I’m sure that many people have tasted preserved eggs or 皮蛋(Pí Dàn). I find it very common for them to appear on the meals of Chinese people and many of them like the taste of it, including me.
Pi Dan(I’ll call it this from now on) is made from duck eggs and basic substances. After a series of chemical reactions, the chemicals and proteins in the egg are transferred into something with a unique aroma and brownish appearance. It has been invented for hundreds of years.
The reason for a foreigner to choose not to taste this, from my observation, is its repulsive appearance. After all, it looks like this:
I would describe this as “sewage jelly with rotted kitchen waste insides shaped like an egg” if I were a foreigner and saw this at first glance. “Edible” will not be the first word that pops into my head; I would rather believe it was some rat poison than food. The sheer appearance of this menacing-looking food has defeated 90% of foreigners.
Although a big percentage of people refuse to consume Pi Dan, the Chinese have an appeal to it. for breakfast, you can commonly see it along with porridge, dried pork floss(肉松 Ròu Sōng), and such. For lunch, you can see it in a different appearance: cut open with sauce. On the dinner table, you can spot chunks of it with tofu and soy sauce. Pi Dan is a popular food in China. From my(Chinese) perspective, I think this food is very delicious. Its salty flavor and semi-solid smooth texture condense in its yolk, with its jelly-ish outside further enhancing its variety in taste. Due to its property of being sort of salty, It fits well into all kinds of dishes.
In conclusion, Pi Dan is a popular food in China, but yet only in China. Foreigners commonly refuse to taste it because of its terrible appearance and consider it as an “exotic food”, although really, it is wonderful after you get used to it.
Oh, yes, now you have started using images, you’re using them effectively! “…it looks like this: [image]” = very effective interconnection between image and text. Your description of how a foreigner might view it is very much how I actually do se it. I’ve been here so long that they don’t look very exotic to me any more, but I still struggle to appreciate that kind of “semi-solid smooth texture” that you vividly describe. My kids quite like those Pi Dan.