By Yin Yeping

Think you know your Beijing snacks, Old China Hand? Sitting there chomping on your niangao sticky rice or baked sesame cakes like a real local? Well, how about doing something to save a real endangered species? No, we're not talking about tigers for once – though we endorse any attempt to save them – but the proper old-time Beijing street snacks, some of which are now all but on the brink of extinction. So listen up, learn and then go out and eat: you'll be saving lives – well, livelihoods, at least. Meanwhile, here's what you've missed, most likely forever…

Zeng'er cake.

Zeng'er cake

Vendors use a circular pot to cook zeng'er, similar to an earthenware cooking one but made of wood to avoid breakages on the move. Few know the exact recipe, but the basic raw materials are rice flour and sugar. Toppings include sesame, raisins and melon seeds. Zeng'er's selling point was its freshly made nature (the snack was eaten straight from the pot) and the fact that it was baked, rather than fried, which made it a healthy choice.

Its biggest fans tended to be youngsters whose sweet tooth favored the cakes; disapproving parents compared it to "feeding camels with jasmine flower," a reference to the fact that its high price and small size provide scant value when "wasted" on juvenile palates. Since the 50s, the snack's popularity has waned, due to the complexity in making it and low profit margins.

Ying mian pastry

Known as "tough flour" pastry due to the fact that the flour used was only half-fermented before being mixed with dry flour, shaped, filled, beaten, decorated and then grilled, ying mian pastry was also referred to as an "adult snack." Sadly, this was not due to some weird sexual pastry kink but the fact that it was sold at night and popularized in Lao She's novel Beneath the Red Banner, in which siheyuan dwellers played mahjong and chewed ying mian pastries purchased from the nearby hutong vendors.

It was also included as a "Han Shi Shi San Jue" cold snack, a group of 13 foods approved for the Qing Ming Festival, when fire was forbidden out of respect for the dead, meaning food had to be prepared safely in advance. Most have gone the way of the dodo today, but ying mian pastry has escaped that fate, if barely. Sweet it may be, but its dry, tough texture may not have helped its survival among the fussier young of today, with their tender stomachs.

That said it's the only snack in this list that you can still get commercially; the only place we could locate them was Jiu Men Xiao Chi restaurant in Xiaoyou Hutong, Xicheng District (Tel: 6402-6868). Wang Shihua, a Beijing snack aficionado and member of the unofficial Traditional Beijing Snack Committee told Lifestyle, "Ying mian pastry must be eaten at once after it's cooked, since it will become very tough to chew later on."

Yang shuang sheep intestines.

Yang shuang sheep intestines

We know: how can anyone let animal guts die out as a grab-and-go street snack? Yet these things happen. The white oil found inside the digestive tract was thought to resemble frost, which gave the snack its name; the cooking process itself was as long-winded as the inner intestine. The gut was turned inside out, immersed in blood and then steamed before being chopped up and mixed with soy sauce, vinegar, balsam, pepper, iced sugar water and parsley.

Temple fair vendors used to flog it in boiled sheep soup, cooked with sesame sauce, spicy pepper oil and parsley, as popularized among the Hui people and sold in Beijing's Niuren Street up to a few years ago. However, the greasy taste that once appealed to the "poor stomach" lags in popularity today, in part because the Hui minority who used to make it do not consume it themselves, due to the cooking-with-blood method. "Because of this, almost nobody still cooks it, which is why you can't buy it in Beijing anymore," said Wang.

Elm seed pastry.

Elm seed pastry

Elm trees were a regular part of the old siheyuan landscape, making this more of a family snack than a street dish; homeowners would simply pick the main ingredient from their own trees when the branches bloomed in spring. The seeds were mixed with well-fermented corn flour and honey before being placed in the steam pot; sesame oil, garlic sauce and small pieces of leeks were added after cooking. Elm seeds are a traditional part of a healthy Chinese diet due to their medicinal qualities of "reducing inner heat and curing coughs," but the bulldozing of many siheyuan and their relative exclusivity means the trees, and therefore the snack, have ceased to be a part of everyday family life.

Times change, as do people's tastes, traditions and living standards, and Beijing is certainly not a place particularity given to preserving its past. Even if some old Beijingers could still remember the recipes, we doubt they'd bother cooking them with so many new flavors around today. It's only due to the likes of Wang and the website her committee runs (below) that we still know anything about them today.

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