Any situation like this, where a food has only made tentative (or phantom?) entreaties onto American soil, and where the majority of information on it exists in a foreign language, makes demarcating origin points nearly impossible. With Sino-Tibetan languages, the perils of transliteration only render this more confusing; earlier or concurrent versions of Golden Sand could be hiding under our noses under one or more different titles. One lead seemed to indicate that the dish was actually the same thing as Typhoon Shelter Crab, which seems to be enjoying similar popularity both in China and now stateside. The origin of TSC is a mouthful in itself, a reference to an actual warren of storm shelters located in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay (hence another moniker, “Under the Bridge Spicy Crab”), but most recipes seems to contain no egg and, as far as I can tell, the only thing the two have in common is the heap of fried onion and garlic in the mix. To complicate things further, in Cantonese, this mound seems to go by the specific label of ‘Golden Sand’ at times, which introduces the idea that there could be several competing dishes operating under the same general name.
China is a big place, one whose seemingly infinite variety of regional sub-cuisines is further complicated by hastening modernization and circuitous internal emigration. I’m still nowhere near finished working through the ever-expanding options offered at Chinese restaurants in New York, and the growing infusion of Northern and Western immigrants into the city’s composite cuisine only makes attempting to do so more of a fool’s errand. There’s also the additional difficulty that, even if something appears to be unavailable in Flushing or Sunset Park, it may just be under-reported (no one can check every menu, especially when some aren’t even entirely in English) or operating under a different name, which I suspect may be the case with the exotic delicacy sometimes known as Golden Sand. I was put on to this stuff by Carolyn Phillips’ fantastic Madame Huang’s Kitchen; in short, it’s a rich combination of salted egg yolks, garlic and onion, which get wok fried, then joined in the pan by any variety of edible matter, usually vegetables or seafood. I came up empty finding this dish on local menus, and was further stumped trying to figure out a regional designation for it. There is a dim sum spot in Manhattan Chinatown called Golden Sand, but its website contains no direct reference to the food itself. The author of this recipe seems to believe its Yunnanese in origin, although I think it’s just as likely that they’re referring more to the corn used than the Golden Sand. ‘Jinsha Yumi,’ the Chinese name employed, leads to a whole different branch of Google results, also spread throughout the entire southern maritime region, although the title may help narrow things down a bit. This locates Golden Sand as far afield as Chongqing, and while ‘Yumi’ is Mandarin for corn, ’Jinsha’ appears to point to the local label for the upper course of the Yangtze. It apparently means “Gold Dust (or Gold Sand!) River,” given because of the sporadic appearance of alluvial gold powder in the water. This could be an important clue. Or not. The Jinsha runs all the way down from Qinghai to Yunnan (i.e., the entire Western border of what’s traditionally/culturally considered China) and while the dish may have been title after the river, it’s just as possible that this was a preparation conceived elsewhere and then given a new name to correspond to a local landscape feature. It seems most likely of all that salted egg preparations are nothing new, and that Golden Sand, whether birthed in the West of the country or somewhere else entirely, is merely the latest fad appellation for something much older. Backing up this theory is the fact that some recipes drop the sand mentions entirely, referring to the dish’s golden elements only as ‘Salted Egg Yolk.’ Any situation like this, where a food has only made tentative (or phantom?) entreaties onto American soil, and where the majority of information on it exists in a foreign language, makes demarcating origin points nearly impossible. With Sino-Tibetan languages, the perils of transliteration only render this more confusing; earlier or concurrent versions of Golden Sand could be hiding under our noses under one or more different titles. One lead seemed to indicate that the dish was actually the same thing as Typhoon Shelter Crab, which seems to be enjoying similar popularity both in China and now stateside. The origin of TSC is a mouthful in itself, a reference to an actual warren of storm shelters located in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay (hence another moniker, “Under the Bridge Spicy Crab”), but most recipes seems to contain no egg and, as far as I can tell, the only thing the two have in common is the heap of fried onion and garlic in the mix. To complicate things further, in Cantonese, this mound seems to go by the specific label of ‘Golden Sand’ at times, which introduces the idea that there could be several competing dishes operating under the same general name. I also wonder if there's any inherent connection to a dish like Singaporean Cereal Prawns, which shares a similarly sporadic, flaxen breading, rich egg-inflected batter and use of curry leaves as many Golden Sand preparations. There’s also a resort in Penang, Malaysia called “Golden Sands,” and while I doubt it's old enough to have been the source of any famous dishes, the name further speaks to the evocative nature of the word pairing in the region (and everywhere else, I guess). Whatever the case, I at least needed to taste Golden Sand for myself, and thus set down to preparing my own approximation. I unfortunately don’t share Phillips' fondness for bitter melon, and so combined her later post about brining eggs with this recipe to whip up my own batch of tailor-made Golden Sand. I was unable to find duck eggs, settling for ordinary chicken ones, and the prospect of an even dozen brining away in a jar encouraged me to pursue other salted-yolk-related projects, perhaps exacerbated by the fact that the eggs required three weeks of inactive prep time. For the other six yolks, I decided to pursue another Madame Huang recipe, tackling the complex task of assembling the Hakka variant of the famous Zongzi rice flour bundles. This itself ended up encompassing a few side projects, most notably the boiling of peanuts, which I managed to find during a trawl through Chinatown at the end of the autumn season, happening upon the single stand selling the raw green variety (as opposed to the much more common pre-roasted) just before entering the Grand Ave. subway station. For the peanuts I used two different recipes, one Hawaiian-inspired, one Chinese. The former were used as a snack, the latter went into the Zongzi, along with a panoply of Chinese supermarket finds: pressed tofu, gluten puffs, tofu skin and fried shallots, in addition to some elusive dried toon leaves, which I was unable to track down. I also wasn’t able to acquire bamboo leaves, and instead subbed in some banana ones I had on reserve in the freezer. All this came together during one frantic Sunday cooking session, in which I was forced to modify the recipe slightly due to the differing texture of the banana leaves, settling for smaller treasure balls with the leaves sacheted around them. Even with this modification, the so-called tamales were fantastic, pliable balls of rice putty with jet-black, intensely flavorful insides, a riotous explosion of tastes and textures. The golden sand was also delicious, - perhaps a tad too rich, its eggy, salty character at least somewhat tempered by the corn I’d used to soak up the rest of the eggs, in a nod to this mysterious dish’s possible Yunnanese roots. A good meal, all in all, but I honestly think I had more fun on the Golden Sand trail than in the actual eating of it. This helps explain, once again, exactly why this is an informational blog and not a cooking one.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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