan often eat spring rolls about noon on Tomb Sweeping Day, either at a cemetery where they have been cleaning the family tombs or at home after they finish their tomb-sweeping duties.
She wrote that there are different stories about the origin of the spring rolls. One story said that they were invented to worship ancestors on Tomb Sweeping Day when the Mongolians invaded southern China, using roll-out dough wrappers and leftover vegetables.
Another story credited the creation to a Madame Lee (李) in the Ming Dynasty, who wanted something quick to make for her husband, because he was in the military and could not eat meals at regular times.
Runbing ingredients reflect regional differences, Han wrote. She said that her mother and grandmother, who were both from Tainan, would put almost 20 dishes of ingredients out, including cabbage, red carrots, bean sprouts, leeks, celery, cilantro, snow peas, lima beans, strips of egg, shredded bean curd, shredded pork and peanut powder.
According to Han, people in Tongan, in China’s Fujian Province, place a bed of oily sticky rice on the wrapper before adding vegetables, while across the province in Quanzhou, some people like fried oysters in their runbing.
Ethnic Chinese in Singapore make a small opening at one end of a runbing so they can pour in a bit of the stock used to cook the vegetables, giving their spring rolls more flavor and moisture, she wrote.
Former Landis Taipei Group chairman Stanley Yen (嚴長壽) said a standard list of runbing ingredients is not necessary, because different ingredients allow for creativity.
“If you want to give a spring roll a crispy and crunchy texture, why not put fried shrimp rolls inside as well?” he said.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods