Soy Milk Is Just Coffee

Soy milk is coffee. Youtiao is a croissant.

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

One morning I held a coffee in one hand and a croissant in the other, took a bite, and scattered flakes all over the table. My first thought: this is a Chinese breakfast.

The classic Chinese breakfast is a bowl of hot soy milk and youtiao, a long fried dough stick you tear up and dip. Swap the cup, swap the pastry, and the motion is identical. A hot drink, something crisp made of dough. Dip, bite, sip.

Beijing alone has two more versions. One is douzhi, a sour fermented bean drink, with jiaoquan, a thin crispy fried dough ring. The other is luzhu, a hot offal stew, with huoshao, a flatbread you soak in it.

Douzhi is coffee. Jiaoquan is a croissant.

Luzhu is coffee. Huoshao is a croissant.

If one city can grow two, the rest of the world gets stranger still. Americans dunk donuts in coffee. Italians have a cornetto with their cappuccino. Spaniards dip churros into hot chocolate. The British dunk biscuits in tea, and in India rusk, a hard twice-baked toast, goes into chai. Turkey pairs tea with simit, a sesame bread ring. Hong Kong has milk tea with a pineapple bun, Singapore has kopi with kaya toast, and Mongolia and Xinjiang have milk tea with fried dough, toasted millet, or naan.

So soy milk is coffee, and so are black tea, milk tea, and hot chocolate. A hot drink plus something crisp made of dough seems to be standard issue for every culture.

Milk is coffee. An Oreo is a croissant. Oreo’s old ad said it plainly: twist, lick, dunk.

It makes sense. After a night of sleep you are short on water and fuel: the hot drink rehydrates and warms you, the dough fills you up. Fried or dry-baked dough holds little water and keeps, and beans, tea, and coffee store well too. For ordinary people, cheap and long-lasting beat everything else. Stale bread comes back to life when you soak it, which is the whole idea behind the huoshao in luzhu and behind yangrou paomo, a Xi’an dish of flatbread torn into mutton soup. And the dipped end goes soft while the rest stays crisp, so every bite has both. Len Fisher, a physicist at the University of Bristol, even calculated how long to dunk a biscuit before it breaks, and won an Ig Nobel Prize for it.

A lot of what we think belongs only to our own culture turns out to be a similar answer people reached on similar days. Mornings are cold, people are hungry, money and time are short. Put that anywhere, and someone will pick up a hot cup and something to dip in it.

Next time I eat breakfast somewhere new and see someone dunk something into their cup, I will probably laugh: oh, you have coffee and croissants too.