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

[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.)