Adventures with Kake

上湯豆苗 (shàng tāng dòu miáo) is a basically very simple dish of mangetout leaves moistened with a rich stock, though it can be jazzed up with garnishes such as century egg or peeled prawns (as in the version pictured above, which I ate at Red & Hot in London). English translations I've seen include "pea shoots in rich broth" or simply "pea shoots in soup" [see footnote].

Wikipedia tells me that 上湯 is a "dark tan broth made from Jinhua ham and chicken", while the Red Cook blog states that it's made by adding more fresh meat to an already-made clear stock, and simmering further. The eGullet forums have a nice discussion of Chinese stocks, including a recipe for 上湯. As that recipe points out, it's worth blanching the meat before you begin (I've discussed this before — see the comments too).

The eGullet recipe also mentions that you should choose an old chicken rather than a young one, for better flavour, and simmer the stock for 6-8 hours. I can thoroughly endorse this suggestion. I bought a "fresh Scottish hen" from the Chinese butcher (he described it as 老雞/lǎo jī/"old chicken") and let the stock simmer at a very low temperature for 8 hours, and it was the chickeniest chicken stock I've ever made. The fact that the neck and feet were also included probably didn't hurt either. The meat itself won't really be worth eating after such a long time — you can eat it if you like (I nibbled a few bits), but the flavour will mostly be gone.

Note that the low temperature is important — if you let the stock boil while you're making it, it will be a creamy/cloudy colour rather than nice and clear. This isn't something specific to Chinese cuisine; in the River Cottage Meat Book, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall insists that a stock should never go above "a very gentle simmer, whereby a few bubbles just tremble the surface every few seconds or so".

A word on the dried scallops — these are a very expensive ingredient, and not all that easy to get hold of in the UK. I'm not entirely sure what the situation is regarding these — they're certainly not illegal to sell, since I found them at See Woo in London's Chinatown (at £40 for a 200g gift package of around 25 scallops, and no, that isn't a typo) — but as Helen Yuet Ling Pang points out, they're not often available in the shops. One suggestion given in the eGullet thread linked above is to try substituting them with a bit of dried squid — or you could just leave them out.

Jinhua ham is also not very easy to find — I asked in three Chinatown supermarkets, and none of them had any. Serrano ham or some other dried non-smoked ham might work as a substitute.

Anyway, my stock turned out well, but I shot myself in the foot when it came to making the dish. I couldn't find any pea shoots, so I thought I'd try spinach instead, but accidentally picked up a bag of something that turned out to be labelled "kai choi" — mustard greens (芥菜/jiè cài). Their flavour totally overwhelmed the flavour of the stock, which was a bit disappointing given how long it had taken to make! I'd say this dish is definitely best made with milder-flavoured greens.

The method I used was fairly simple (cribbed from a blend of two recipes, one from Noob Cook and the other from Portion Perfect) — heat oil in a wok over medium heat, add some chopped garlic and stir it around briefly, add the washed leaves and continue to stirfry until they've wilted, pour in some 上湯, season with a drizzle of Shaoxing wine and a small pinch of salt, let it get hot, and serve.

Footnote: [0] I don't actually know why 豆苗 is usually translated as "pea shoots", since to my mind pea shoots look more like this.

While I've previously had a gentle dig at mix-and-match meat-in-sauce Chinese takeaway dishes, the presence of mix-and-match green vegetable dishes on a Chinese menu is actually a good sign. Generic Anglo-Chinese food often neglects the vegetable side of things, aside from items like "mixed seasonal vegetables" (rarely actually seasonal) and "stirfried beansprouts", but a good Chinese restaurant will offer several green vegetable options, cooked in a number of styles. The Red Cook blog has a nice post on this subject.

Here are some leafy (and other) greens you might see listed on a menu:

You might also see 時菜 (shí cài), which means "seasonal vegetables" — and for completeness' sake, I should also mention 白菜 (bái cài), though given how thoroughly I've already covered this term, I expect regular readers already know more about it than they ever wanted to.

Here are some styles you might see these vegetables offered in:

A few notes on some of these:

• The 汁 (zhī) in 豉汁 and 姜汁 literally means "juice" or "gravy"; the alternative names use the characters 豆 (dòu/bean) and 絲 (sī/shredded).
• The literal translation of 上湯 (shàng tāng) is "superior soup". 上 also appears in 螞蟻上樹 (mǎ yǐ shàng shù/ants climbing a tree) and 上海 (Shànghǎi, literally "above the ocean").
• While XO sauce is named after XO cognac, it doesn't actually contain any. It's a spicy, savoury, slightly oily sauce made with Chinese ham, dried scallops, dried prawns, and other such delicious ingredients. See Helen Yuet Ling Pang's post on XO sauce for more info.

Interestingly, the menu pictured at the top of this post offers both 清炒 and 嗆炒 as options, translating the former as "plain fried" and the latter as "stir fried". According to mandarintools.com, 嗆 means "pungent", so I'm not entirely sure what 嗆炒 actually does mean. Update, August 2010: I tried asking about this in the restaurant the menu belongs to, but had a lot of trouble making myself understood. After going around in a few conversational circles I gave up and just ordered some 嗆炒空心菜 — it turned out to be stirfried with dried red chillies and Sichuan peppercorns. Update II, August 2010: I've just noticed I was writing that character wrong — it's 熗, not 嗆. mandarintools.com says 熗 means "to cook in soy". So now I am even more baffled.

白 (bái) has a number of related meanings, with the most relevant to the menu context being "white", "pure", and "plain".

Here are some common menu terms that include 白:

白肉 (bái ròu) is often served as 蒜泥白肉 (suàn ní bái ròu), a pungently garlicky cold dish. Other names I've seen used for this dish are 蒜茸白肉 and 蒜蓉白肉, both of which pinyin-ise as suàn róng bái ròu. 蒜泥白肉 is more common though, in my experience. This really is a tasty dish — thin slices of tender pork coated in a light sauce with an abundance of mashed/minced raw garlic — though you'll stink of garlic for hours afterwards.

白灼 (bái zhuó) confuses me slightly. I've seen it variously translated as "plain braised", "quick boiled" or "quick boiled in soy sauce", "scalded", and "boiled". A thread on the CantoDict forums sheds a little more light — apparently the main characteristic of the 白灼 cooking method is that the items are cooked in water or stock at high rather than low heat (boil rather than simmer). This is perhaps a minor quibble, though — the important thing as far as the diner/menu-reader is concerned is that the item is cooked in liquid rather than fried, baked, etc.

白 is its own radical — Kangxi radical 106, which isn't a particularly common one. The only other character with this radical that you're likely to see on a menu is 百 (bǎi/hundred), which as superpitching recently informed me appears in the rather poetic name 牛百葉 (niú bǎi yè, literally "cow's hundred leaves") for third-stomach/omasum beef tripe, also known as leaf or book tripe, a common dim sum dish. I've also seen 百 in the name of another dim sum dish — 百花腐皮卷 (bǎi huā fǔ pí juǎn), which is literally "hundred-flowers beancurd skin rolls" (and is actually stuffed with minced prawns, rather than flowers).

Photo © Ewan-M, used under cc-by-sa.

As with the 水煮 (shuǐ zhǔ) style of cooking, the literal English translation of 火鍋 (huǒ guō) can be somewhat misleading to those unfamiliar with Chinese cuisine. Like 水煮牛肉 (shuǐ zhǔ niú ròu), which is completely different from English boiled beef, 火鍋 bears very little resemblance to Lancashire hotpot.

火鍋 is a sociable, communal-style meal, served as a simmering pot of stock in the middle of the table with raw ingredients (sliced meat and fish, prawns, vegetables, tofu, noodles, etc) supplied on the side. You choose your own ingredients and cook them to your preferred doneness by letting them simmer in the pot before fishing them out with chopsticks or a strainer. Various dipping sauces are also offered.

There are a number of different styles of stock. Helen Yuet Ling Pang describes the Cantonese style, which is a fairly plain one flavoured with carrot, daikon, spring onion, and ginger — you could use pork or chicken stock as a base for this, but since Helen lives with a vegetarian she uses water, and it works out fine. The version pictured at the top of this post is a "split" version known as 鴛鴦 (yuān yāng) [see footnote 0], which has a spicy Sichuan-style stock in one side and a milder, "medicinal" stock in the other — quite handy if the various members of your party have differing chilli tolerances!

I'm having a little trouble finding recipes for the Sichuan-style stock — as far as I can see, a lot of people who make this hotpot style at home simply buy a pre-mixed seasoning packet and use that. I did find a recipe on the BBC website, and an accompanying video [see footnote 1]. (Update, April 2012: I found one on the Yi Reservation blog, though it doesn't give quantities.) I've had no luck at all finding a recipe for the "medicinal" stock, but it usually seems to include things like dried mushrooms and goji berries (wolfberries). (Update, February 2013: Yi Reservation has now posted a recipe for medicinal hotpot stock.)

To serve 火鍋 at home, you'll want some kind of tabletop cooker, a pot to go on it, some small single-serving hotpot strainers, and of course chopsticks. You may want to supply separate sets of chopsticks for eating and for transferring raw ingredients to the pot with, to avoid cross-contamination. Hotpot strainers (photo) should be available in most Chinese supermarkets that have kitchenware sections (regular readers will, I suspect, not be surprised to learn that I got mine from Loon Fung in Silvertown). The cooking can be done in a rice cooker, if you happen to have one of the old types with a completely removable lid, or in a specialist 火鍋 vessel (look for these in any Chinese cash-and-carry/large supermarket). I recently managed to achieve a two-person hotpot in a fondue set, but it was a slow process even on the highest heat setting.

Here are some of my favourite hotpot ingredients (see also my earlier post full of balls):

Finally, here are some hotpot menus from London restaurants:

• Chilli Cool, Bloomsbury (photo with transcription, bilingual)
• Red & Hot, Euston (blurry photo with partial transcription, bilingual, but the English and Chinese versions don't correspond exactly)
• Royal Palace, Surrey Quays (text, translation by me)

Footnote: [0] 鴛 (yuān) and 鴦 (yāng) are the characters for the male and female Mandarin duck, and are often used together to denote a pairing of some kind — CantoDict has a few examples (scroll down).

Footnote: [1] I'm not sure whether or how much the BBC recipe is "dumbed down", given that the chef (Ching-He Huang) is using Lee Kum Kee chilli bean paste — with the brand name blanked out on the jar, since this is the BBC, but the jar is pretty distinctive. See Fuchsia Dunlop on this subject, and also note this forum thread disparaging Lee Kum Kee's pre-prepared Sichuan hotpot base.

I currently have a reading vocabulary of around 150 Chinese characters and probably around twice that many words. This is a pretty small number compared to what I'd need to be able to read something in a more general context, but it's enough to read a menu [see footnote].

As I've mentioned before, I've been using Anki to ensure that I don't forget previously-learned characters/words. It works pretty well in that it keeps track of how long it is since it last tested me on a given character, and tries to figure out the best time to test me on it again. However, a few months after I started using it, it gave me an alarming message — one of my characters had been "identified as a leech" and had been "suspended"!

Turns out, what this means is that I kept getting that character wrong, so Anki had decided I was spending a disproportionate amount of time on it and I'd be better off giving up on it for now. This was actually a reasonable assessment for it to make — the character was 房 (fáng), which basically means "house" or "room", and the only reason I'd added it to my vocab list was that it was in the name of a restaurant I'd come across very early on in my learning process, and I thought I may as well stick it in there just in case it turned out to be something I'd come across frequently in the future. It didn't.

However, there are some characters that may not appear very often on menus, but are still useful to know. The way I finally succeeded in learning these characters was to actively seek out names of dishes that included them, and add those dishes to my "Chinese dishes" Anki deck. The more contexts I saw them in, the easier it became to remember them.

I suppose my Anki decks deserve a digression of their own. I have three main ones — Chinese characters/words, Chinese dishes, and easily-confused character pairs. Regarding the dishes deck, I don't indiscriminately add every dish on every new menu I come across — I mainly add dishes if I already know all or most of the characters, or if it's a dish I particularly enjoyed or particularly want to try, or if it's a very common dish. However, I do relax this rule in the case mentioned above — that is, if I can use the dish to help cement a particular character in my head without adding too much of an unnecessary burden (e.g. if there are other "difficult" characters in the dish, it's not going to help).

The Sinosplice blog has a relevant post on this subject, and the followup is worth reading too.

Footnote: [0] When I say I can read a menu, I don't mean in the sense of being able to positively identify each and every dish on a menu I've never seen before — I often can't even do this on non-Chinese menus, as proved in the pub last weekend when I had to use my phone to Google for "agnolotti". I mean in the sense of being able to understand enough of it to order an interesting, varied, and well-balanced meal, and to pick out dishes that I've been meaning to try, rather than panicking and just picking the first thing I recognise.

四 (sì) is the character for the number four.

The most common use for 四 on the Chinese menu is perhaps as 四川 (Sìchuān), as in Sichuan food (四川菜/Sìchuān cài) — 四川 literally means "four rivers". 四川 is sometimes abbreviated simply to 川 — note that 四 on its own never means "Sichuan", though.

The next most common is probably as 四季豆 (sì jì dòu), or green beans. The literal translation is "four season beans" — I've read that this is a reference to their being in season all year round.

As noted on Monday, the pronunciation of 四/sì is a little tricky. This YouTube video of a woman cooking 涼拌四季豆 (liáng bàn sì jì dòu, or green bean salad) helps demonstrate the proper pronunciation, since she says 四季豆 quite often towards the start of it!

The radical of 四 is 囗 (wéi/enclosure). At first glance, this looks fairly similar to 口 (kǒu/mouth), which is also a radical. The way to distinguish them is this: when the radical is wéi, the character is basically a box with something in; but when the radical is kǒu, the character will contain one or more empty boxes somewhere within it.

A few examples:

I won't be doing this every Friday, but I just saw rydra_wong's Follow Friday post and figured it was about time I did another one.

Communities:

• 42_answers — answers in search of questions.
• factfinding — where to go when Google fails you.
• transcripts — working together to transcribe videos, podcasts, and visuals, for greater access.

People:

• ewan posts about sherry!
• nanila posts about science!
• pulchritude posts about Han culture!
• spiralsheep posts about social justice and bees!
• superpitching posts about food!
• trouble posts about access and disability history!

This week's character is a nice, simple one — 水 (shuǐ), which means "water" (check out 水 stroke order on Wikimedia Commons for an animated GIF showing how to write it). Like last week's 瓜/guā, it's a radical as well as a character in its own right.

Perhaps the most common occurrence of 水 on the Chinese menu — and indeed the context in which I first encountered it — is as 水煮 (shuǐ zhǔ). Although this translates literally as "water-cooked", the widely-available dishes of 水煮牛肉 (shuǐ zhǔ niú ròu) and 水煮魚片 (shuǐ zhǔ yú piàn) are almost entirely the opposite of what you might expect from "boiled beef" or "boiled fish" — the 水煮 method is actually a deliciously spicy and fiery Sichuan cooking style (of which more on Friday).

Another common use for 水 is in 口水雞 (kǒu shuǐ jī), or "mouthwatering chicken". This is another Sichuan dish, served cold. (Incidentally, if you've seen "saliva chicken" on those wackily-translated not-exactly-perfect-English menus, this is what they mean.) Note that the tone sandhi rule I mentioned on Monday applies to both 口水雞 and 水煮, since they feature two third tones in succession.

The most usual way 水 looks when used as a radical is as three disconnected strokes sticking out from the left-hand side of the character; however, in some fonts these strokes are connected to each other (screenshot). Also, a few characters incorporate the radical in a different way, for example 泰 (tài), which puts it on the bottom rather than on the left, and keeps the standard form rather than transforming it into three strokes. 泰 is short for "Thailand"; you might see it on a menu as, for example, the common dim sum dish of 泰式鳳爪 (tài shì fèng zhǎo), which means Thai-style chicken feet (literally "Thai-style phoenix claws").

Here are some other characters that use 水 as a radical:

汁	zhī	juice/sap/gravy; often seen as 姜汁 (jiāng zhī), which indicates that something's in a ginger sauce.
沙	shā	sand/granular/powdery; see 金沙玉米 (jīn shā yù mǐ, or "golden sands corn"), and also note that 沙 is used phonetically in 沙爹 (shā diē), which means "satay". Be sure not to confuse it with 炒 (chǎo/stirfried), which is similar but has a different radical.
河	hé	used alone and as 河粉 (hé fěn) to refer to ho fun noodles.
油	yóu	oil/fat/grease; used as e.g. 紅油 (hóng yóu), meaning chilli oil (literally "red oil").
泥	ní	mashed; e.g. as 蒜泥 (suàn ní), which is mashed garlic.
海	hǎi	sea/ocean; most often seen on menus as 海鮮 (hǎi xiān), literally "ocean fresh", meaning seafood, but as john points out in a comment on an earlier post, it also turns up as 上海 (Shànghǎi).
涼	liáng	cool/cold; commonly seen as 涼菜 (liáng cài), meaning cold dishes such as cucumber salads.
湯	tāng	soup, e.g. 酸辣湯 (suān là tāng) — hot and sour soup.

When I first moved beyond Anglo-Chinese takeaway food and started learning about proper Chinese cuisine, one of the many pleasant surprises I had was how tasty and refreshing the cold dishes (涼菜/liáng cài) can be. Indeed, most of the Chinese-language menus I've seen are divided primarily into cold dishes and hot dishes, and these arrive together rather than in strict cold-then-hot sequence. You can even make up an entire meal from cold dishes, if you like; Beijing Haochi has a nicely-illustrated paean to the joys of 涼菜, describing just that.

Certain of my regular dining partners disapprove of my penchant for ordering 黃瓜 (huáng guā/cucumber) dishes in Chinese restaurants, claiming that the markup on these cheap, simply-prepared ingredients is unjustifiable. I do see their point, but I really enjoy the crunch and contrast in amongst the more intensely-flavoured dishes.

There are a number of styles of 涼拌黃瓜 (liáng bàn huáng guā), which literally translates as "cold mixed cucumber". The photo at the top of this post illustrates one I ate at Baozi Inn in Chinatown; the cucumber is stirfried ultra-briefly (10-15 seconds) in oil flavoured with dried red chillies, and marinated with vinegar, sugar, and a few spices. Alice de Jong has a recipe for this style; she calls it 黃瓜皮 (huáng guā pí, literally "thin sheets of cucumber"), while Baozi Inn calls it 炝黃瓜 (qiàng huáng guā), with the 炝 describing the very brief cooking of the cucumber in the flavoured oil.

Another option is the rather fun (and garlicky) 拍黃瓜 (pāi huáng guā), literally "bashed cucumber". It's a bit messy to make (I ended up with cucumber innards in my hair the first time I tried), but also kind of satisfying if you've had a tough day. The basic idea is that you cut the cucumber into wedges and then bash it with the side of a cleaver (or a rolling pin) to break it up and make it easier for the garlicky dressing to soak in. Here are some recipes: Beijing Haochi, Lily's Wai Sek Hong, Planting Bamboos.

I'm also keen on the spicer forms of cucumber dish; the photo below is of the 蒜泥黃瓜 (suàn ní huáng guā) served at Chilli Cool in Bloomsbury; although the name translates simply as "cucumber with mashed garlic", it's spiced up with hot chilli oil and loads of Sichuan pepper. I don't have a recipe for this yet, but I'll certainly be experimenting.

Recipes for Chinese cucumber salads:

• Alice de Jong: Pickled cucumber (黄瓜皮)
• Beijing Haochi: Smashed cucumbers with garlic (pai huang gua 派黄瓜)
• China South of the Clouds: Cucumber with herbs and peanuts
• Hollow Legs: Smacked cucumber salad, turbo-charged
• Lily's Wai Sek Hong: Smacked cucumber salad
• Planting Bamboos: 拍黄瓜 Chinese smacked cucumber

Another aspect of reading Chinese characters, which I've previously only mentioned in passing, is the issue of fonts and calligraphy. I'll say upfront that reading cursive/decorative Chinese calligraphy is difficult, and I cannot do it [see sidetrack in footnote]. So I'm going to stick to discussing fonts.

Chapter 12 of Douglas Hofstadter's excellent book Metamagical Themas has a couple of relevant figures (12.3 and 12.4, if you happen to own the book). The first of these shows the Latin letter A in various decorative fonts (the fonts.com website offers a similar set of examples), while the second does exactly the same for the Chinese character 黑 (hēi/black); see my photo of part of the page. The issue Hofstader is exploring with these figures is that of creating a font-making machine that can generate all possible versions of the letter A while also excluding everything that is not an A. However, the figures also serve to illustrate the fact that a reader who is very familiar with a particular set of graphemes (in this case, the Latin alphabet and Chinese characters, respectively) will have a much easier job separating out the decorative flourishes of a particular font from the underlying structural/meaningful parts.

In short: the more practice you get at reading Chinese characters in different fonts, the better you will be at it.

When I started learning to read Chinese menus, I got tripped up a lot by even very simple variations in the way a given character was depicted in different fonts. For example, the character 包 (bāo/package/bundle/bun) has a completely enclosed rectangular area in the centre in some fonts, yet in other fonts this area is open at the left-hand side (screenshot). It took me some time to properly convince myself that it was still the same character. Another one like this is 拌 (bàn/mixed), which in some fonts has the two strokes at the top on the right-hand side pointing inwards at the top, and in other fonts has them pointing outwards at the top (screenshot). Again, it took me some time to recognise these as the same thing.

I can mostly deal with these sorts of variation now, but every so often I still have to check whether a character really is the one I think it might be. I usually do this by pasting it into a Word document and viewing it in a couple of different fonts; the ones I mostly use are 儷宋 Pro and 华文楷体. I have no particular reason for choosing these, just that they happen to be installed on my Mac and they look fairly different from each other.

Relatedly, Chinese-Tools.com has a calligraphy editor that you can use to play around with viewing familiar characters in different fonts (note that the options in section 3 and the final option in section 1 will show you simplified characters rather than traditional ones). Some of these fonts are more like handwriting than printing, but it's still interesting to see the variations.

(Update, July 2013: see also Simon Cozens' post.)

Footnote: I also have more trouble than I should reading things handwritten in English, which is my native language. This is partly because I rarely read handwritten text any more, so I'm out of practice. My own handwriting (example photo) is not actually handwriting as such, since it's not cursive, but rather what we used to call "printing".