What the bing?

When I just started working in a Chinese-Indonesian restaurant, I did not really understand the abbreviations that were used on the Chinese receipts. For every order, there is a small receipt printed to hand to the cooks, so that the order is processed smoothly. There were thus always two receipts, one with Dutch on it, and one with Chinese on it that was sent to the kitchen and sent back to the restaurant when the food was ready.

When I just started working in a Chinese-Indonesian restaurant, I did not really understand the abbreviations that were used on the Chinese receipts. For every order, there is a small receipt printed to hand to the cooks, so that the order is processed smoothly. There were thus always two receipts, one with Dutch on it, and one with Chinese on it that was sent to the kitchen and sent back to the restaurant when the food was ready.

When checking the receipts to see if the order was complete, I saw the Chinese character 并 bing printed on the it. Being slightly confused, I remembered that my mother told me that sometimes variations or other characters were used, since it was easier to note. In Mandarin Chinese 并 bing is used as a conjunction and as a standalone character makes little sense on a receipt. However, due to the Chinese written language making use of radicals to change the meaning and pronunciation of a word, it would make sense that this 并 bing would have a meaning suitable for the restaurant setting, since it has a similar pronunciation. So 并 bing was probably a simplified 饼 bing, which means cookie or cake in Chinese, with the only difference between the two words being in tone, and a slight difference in writing.

However, back then, I still did not get what it was supposed to be. I asked my uncle if it was a typo and he then grabbed kroepoek and said that this is the 并. Then I finally figured it out, the only 饼 bing that we had was of course the 虾饼 xiabing, which is the Chinese word for kroepoek! It sparked my interest in this fried cracker from Indonesia, hence this story.