Earlier this week, I posted about less-common menu characters that are still worth learning. One of these characters is 球 (qiú), which literally means ball/sphere/globe.

I first came across 球 in the name of a dish I ate at Dragon Inn in South London — 南乳脆鱔球 (nán rǔ cuì shàn qiú), or crispy eel with red fermented beancurd. 南乳 (literally "southern milk") is the red fermented beancurd, 脆 means "crispy", 鱔 is eel, and 球 is... ball?

However, there are no balls, globes, or spheres in this dish. 球 actually refers to the way that the eel pieces curl up as they're cooked (see photo). It's also sometimes used in the names of prawn (蝦/xiā) dishes, since prawns have a similar tendency to curl. Below are some examples from the menu of Red & Hot near Euston Station in London. The English translations are theirs, not mine — the Chinese names don't specify that king prawns are used in the dish. Note that the dish names would still be intelligible without the 球:

While 球 is also used on dim sum menus to mean balls-as-in-meatballs, the character I've most commonly seen used for this on other menus is 丸 (wán). 丸 primarily appears in two contexts: soup (湯/tāng) and ingredients for hotpot (火鍋/huǒ guō). Here are some examples:

魚丸湯	yú wán tāng	fishball soup
冬瓜丸子湯	dōng guā wán zi tāng	winter melon and meatball soup (note the 子/zi here — john sheds some light on this in comments — and also note that the type of ball is not explicitly specified)
牛肉丸	niú ròu wán	beef balls
豬肉丸	zhū ròu wán	pork balls
蟹味丸	xiè wèi wán	crab-flavour balls

The last three of these are common ingredients in Chinese hotpot, which is this week's dish post.