Snake Cuisine, An Epitome of China’s Gilded Age

A Dish that Provides a Portal to China’s ‘90s

Those who witnessed Shanghai’s early economic boom in the ‘90s unite in their memory of the proliferation of a peculiar dish,the Salt and Pepper Snakes-an eerie departure from the region’s traditional diet.Some even found the culinary phenomenon skin-crawling prior to its instant fame.

The crux of its success lies in finesse of deception-the snakes should be cooked in a way that any association with the actual animal is mitigated to a bare minimum. The crispy snake skin coated in the exciting mixture of salt and pepper could easily pass off as fried hairtail fish, a staple of home cuisines in China’s coastal regions. Thanks to the ambiguity, tolerance was greatly boosted towards a dish whose protagonist was long deemed a pungent symbol of the ruling class’ caprice at the expense of its people, as evidenced by a Chinese classic text “On Snake Catcher” written roughly 1200 years ago. In the fable-style article, the Tang Dynasty writer Liu Zongyuan recounts a gut-wrenching encounter betwe…