Reading Chinese Menus: Meta: Come in, sit down, have a cup of tea, and ask me a question.

[kake]

Apparently I am capable of keeping this thing going! Who knew?

So I now have three months' worth of Chinese menu posts on here, which I think calls for some kind of mini-celebration. I thus decree that August will be dim sum month! I'll be temporarily suspending my character posts to make room for more dish posts — so each week in August, I'll post about two of my favourite dim sum dishes. Also, in honour of the fact that it was the London Perl Mongers who first introduced me to the delights of dim sum, August's "concept" posts will focus on working with Chinese characters in computing contexts.

I thought I'd also take the chance right now to solicit some feedback. I really appreciate all the comments, questions, and corrections that people have been leaving on these posts (or asking me when they see me in real life). I haven't yet put out a call for comments on the series as a whole, though.

So, are there any general questions you'd like to ask me? Is there an aspect of Chinese food that you've always wondered about? Is there a concept, character, or dish that you'd like me to cover? Would you like to see more variation in the types of dish covered, or do you think I've got it about right?

Conversely, are you an expert who's been biting their tongue at all my mistakes? Do you think my quest for good Chinese food outside China is fundamentally doomed? Do you think I'm going about this all entirely wrong? I'm always up for hearing constructive criticism, and I promise to be polite in response.

I'm pretty happy with the way the structure of the series is working out (a concept on Monday, a character on Wednesday, a dish on Friday), but I don't mind hearing any comments or suggestions that you have on that. Also, I've been pondering setting up a more extensive tagging system, and would love to hear any thoughts on that, or indeed on any other ways that I could make it easier for people to find the content they're looking for.

Please do let me know what you think on any of the above — or, if you have no particular thoughts in those directions, just say hello! Or tell me what your favourite Chinese dish is. Or recommend me a Chinese food blog that's worth reading. Or anything else that springs to mind!

And if you happen to be within reach of London during August, and would like to eat some dim sum with me, please drop me an email :)

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment (here's how) and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See my introductory post to the Chinese menu project for what these posts are all about.

Comments

[emperor]

I've been really enjoying these posts. I like Chinese food (at least, as it can be found in the UK, having never been to China), although the closest I get to making it at home is an old Ken Hom book (and I've no idea how authentic or otherwise that is). I've been reading the languagey bits less recently, as I'm trying to learn Portuguese at the moment, and I think more than one language at a time might fry my brain...

[kake]

Ha, yes, fair enough on the not reading the languagey parts! But very glad to hear you're enjoying the rest.

Regarding Ken Hom, I only have one of his books. I had a quick flick through and checked on a couple of the recipes I'm familiar with. I'm slightly disturbed that he makes mapo tofu with yellow bean sauce and chilli powder, rather than with chilli bean paste. He also omits chilli bean paste from his fish-fragrant aubergine recipe, and adds what looks to me like way too much sugar. Having said that, he does at least use some more unusual ingredients, such as pig trotters, and while most of the recipes want you to use boneless meat cuts and fish fillets, he also offers a couple for on-the-bone meat and whole fish.

According to Wikipedia, he first learned to cook in his uncle's restaurant in Chicago — I would suspect from the timing that the restaurant was a Westernised Cantonese style one, though this is speculation of course. I don't think it would be too far of a stretch to suggest that most of his recipes, particularly the earlier ones, are likely to be somewhat Westernised, if only because that would have been necessary at the time to get the British public to accept them.

(Oh, and somewhat off-topic, but I love this anecdote of his visit to Elizabeth David — right at the bottom.)

[emperor]

I have his "Chinese Cookery", a hand-me-down from my mother. I think I must agree that it is at least moderately Westernised in tenor (which, having read a little about its origins is hardly surprising!). Would you go as far as to recommend a more authentic cook-book, or do none exist in English?

(that made me grin :)

[kake]

I think Fuchsia Dunlop is well worth a look. Her online blurb states that she speaks fluent Mandarin and was trained at the Sichuan Culinary Institute, and as far as I can see, she seems to know her stuff. I've cited her on here a few times already.

Dead-tree-wise, I've only read her book on Hunan food, on which I am rather less than an expert, but I didn't see anything in there that contradicted stuff I already knew, and I found a lot of information that clarified things I'd been wondering about. Her other book covers Sichuan food — the only reason I've not read it yet is that I've already posted quite a lot about Sichuan food and I'm trying to branch out a bit :)

[lnr]

Just want to say that I'm enjoying reading these, even if I'm making no effort to actually remember the characters myself. The concepts are still interesting, and the dish posts are great :)

[kake]

Hurrah, thank you! Hopefully you'll enjoy the August posts, then, with twice as many dishes as usual :)

[bob]

needs more unicode snowmen

☃

[kake]

☃ ☃ ☃ ☃ ☃ ☃

Re: ☃

[pulchritude]

omfg how did you do that

Re: ☃

[kake]

Is the Unicode snowman not awesome? The character is, I must admit, copy-pasted from ☃.net (best URL ever). The sizes are done like so: <span style="font-size:6em">☃<span> (where 6em means 6-times bigger characters, 5em would mean 5-times bigger characters, etc).

I think my favourite Unicode character though has to be the unbearably goth HEAVY BLACK HEART. ❤ ❤ ❤

Re: ☃

[bob]

bob staples your hand to your forehead

[pulchritude]

I, um, might be in London in August for, uh, more politician-purposes. *hides face* Is dim sum usually only open on weekends, though? Or...?

[kake]

Heh, I love your politician obsession :)

Pretty much every dim sum place I know of in London does dim sum all week... and I can easily be free on a weekday lunchtime with a couple of days' notice — I should be able to recruit a few others to come along too. Thursday lunchtimes are my "traditional" dim sum time, since that's when the Perl Mongers generally do it, but other weekdays are fine too.

[pulchritude]

It's rather embarrassing, though I suppose it could be a worse obsession...

I'll e-mail you once I am certain whether I will be in London during August or not! I imagine it will be near either the late middle or the end of the month...

[marshtide]

No real comments other than that I enjoy reading your blog. Especially interested in the discussions of specific dishes, so looking forward to more! I basically can't actually eat much of this stuff, being unable to eat wheat (therefore no chilli bean paste and such, and only one kind of soy sauce), so maybe that's kind of weird. But occasionally there's something I can work with. :D

[kake]

I'm pleased to hear you're enjoying it — thank you for commenting to let me know!

I can see how a non-wheat diet would be tricky in terms of eating Chinese food in restaurants, particularly regarding soy sauce — am I right in thinking that the only type of soy sauce that's likely to be wheat-free is tamari? (i.e. a Japanese style rather than a Chinese one)

I do have a number of dishes lined up for August in which the only potentially-wheat-containing item is the soy sauce, so hopefully there will be something of interest in there.

[marshtide]

Yeah, that's exactly it. Fortunately that's at least easy to get hold of. It does taste different, according to people who regularly eat both, but not catastrophically so. I basically use it in anything that calls for normal soy sauce. It's more similar to the kinds of soy sauce actually called for than GF bread generally is to normal bread. For example.

Oh, cool! I look forward to it. :) I think my favourite thing so far has actually been the pickled cucumbers! They're quite similar to a traditional way of eating cucumber here in Sweden, actually, but I like the Chinese recipe better. (And we eat a lot of pickled cucumber in summer, so a variety of recipes is a really good thing to have.)