Reading Chinese Menus: Characters: 菜 — cài — vegetables, dish/course/cuisine

[kake]

菜

This week's character may be familiar to regular readers already, as it not only appears in the icon I use for this series, but has already been mentioned in my posts on 擔擔麵/dàn dàn miàn, 粉/fěn, 豆/dòu, and getting in some practice.

菜 is written in pinyin as cài. The initial consonant is a sort of short "ts" sound, and the final vowel rhymes with "eye". It's pronounced with the fourth (falling) tone.

The radical of 菜 is radical 140, 艸/cǎo/grass. According to Wikipedia, this is the most common radical in the Kangxi Dictionary, being used in nearly 2000 characters. As shuripentu points out in a comment on Monday's post, the actual form that a radical takes can vary. However, radical 140 is a fairly simple one — it pretty much always looks like 艹, and appears at the top of the character.

Here are some other characters that have the same radical as 菜:

花	huā	flower
苗	miáo	sprout (see for example 豆苗)
茶	chá	tea
茄	qié	aubergine (as 茄子/qié zi)
菇	gū	mushroom

Usage of 菜 on menus breaks down into two broad categories — it either refers to some kind of vegetable, or it means something like "dish", "course", or "cuisine". There are many, many menu words that include 菜; here are some of them.

韭菜	jiǔ cài	Chinese chives (may possibly mean spring onions or leeks also, but see comments)
白菜	bái cài	literally "white vegetable" — Chinese leaf in the north of China, bok choy in the south [see footnote]
菜花	cài huā	cauliflower (literally "vegetable flower")
生菜	shēng cài	lettuce (literally "raw vegetable")
芹菜	qín cài	celery
菠菜	bō cài	spinach
東北菜	Dōngběi cài	Northeastern Chinese food
四川菜	Sìchuān cài	Sichuan food
湘菜 or 湖南菜	Xiāng cài/Húnán cài	Hunan food (湘 is the name of a river that runs through Hunan province, and is also used as an abbreviation for the name of the province)
涼菜	liáng cài	cold dishes
熱菜	rè cài	hot dishes

There are more characters than usual in this post, so I won't list all the pronunciations — but if there are any you're particularly interested in, feel free to ask in comments.

Footnote added July 2010: [0] The credit for telling me about the regional split in the meaning of 白菜 goes to Mr Noodles, by the way. My local Chinese restaurant takes the sensible route of differentiating the two vegetables with the terms 小白菜 (xiǎo bái cài/"small white vegetable"/bok choy) and 大白菜 (dà bái cài/"large white vegetable"/Chinese leaf).

菜:	cài	radical 140 (艸/艹)	Cantodict	MandarinTools	YellowBridge	Zhongwen
			Sybaritica: Culinary Chinese 101

Related posts:

• 酸菜魚 (suān cài yú/fish soup with pickled greens),
• 花 (huā/flower),
• 茶 (chá/tea),
• 茄 (qié/aubergine),
• 菇 (gū/mushroom),
• 生 (shēng/live/raw/unripe)

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See here for what these posts are all about.

Comments

[pne]

白菜 bái cài literally "white vegetable" — Chinese leaf in the north of China, bok choy in the south

And dollars to doughnuts that "bok choy" is simply the reading of those two characters in some southern variety of Chinese (Cantonese? Hokkien?).

[kake]

CantoDict says that the Canonese pronunciation is baak6 coi3, but I don't know enough about Cantonese to say how similar that is to the English pronunciation of "bok choy". English borrowings for names of Chinese food items do usually seem to come from Cantonese though. The only exception that's springing to mind is xiao long bao, which is from the Mandarin 小籠包/xiǎo lóng bāo.

[shuripentu]

I'd approximate the Cantonese as "baak choy", to which "bok choy" is closer than most mangled transliterations. :)

[shuripentu]

I don't think I've ever come across an English transliteration of a Chinese food item that didn't look as though it were likely to be from Cantonese. Of course, the mangling is frequently sufficiently great that it could well be from another dialect (or, in extreme cases, galaxy).

(I haven't come across Kake's example below, but then I've haven't come across 小籠包 in an anglophone setting.)

[shuripentu]

Yay! I <3 菜.

I have always got the impression that when 菜 is used to refer to a vegetable, it is almost always some sort of brassica. This may be meaningful, or it may just be because "some sort of brassica" covers a veritable panoply of sins. But I could be wrong.

I find the use of 菜 to mean dishes in general (IME all the stuff that goes with your rice, i.e. the food with flavour :p) interesting, in the same way that 飯 is used to mean a meal in general. It's like Chinese food fundamentally consists of rice and brassicas. ;)

[shuripentu]

Also, I am having difficulty with the concept of 白菜 being used to describe Chinese cabbage/leaf, since as far as I'm concerned, bak choy is the best vegetable ever (except possibly for that stuff that looks like green bak choy but isn't and has more kick to it) whereas Chinese cabbage is a crime against brassicas and should be exiled to the furthest reaches of the solar system.

I will stop commenting now. :P

[kake]

Do not hate the Chinese leaf! It is almost as good as tripe at soaking up tasty sauces :)

菜 ＝＝ brassica?

[kake]

I have always got the impression that when 菜 is used to refer to a vegetable, it is almost always some sort of brassica.

Now that's interesting! It's clearly not a cast-iron rule (韭菜 is an allium, 芹菜 is an apium, and 菠菜 appears to have its entire own genus called Spinacia, according to Wikipedia), but as a general rule it sounds plausible. Thinking about it some more, I realised that most (all?) of the 菜 vegetables I've come across are leaves or stalks, so perhaps that's the common thread.

[pulchritude]

I have never heard anyone use 韭菜 to refer to anything other than Chinese chives and am curious as to where you've heard it used to refer to spring onions and leeks.

韭菜

[kake]

I got it from CantoDict originally. Then the other week, I came across this blog post which includes a link to a document claimed to be the official menu translations made by the Beijing Tourism Bureau in preparation for the 2008 Olympics. I grepped through the document and it uses "leek" to translate 韭菜 — I realise though that what they're calling a leek may not necessarily be the same thing that I'd understand as a leek.

I looked through my collection of transcribed menus, and the only one that (a) uses 韭菜 and (b) has English translations on the original is this one from Baozi Inn, which confirms that the item intended in this instance is Chinese chives.

I've edited the post to mention that the spring onion/leek thing may be inaccurate, pointing to this comment thread.