A jian dui is a ball of glutinous rice flour, deep-fried until the outside goes hard and the inside blows up into a hollow. Most of the ones sold in English-speaking countries are rolled in white sesame before frying, which is why the usual English name is sesame ball. They come to the table hot, they are chewy rather than crisp, and if you bite one open there is more air inside than filling.
That is the thing as it is now. This page is about the oldest printed account of it we have actually read, which describes something close but not the same — and which does not mention sesame at all.
The Name
煎 jiān is to cook in a pan with oil. 堆 duī is a heap or a pile. Together they are not a poetic name; they are a description of a lump of dough going into fat.
In Cantonese the same two characters are jīn dēui, which is where the romanisation jin deui comes from, and why you will see it on dim sum menus spelled half a dozen ways. In Mandarin-speaking parts of China the thing is more often called 麻團 mátuán, “sesame ball,” and in English it is nearly always sesame ball or sesame seed ball. You will also meet it under local names across Southeast Asia and in Japan.
We are only going to make claims about the two characters we have in front of us in a printed edition, and those two characters are 煎堆.
What Was Inside It
The record is in 廣東新語, a book of notes on Guangdong written by Qu Dajun 屈大均 (1630–1696). Section fourteen is on food; the entry is headed 茶素, which means roughly the things you put out with tea. It opens like this:
廣州之俗。歲終以烈火爆開糯穀。名曰炮穀。以爲煎堆心餡。煎堆者。以糯粉爲大小圓。入油煎之。以祀先及餽親友者也。
“The custom of Guangzhou: at the end of the year they burst glutinous grain open over a fierce fire; it is called paogu. This is used for the heart-filling of jian dui. As for jian dui: glutinous rice flour is made into rounds large and small and fried in oil, to make offerings to the ancestors and as gifts to relatives and friends.”
Read that filling again. 爆開糯穀 — glutinous grain burst open over a fierce fire, and given its own name, 炮穀 paogu. That is popped rice. Not bean paste, not lotus seed, not black sesame, not peanut. The ball was packed with grain that had been exploded in the heat first.
We have not found a modern recipe that does this. Every jian dui on the first two pages of an English search is filled with a sweet paste. The filling in the oldest account we can read is a different material with a different texture, and it has a name of its own.
No Sesame
The passage says glutinous rice flour, rounds large and small, oil, popped grain inside. It does not say sesame.
This matters because sesame is the whole of the English name. Sesame does appear further down the same entry — the writer lists coconut, sesame and bean bran as materials for another item on the list — so the word was available to him and he used it elsewhere. He did not use it here.
We are not going to tell you the Guangzhou jian dui of three hundred years ago had no sesame on it. One sentence in one book is not an inventory. What we can say is narrower and firmer: the earliest printed description of jian dui that we have read does not mention sesame.
It Was an Offering and a Gift, Not a Snack
以祀先及餽親友者也 — “to make offerings to the ancestors and as gifts to relatives and friends.”
That is the whole stated purpose. No mention of selling it, no mention of eating it yourself. It is made at the end of the year, it goes on the altar, and it goes to other households.
This is worth holding onto, because the question English readers usually ask is whether a jian dui is a dessert. In this record it is not a course in a meal at all. It is a thing you make in quantity in the last weeks of the year, for the dead and for the living you owe a visit to.
It is also worth setting against what you will be told about why jian dui are eaten. The usual explanation in English is that the ball swelling up in the oil stands for growing wealth and good fortune, which is why they belong to the Lunar New Year. The record here confirms the season and nothing else: 歲終, the end of the year. It says what was made, what went inside, and who it was for. It does not say what any of it meant. We are leaving the meaning where we found it, which is to say not in this book.
What It Sat Next To
The 茶素 entry is not about jian dui. Jian dui is the first item in a list, and the list is a household’s whole year-end and festival output. In the order the book gives them: popped grain, jian dui, 米花 rice-flower, 沙壅 sha yong, white cakes, yellow cakes, egg cakes, honey-and-shortening cakes, then — for ordinary visiting between women — 油糰 oil dough-balls, 膏環 gao huan and 薄脆 thin-crisp, and later in the year zongzi for the fifth month, cakes for the ninth, 米餈 rice cakes at the solstice, and 粉果 fen guo as the everyday one.
Two sentences from the middle of that list are worth having on their own. The first is about the white cakes, which were made by pressing a toasted flour mixture into carved moulds and knocking it out:
殘臘時。家家打餅聲與搗衣相似。甚可聽。
“In the last days of the twelfth month, the sound of every house beating cakes is like the sound of beating laundry. It is very good to listen to.”
Somebody stood in a Guangzhou street at the end of a year in the seventeenth century and wrote down what the whole neighbourhood sounded like. That is not a recipe and not a legend. It is a man reporting what reached his ears.
The second is shorter:
富者以餅多爲尚。
“Among the rich, having many cakes is what is esteemed.” The count was the point. How many kinds you could put out said something about the house.
So the jian dui in this book is not a dish with a story. It is one line item in a household’s end-of-year production, next to the pressed cakes and the fried dough rings, in a city where the neighbours could hear how much of it you were making. If you have read our page on youtiao, 油糰 and 膏環 in that same list belong to the same family of fried dough, three hundred years earlier and a thousand miles south.
Where It Came From, and What We Cannot Say
Search for the origin of the sesame ball in English and you will be told it comes from Tang-dynasty Chang’an, where it was court food. That is the standard account and it may well be right.
We have not read the Tang source that claim rests on. So this page does not make the claim, and does not quote anything to support it. What we have is one printed book, one edition, one entry, one city, and a writer who died in 1696 — and that is the whole of what we are putting our name to.
There are two more records we know about and have not got:
- 《食物本草》, attributed to Yao Kecheng, Ming — reported to describe a 油堆 yóuduī made for the fifteenth of the first month, from glutinous rice flour, filled with sugar and fruit, fried in boiling oil. If that is accurate it would put a very similar thing at a different festival. We have not seen the book.
- 《兩般秋雨盦隨筆》, Liang Shaoren, Qing — reported to give 麻蛋 mádàn as another name for jian dui. We have not seen the book.
Both of those reached us through a modern scholarly survey, not from the originals. Under the rule this site works by, a quotation taken out of a later writer’s book is not the same thing as the book itself, so neither is quoted here and neither is counted. They are on our list to buy.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does jian dui mean?
煎 is to fry in oil in a pan; 堆 is a heap or pile. The name describes the making, not the eating. In Cantonese the same characters are jin deui.
How do you pronounce jian dui?
Roughly jyen-dway — the first syllable like the “jen” in “jenny”, the second close to English “dway”. In Cantonese it is closer to jin-dui.
Is jian dui a dessert?
In the record on this page it is neither dessert nor snack: it is made at the end of the year to offer to ancestors and to give away. Today it is usually eaten sweet and usually after something else, so dessert is a fair description of how it is served now. It is not how the oldest account we can read presents it.
Why is a sesame ball hollow inside?
Because the dough expands in the hot oil faster than the inside can fill. The shell sets while the middle is still pushing outwards, and what is left when it cools is a shell, a filling and a gap. The hollow is a consequence of the frying, not something put there.
Are jian dui and matuan the same thing?
They are the same class of thing — fried glutinous rice flour balls, usually sesame-coated, usually filled. 麻團 mátuán is the commoner name in northern and central China; 煎堆 jiān duī is the southern and Cantonese one. Sizes, fillings and how hollow they end up vary by place and by shop.
What is a sesame ball called in Chinese?
煎堆 jiān duī, 麻團 mátuán, or 芝麻球 zhīma qiú, depending on where you are. The two characters printed in the edition quoted on this page are 煎堆.
What We Have Not Found
We have not found any pre-modern text that we can read ourselves describing a sesame coating on jian dui.
We have not found the Tang-dynasty source behind the Chang’an origin story, and we have not looked for it in a library — we simply do not have it.
We have not found a second printed account of 炮穀 as a filling. One book says it; we have not been able to check it against another.
We have not found anything that tells us when the popped-grain filling was replaced by sweet paste, or whether the two ran alongside each other for a long time.
If you have a printed edition that covers any of these, we would like to hear about it.
Sources
The Chinese passages above are quoted from the edition named, in the characters that edition prints. This one is a traditional-character, vertically set text, and we have not converted it.
- Qu Dajun 屈大均 (1630–1696), Guangdong xinyu 廣東新語 — juan 14, the entry headed 茶素. Read in a modern typeset edition that prints the text in traditional characters, and checked character by character against the printed page.
The following are named here because they are relevant and because we have not read them. Nothing on this page rests on them:
- 《食物本草》 Shiwu bencao, attributed to Yao Kecheng 姚可成 (Ming) — for 油堆 at the Lantern Festival.
- 《兩般秋雨盦隨筆》 Liangban qiuyu an suibi, Liang Shaoren 梁紹壬 (Qing) — for 麻蛋 as an alternative name.
For how we check a passage before it appears here, see our page on editorial method. The dated list of the earliest record we can check for each dish is on the earliest records page.