Coffin bread

Coffin bread is a Tainan snack in which a hollowed, fried bread box holds a thickened savoury filling. The district office’s account of the Chikan shop describes an early filling of chicken liver, cuttlefish and vegetables. The crisp bread serves as an edible container, with a removable lid that gives the snack its distinctive box-like appearance.^[1]

The same account associates the snack with Xu Liuyi, who opened a stall in Tainan’s Shakariba market in 1935 and sold Japanese, Western and Taiwanese snacks. It describes the filled bread as a post-war creation and records that the shop adopted the coffin-bread name on its sign in 1959. The story about a customer joking that the bread resembled a coffin belongs to that local account of the name.^[1]