What We Ate In Taiwan, Part 7 - The Unique Juoncun Cuisine

When you think about any particular type of cuisine, it's always the food associated with a particular racial, ethnic or geographic group.  Then there's Taiwanese Juancun cuisine which can't be pigeonholed into national, racial or ethnic terms.   When the Nationalist Chinese government evacuated to Taiwan in the late 1940s with an unknown number (estimates are all over the place) of its soldiers and their dependents, they arrived at a locale that did not have the conventional infrastructure to house the new arrivals.  Furthermore, the new arrivals thought they were only temporarily stationed in Taiwan, until they were able to return to their Mainland homes.  Indeed, I still recall hearing in the news about military "drills" in Taiwan where soldiers were falsely told that the invasion to retake the homeland was about to begin.  

Juancun were villages built to house the dependents of Chinese Nationalist soldiers pending the return to the Mainland.  As villagers bided their time until they could go back home, they salved their homesickness by cooking the foods they remembered from their homes.  But the residents of the Juancun originated from all parts of Mainland China.  Consequently, the food of these villages evolved into something different from that of any particular location on the mainland.  As such I am particularly grateful for Supera/Signet Tours (www.superatours.com) taking us to a traditional Juoncun restaurant

The meal began with cabbage soup in a most interesting cooking/serving vessel.  The food at this restaurant trended more to Northeast Chinese food which might have been indicative of the makeup of the nearby Juancun.  This is the sour cabbage soup which is identified with that region.

Here's the beef roll and onion pancake.  The beef roll comes with something like mayonnaise instead of the hoisin sauce we're used to at home in California.  I think this solves the raging debate in California as to whether the hoisin sauce beef roll is authentically Chinese from the homeland, or an American creation.  I think the US version is close enough to this one to make it authentic.

Some nice steamed pork dumplings

An overview of the meal.

And for dessert, literally red bean cake.

Thanks again to Supera/Signet Tours for ferreting out this interesting and unique cuisine.  I subsequently found out that this was not my first exposure to Juancun cuisine, as the now nearly defunct Liang's Kitchen chain in California based their menu on this style cuisine.