“There was a time when making pi dan was a specialty, as much as hand-pulling noodles, hammering into shape a well-balanced wok, or fermenting rich soy sauce. When my dad was a kid in southern China, there was a guy in the village whose trade was making pi dan and caring for the ducks that laid the eggs to make them. And, of course, he had learned how to do these things from his father before him.

Pi dan means roughly “leather-skinned egg” in Chinese, a name that describes how they were once most commonly made: Clay was applied to the shell of raw eggs (usually duck), which dried into a leathery coating. After a month or so, it transformed their insides into a gel of dark amber surrounding a creamy yolk of many shades of green.

In the West, pi dan are commonly known as thousand-year eggs, millennium eggs, or century eggs, which are all misnomers. Transformed, pi dan can last a few months without refrigeration—though, like most everything in the world, they do eventually shrivel up into smelly, brown goop.”

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