It Puts The Chowder In The Casket

Coffin bread is a very Western-seeming treat that arose out of the night markets of Taiwan in the mid-20th Century. The Food History series on Mental Floss did a good video on the snack and its background earlier this year, scripted by the always-interesting Clarissa Wei.

Wheat-based foods like bread gained in popularity in Taiwan in the post World War II era, after their occupation by the Japanese, and as the Nationalist government of mainland China fled to Taiwan following the successful Communist revolution in the late 1940s. The US began a “Food for Peace” program that distributed surplus agricultural products, including grain, to foreign nations with food deficiencies. The grain in question–wheat–was uncommon in the cuisine of subtropical Taiwan, where rice grows far more easily. Some wheat cultivation had begun centuries before with the Dutch, the Taiwanese word for bread–pan–entered the language from the Japanese.

So while wheat was not unknown in Taiwan, this boom in its availability during the period of US aid from 1950 to 1965, along with training in the milling of wheat and baking with it provided during that period–not to mention the presence (and appetites) of US military personnel on the island during that time–“transformed the eating habits of the Taiwanese population” according to the Taiwan Gazette. Large-scale milling operations backed by the US began in the early 1950s and Western-style baked goods–bread–sprang up alongside the Japanese-style confections and northern Chinese-style buns and noodles that were previously the primary uses of wheat flour in Taiwan.

It was against this backdrop that a food stall entrepreneur in Tainan developed what would become coffin bread. Hsu Liu-Yi, who sold traditional Taiwanese fare like eel noodles, wanted to develop something that would appeal to the palates of the American servicemen, and he hit on a combination of chicken liver and thick, deep-fried slices of bread. Chicken liver was a novel ingredient in Taiwan at the time, bread was very Western of course, and deep-frying is a much more night market street food friendly version of toasting than a dedicated appliance or an open flame would be. According to one source I saw, the original version filled the crispy fried bread with chicken liver pâté but most of the sources I’ve seen say that the original filling was a chicken liver based ragout or stew. Most agree that originally it was called something like “Chicken liver plate” but after a regular remarked that the hollowed-out, lidded bread resembled a casket, the name 棺材板 or Guāncai bǎn–commonly rendered in English as Coffin bread–stuck.

These days, coffin bread is not often made with chicken livers, but rather a light-colored cream soup or chowder that may contain seafood, tripe, chicken, mushrooms, potatoes, vegetables, or some combination of the above. In a few of the videos I’ve seen on Youtube depicting night market renditions of the dish, the vendor will place the requested combination of ingredients into the bread then cover the combination with a plain, thick, white gravy-like sauce, fast-casual style, as if to make a custom filling recipe for each order. Some stands stands will, I’m sure, have an actual chowder recipe they use instead of building their coffins Chipotle-style.

My chowder recipe was developed by looking at several recipes from various blogs and stealing the bits I liked from each of them. It combines chicken breast, shrimp, squid, and several types of mushroom (oh and a little bacon) with aromatics and vegetables in a creamy vegetable stock base. If I’d had seafood stock I’d have used it but the best I could do was mix some clam juice into my vegetable stock and rehydrate my mushrooms in it. Trust me, the stock was good, and the recipe appears below, slightly further down the page.

I did not deep-fat fry the bread like they do in the night markets. Look, it’s not that I’m opposed to deep-frying bread, it’s just that I thought it might be wasteful of cooking oil. Besides, brushing thick slices of Japanese Shokupan with melted butter and air-frying them sounded more delicious yet.

After cutting a shallow slit around the periphery of the toasted bread, I worked the knife under the surface and pried off the coffin’s “lid.”

Then I filled it with about a cup of the chowder. Some of the recipes I’ve seen for this call for ridiculously thick slices of bread, 3″ or 4″ (8-10cm) thick slices, big enough to be a doorstop, and if you did it that way, you could probably fit a couple cups of stew in there. But of the Youtube videos I’ve seen, the only ones making it that way are the bloggers. The night market videos all show bread about 1.25″ or 1.5″ (3.5cm or so) thick.

Then you just close that lid and you’ve got something that looks pretty much like a coffin. Well, a casket, the difference being that a casket is rectangular, while a coffin broadens from the feet to the shoulders and then tapers again in an irregular octagon. You can google it if you can’t picture it, think of those pine boxes leaning against the wall in old Western movies. Anyway, just look at how that lid suggests a box holding a dead body for viewing! Delicious!

In truth though it is a tasty meal, in spite of the macabre nature of its name, which some stands have changed to avoid alienating their more superstitious potential customers. The combination of the mild yet lush cream soup base with the sweet seafood and tender chicken with the crisp vegetables–peas, carrots, sweet corn–and appealing, familiar aromatics–onion, celery, nutmeg–would be a classic blend on its own but the addition of three mushroom varieties–shiitake, oyster, and golden mushrooms–lends the chowder a savory depth that is unlike any chowder I’ve had previously. The bread is buttery and crisp, and maintains that crispness despite the ladleful of less-thickened-than-I’d-hoped chowder that inundates it.

Like Saveur pointed out in their writeup, it’s a lot like a pot pie in many ways. Only the crust of this pot pie is crisper, more buttery, more delicious than any I’ve had before. Here’s the recipe I used.

I still wanted to try that original, chicken-liver version though, and I could not find any likely recipes for a chicken liver chowder that Hsu Liu-Yi might have used in Taiwan in the 1950s. So I made the same chowder again, left out the shrimp, kept the bacon and mushrooms and squid, and replaced the chicken breast with a pound of chicken livers, fried in bacon fat.

The darker meat of the livers changed the nature of the chowder, from a light-colored cream soup to a darker, more robustly mineral stew, even more savory yet than the big mushroom flavor gave me alone. Again, I air-fried a thick slice of toast, cut out a lid, pried it open, and filled that coffin with this delicious-even-if-it-doesn’t-look-it liver ragout.

Chicken livers aren’t to everyone’s taste. I get that. And I’ll admit that this plate could get to be a bit much. It could use something acidic to break it up, like a squirt of hot sauce or some pickled mustard greens.

After this month though, I have a lot of chowder left over that I have yet to get through, and there are worse ways to eat it than putting into a crispy buttery casket to make the world’s best pot pie.