It comes in an sorts of varieties, from sweet, to fairly bland, but it’s so much better than what I’m used to in the UK. Normally I’d never drink the stuff straight, but here it is a different thing altogether, and I’m actually picking it over beer some of the time.
It goes great with youtiao (油条), which is a sort of light fried batter stick that you dunk in a bowl of soy milk, sweetened to your taste.
Anyway, just thought I’d enlighten anyone who didn’t already know.
In the south they call youtiao 油炸鬼 which literally means deep fried devil
Folklore goes that the dish was invented when a notorious traitor died and people wanted to posthumously punish them by making effigies of he and his wife and deep fry them
Oh wow. I’ll try to impress people with that little factoid. Thanks
Its most likely a bullshit story like its probably a pun
In southern dialects the word for pastry 粿 and the word for ghost\devil 鬼 are pronounced similarly