飯糰Taiwanese Rice Roll (Fan Tuan)

A vendor presses freshly steamed sticky rice flat on a sheet of plastic wrap, layers on twice-fried youtiao cut into short pieces, then adds pork floss, salted radish, pickled mustard greens and often a braised egg, and squeezes the whole thing into a plump oval. The rice is either white or purple; purple rice has more bite and is less sticky, and some stalls use a five-grain mix.

It is wrapped in plastic film and a thin bag so you can eat it on the move, and a cup of soy milk is the usual companion. A sweet version swaps the savory fillings for sugar and ground peanuts; the Ministry of Education's Hokkien dictionary names both sets of fillings in its entry: fried dough, pork floss and dried radish, or sugar and peanut powder.

Nobody can point to a single inventor. The commonly told account traces the Taiwanese rice roll to the Jiangnan region around Shanghai, where cifantuan, sticky rice wrapped around fried dough, is a traditional breakfast. When it became an everyday sight on Taiwanese streets is less certain, and no firm documentation turns up: according to City Magazine, one account places its rise in the Japanese colonial period, when miners with no refrigerator at home are said to have wrapped the previous day's leftover vegetables in leftover rice and carried it to work in bamboo leaves. That is circulating lore rather than a historical record, so treat it as 'is said to'.

A Taipei fan tuan vendor once told a reporter that the old version was simply warm sticky rice around pickled mustard greens and salted radish, wrapped in lotus leaf rather than plastic. That is one vendor's memory, not a historical record. Today's rolls are far more varied, with some shops offering more than thirty fillings, from cheese and bacon to corn and tuna, and local habits differ too: City Magazine notes that people in Yilan like to splash theirs with soy sauce or chili oil and add a fried egg. It is not the same thing as the cold, triangular Japanese-style onigiri of the convenience store: the Taiwanese roll is typically made with hot sticky rice, the Japanese one with cold rice wrapped in seaweed.