Adventures with Kake

Photo © Ewan-M, used under cc-by-sa.

Today's dish is one of the ones I mentioned in Monday's post on dishes with flowery/poetic names — 螞蟻上樹 (mǎ yǐ shàng shù), which translates literally as "ants climbing a tree". I've seen it actually listed under this name in English translations on menus, though more often they go for the less-exciting option of "minced pork with vermicelli" or something along those lines. The vermicelli represents the tree, and the specks of minced pork are the ants.

螞蟻 (mǎ yǐ) means "ant", and I think I can feel fairly confident in stating that 螞蟻上樹 is the only context in which you're likely to see it used on a menu.

上 (shàng) is the "climbing" part; it has a number of related meanings such as "above", "superior", "previous", and "summit". Aside from its use in 螞蟻上樹, I've mostly seen it as 上湯 (shàng tāng), literally "superior soup", which is often translated as "consomme" or "rich broth" and is used in dishes such as 上湯豆苗 (shàng tāng dòu miáo). As mentioned in my post on 豆/dòu, 豆苗 are pea shoots/mangetout leaves, so 上湯豆苗 is essentially mangetout leaves moistened with a tasty stock/broth (photo).

樹 means "tree" or "plant". It's not a particularly common character on menus, but it does appear in the form of 茶樹菇 (chá shù gū), or tea tree mushrooms (also known as willow mushrooms or Agrocybe aegerita). (If anyone knows where to buy these in London, dried or fresh, I would be very interested. Update, July 2010: Found the dried version on the first floor of New Loon Moon in Chinatown. Still looking for fresh ones — they may be seasonal.)

螞蟻上樹 is a Sichuan dish, and unsurprisingly it's intensely-flavoured and quite spicy. It's made with 粉絲 (fěn sī), which are normally translated as "bean thread noodles", "glass noodles", or the rather non-specific "vermicelli". 粉絲 are thin, resilient noodles made from mung bean flour. They come dried (I've never seen them on sale fresh) in packages of various sizes — this is important to note, since unlike rice or wheat noodles they're very hard to cut or break in their dried form, so it's worth looking out for them packaged in sizes that you're likely to want to use. I often use them for a single serving in a quick salad or whatever, so I find the multipacks of individual 50g packages are very useful. Lóngkǒu (龍口) brand is a good one, if you can find it. (Londoners: Loon Fung in Silvertown has 龍口粉絲 in various package sizes.)

Sunflower Food Galore, a blog I've mentioned before, has a recipe for 螞蟻上樹 which I've made a few times. It includes celery, which I haven't seen in other recipes; the Angie's Recipes version omits the celery and marinates the pork mince before cooking it. Neither of these recipes includes Sichuan pepper (花椒), but the version pictured above, which I ate at Chilli Cool in Bloomsbury, definitely had a flavour of 花椒, so I'm not sure if it should traditionally be included or not. The dish is tasty either way.

Update, October 2010: Although I was previously of the opinion that this dish isn't worth it without the meat, I recently tried making it with very finely-chopped courgette (zucchini) instead of the pork mince, cooking the courgette just enough to soften it slightly but not go mushy. It worked pretty well, so I'm now happy to make this even when I don't have pork mince on hand.

Recipes linked in this post:

• Sunflower Food Galore: Ants climbing the tree
• Angie's Recipes: Ants climbing a tree / 蚂蚁上树

The lovely Dreamwidth developers added a new feature in their latest code push — search boxes for journal sidebars — so there's now a convenient way to search through all my posts. TwoThree caveats:

• The search doesn't work properly for Chinese characters. Dreamwidth are aware of this but I don't know when it will be resolved. In the meantime, it's best to search in English or pinyin (you don't need to include the accents for the pinyin).
• It searches all my posts, not just the ones about Chinese menus. You can get around this to some extent by adding "chinese menu" to your search term.
• Because resources to run the search are currently a bit limited, the search is only available to logged-in users (and hence the search box will only appear for logged-in users). However, you don't need a Dreamwidth account to log in to the site — you can do it via OpenID, and I've confirmed that the search works fine for OpenID users.

While I'm posting, I thought I should mention that although all my recent posts have been about Chinese menus, I may from time to time use this journal for other kinds of posts. If you're only interested in the Chinese menu stuff, just follow my "chinese menu" tag and the other stuff will be filtered out: web, RSS, Atom.

酸菜魚, or suān cài yú, is more of the more economically-named dishes on the Chinese menu. 酸菜 is pickled mustard greens, and as mentioned a couple of weeks ago, 魚 is fish. It should be easy enough then to deduce that 酸菜魚 involves both pickled greens and fish, but the part that usually goes unmentioned in the name of the dish is that it also involves enough broth/stock that it's most sensibly translated as "fish soup with pickled greens".

Furthermore, it also comes in both spicy and non-spicy versions, and it's not always clear which one you're going to get. However, if you order it in a Sichuan restaurant, for example, you'll probably end up with a spicy one! The one pictured above is a non-spicy version that I ate at my local Chinese restaurant, Royal Palace, which specialises more in northern Chinese food. I also have a photo of a version I ate at Red & Hot, which is a Sichuan restaurant; this one was not only pretty spicy, but the broth was richer and the fish was in fillets rather than the bone-in pieces used at Royal Palace. (This one was listed on the menu as 風味酸湯魚/fēng wèi suān tāng yú, which means something like "local-flavour sour soup with fish".)

English-language recipes for 酸菜魚 are few and far between on the internet. Angie's recipe looks plausible, as does this somewhat idiosyncratically-translated one from chinesefoodfans.com. Both seem to be of the spicy type. This YouTube video (in English) offers a less-spicy version which looks more similar to the one pictured above. I've made a transcript of the video for those who can't or prefer not to listen to it.

I'm afraid I can't give a personal opinion of any of those three recipes, since I only managed to locate the right kind of 酸菜 a couple of days ago (from See Woo in London's Chinatown), and haven't had time to cook since. (This dish was a last-minute replacement for the one I'd originally intended to feature today, necessary because of the unexpected closure of the restaurant where I'd planned to sample a dish known as tiger salad. Apologies for the disorganisation!)

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Chinese characters are not unstructured scribbles, but formed from specific strokes made in a specific order. I hinted at another aspect of the structure of these characters a couple of weeks before that, too, when I discussed 魚 (yú), the character for fish.

As a reminder, here are four of the words mentioned in my 魚 post:

If you look at the left-hand sides of 魷, 鯽, 鰻, and 鱔, you'll see what I described as "a sort of squashed version of 魚" — this is in fact what's known as a radical. Basically, a radical is the means by which a Chinese character is indexed (and thus located) in a dictionary. The radical often appears on the left-hand side of the character, but it may also appear in other positions. Note that it's an intrinsic, inseparable part of the character, not a prefix or suffix that can be left off.

When you're trying to identify a character you've seen on a menu, you can narrow your search down considerably if you can recognise its radical. My favourite way of searching by radical is the CantoDict radical search, but you may prefer the mandarintools.com version.

Generally, to look a character up by its radical, you'll need to know the number of the radical. There are 214 radicals in all, some used more commonly than others. The Wikipedia list of radicals points out that seven of them are used in more than 1,000 characters each, so these are well worth getting to know. As well as the seven mentioned there — 艸/cǎo/grass, 水/shuǐ/water, 木/mù/tree, 手/shǒu/hand, 口/kǒu/mouth, 心/xīn/heart, and 虫/chóng/insect — I also find the following crop up quite often in the characters used on menus:

You don't need to worry too much at this stage about memorising radicals. Just be aware of their existence, and eventually you'll start noticing patterns in the characters that you see showing up often.

It's important to remember that while the radical can give you a clue as to the meaning of the character, it's not guaranteed to have anything to do with the meaning. The only thing you can rely on a radical to be is a way of organising characters in a dictionary, similar to alphabetical ordering.

Last Wednesday I posted about 粉/fěn, the character for rice noodles. Obviously, though, not all noodles are made from rice flour! The character for wheat noodles is 麵, or miàn.

As my friend Mr Noodles points out, "chow mein" is actually not a made-up term, but the Cantonese term for stir-fried noodles. (shuripentu notes in comments that the Cantonese pronunciation is approximately "tsow meen".) The Chinese characters for this are 炒麵 (chǎo miàn). 炒, which basically means "stir-fried", is a pretty common character on Chinese menus, so it's worth remembering.

Approximate Mandarin pronunciations: 炒 (chǎo) rhymes with "ow". Remember, the caret on the vowel means you use the third tone (falling-then-rising). 麵 (miàn) rhymes with 片 (piàn), the pronunciation of which I attempted to describe a couple of weeks ago. The grave accent on the vowel means it's pronounced with the fourth tone (falling tone).

Although in a more general context 麵 could also refer to wheat flour or dough made from wheat flour, on a menu it pretty much always refers to noodles; unsurprising, since menus don't generally list raw ingredients such as flour and dough!

Two types of noodle that are worth looking out for are 刀削麵 (dāo xiāo miàn) and 拉麵 (lā miàn). 刀削麵, or knife-cut noodles, are chewy, irregularly-shaped noodles cut on-the-fly from a block of dough directly into the boiling water that they're cooked in. This YouTube video shows them being made. 拉麵, or hand-pulled noodles, are pulled and stretched out by hand. This blog post has photos and a couple of videos, and there are more photos in the La Mian Flickrpool.

Approximate pronunciations: dāo rhymes with "ow", xiāo rhymes with "yow", and lā rhymes with "ah". See my post on 豆/dòu for info on how to pronounce "x" (and make sure to check out ajva's comment too).

Note for Londoners: there's a noodle bar at 33 Cranbourn Street (near Leicester Square) that offers both 刀削麵 and 拉麵 — I don't have a photo of the frontage, but I do have one of the writing in the window. You can also get 拉麵 at Noodle Oodle, which has branches on Oxford Street and on Queensway in Bayswater.

Photo © Ewan-M, used under cc-by-sa.

Corn with salted egg yolk (鹹蛋黃玉米粉) is a dish I only learned about recently, at a dinner at Sichuan Restaurant in Acton with Su-Lin and a few other friends and food bloggers. This restaurant is Su-Lin's local, and she insisted on us ordering this dish — it was really very very tasty indeed. The photo above was taken by ewan on that occasion. I was excited to realise a week or so later that my local Chinese restaurant had the very same dish on its menu — sadly, it turned out to be greasier and not as good.

鹹蛋黃玉米粉 only includes a handful of ingredients — sweetcorn (fresh, canned, or frozen), egg white and cornstarch to coat the sweetcorn, oil for frying, the yolks of salted duck eggs, a few bits of spring onion, and optionally some rice wine to flavour the egg yolks. 玉米 (yù mǐ) is sweetcorn. The 粉 (fěn) character in the name of the dish refers to the cornstarch coating, and is sometimes omitted, so you may see this dish listed simply as 鹹蛋黃玉米 (xián dàn huáng yù mǐ). Beware the pitfall of attaching the 粉 character to the 米 (mǐ) character and assuming that the dish includes 米粉, or vermicelli — it doesn't. The 米 is part of 玉米 and the 粉 stands alone.

Salted eggs (鹹蛋/xián dàn) are not the same thing as century eggs (皮蛋/pí dàn, literally "skin eggs"). 鹹蛋 are simply duck eggs that have been left to sit in brine for around 40 days. As the salt works its way inside the egg, the white becomes salty (though remains liquid) and the yolk gradually solidifies. Unlike 皮蛋, which can be eaten as-is, 鹹蛋 need to be cooked before you eat them, usually by steaming. Often, only the yolks (蛋黃/dàn huáng, literally "egg yellow") are eaten, and you can sometimes buy these already separated from the whites. If not, just buy the eggs whole, and separate them as you would normally separate an egg.

The interweb doesn't seem to have very much information about 鹹蛋黃玉米粉 available in English. The only English-language recipe I've managed to find is this one from the GoKunming website, which also offers an alternative name for the dish — 金沙玉米, or jīn shā yù mǐ, literally "golden sands corn" — and states that the recipe is a Yunnan specialty (Kunming being the capital of Yunnan province).

I found that the recipe as written was not very successful. My first batch, done according to the instructions, was a greasy, starchy mess that went straight in the bin. The second batch was better; I doubled the oil (you're essentially deep-frying the corn, so the more oil you have, the less the temperature will drop when you add the corn) and made sure to shake the hell out of the cornstarch-coated corn grains before putting them in the wok, to remove all excess starch. The third batch was even better; I took a tip from this video (in Chinese with partially-obscured Chinese subtitles) and coated the sweetcorn in a little egg white before tossing it with cornstarch, leaving it to sit for a few minutes, then shaking off the excess as before.

My fourth attempt involved giving the (canned, drained, and dried) sweetcorn an initial light coating of cornstarch, shaking off the excess, mixing in some egg white, giving it another, heavier coating of cornstarch, letting it sit for a while, then shaking off the excess again. I also increased the number of salted egg yolks from 3 to 4, and added a small pinch of salt along with the rice wine. This was my most successful attempt so far, and although it wasn't quite as good as the version pictured at the top of this post, it was pretty damned good, so I decided to leave the experiment there before I completely lost the desire to ever eat sweetcorn again.

Luckily, there was enough sunlight left for me to get a nice shot of version four, on the walkway outside my front door.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned a few searchable online dictionaries for looking characters up. This is all well and good when you know the pinyin for a character and so can type it in, or when the character is on a restaurant's website so you can copy and paste it, but it's less useful when you're looking at a paper menu and trying to puzzle out a character whose pinyin you have no idea of.

Fear not — there is a solution! But it does require an understanding of how Chinese characters are written.

Like letters in the Latin alphabet, Chinese characters are not drawn haphazardly, but written in a specific way — each time you write a character, you use the same strokes in the same order. The order isn't arbitrary, though; a small set of rules (with some exceptions and regional variations) determines the order in which the strokes should be written. Also, despite the complex appearance of many characters, there are only really eight basic strokes.

You don't need to learn to write characters in order to learn to read them. However, knowing the strokes and the stroke order rules is invaluable for looking things up via handwriting recognition programs! The one I use is the ChineseTools.com Mouse Input lookup. (Update, June 2012: the ChineseTools one isn't working for me any more, so I'm now using one by Mobilefish instead.)

I won't be posting my own guide to strokes and stroke order here, since there are already plenty of good ones on the interweb; two of these are at zhongwen.com and at CantoDict. Keeping these principles in mind, I find I get a pretty good hit rate when playing with the handwriting recognition tool above.

Furthermore... although as mentioned above you don't need to learn to write if your main aim is to learn to read, I have found that knowing how to write a character can help me remember it. If you also find this, then you can get free printable calligraphy paper for practising on at CantoDict and at Incompetech. To see some examples, there are a number of characters in animated GIF form on Tim Xie's website, and there's also an online version of the eStroke software which lets you enter any Chinese character and view the stroke order (I'm having trouble viewing it properly in Firefox with addons and Flashblock, but it's fine in Safari and Opera).

Update, July 2010: I've now discovered the YellowBridge stroke order widget, which I find a lot easier to use than the eStroke one mentioned in the previous version of this post.

As an aside for those interested, Wikipedia has an article on the history of and regional variations in stroke order.

Having covered meat and fish, it's time to turn to the other protein staple of the Chinese menu — tofu, or beancurd. The full name for beancurd is 豆腐 (dòu fu), which is made up of the character for "beans/legumes" (豆) charmingly combined with the character for "gone off/rotten" (腐). Needless to say, beancurd is not actually rotten, and it's not even fermented; it's a fresh product made by coagulating soya milk. Wikipedia suggests that 腐 can also be translated as "curdled", but I have no idea how accurate this is.

Translation of 腐 is much easier in the context of the Chinese menu. If you see 腐 on a menu, it simply means "beancurd" — it's a commonly accepted and widespread abbreviation for 豆腐.

Given that the pinyin for 豆 is dòu, readers of my post on 肉 (ròu) should be able to deduce that it's pronounced like "dough", with a falling (fourth) tone. 腐 is pronounced as "foo". On its own, it's spoken with the third tone (falling-then-rising), but when combined with 豆 to make 豆腐, 腐 is spoken with the "fifth tone" (also known as "neutral tone"); this basically means that the syllable is a toneless one. For more on the fifth tone, there are some useful hints from pulchritude in a previous comment thread.

Other words which use 豆:

Note that I've never seen 豆苗 used to refer to what we call "beansprouts" in English! A different "sprout" character (芽/yá) is used in that context — beansprouts are 銀芽 (yín yá, literally "silver sprouts"), 豆芽 (dòu yá), 大豆芽 (dà dòu yá), or 芽菜 (yá cài).

Approximate pronunciations (in my British accent): máo rhymes with "cow", tǔ is as "two", hé is as "her", lán rhymes with "man", miáo is as "meow" (one syllable, not two), yín rhymes with "in", yá and dà rhyme with "ah", and cài is like "sigh" but with "ts" instead of the "s".

xuě is a little trickier. The consonant, "x", is like the "ch" in German "ich" (at least, as taught in British schools) or a bit like a softer version of the "ch" in "loch". pne suggests that the vowel sound, "ue", is as if it was spelled uè in French, but my French isn't good enough to confirm this, so if yours isn't either, check out this YouTube video at the 3:50 point.

The first character in the name of this week's dish should be familiar to you from Wednesday's post on 魚/yú/fish. However, despite the name, which literally translates to "fish-fragrant", the 魚香 (yú xiāng) style of cooking doesn't actually involve any fish! Due to this, it's sometimes translated as "sea-spiced" instead. Fish-fragrant dishes are hot and salty, with side notes of sour and sweet; it's quite tricky to get the balance of this right, and some lesser renditions I've encountered have been much more like sweet-and-sour dishes than properly fish-fragrant.

One of the most important ingredients in getting the right flavour is 豆瓣醬 (dòu bàn jiàng) — also known as chilli bean paste. This is a spicy, salty, fermented mash of broad beans and chillies, and it's brilliant for adding flavour to almost anything. However! There are many different kinds of bean pastes that go under the name of 豆瓣醬 (a detailed discussion of bean pastes can be found on the eGullet forums).

I used to use Lee Kum Kee brand, until I read about a mini taste-test conducted by Fuchsia Dunlop and the head chef of Barshu restaurant. On the back of this, I went out and got some Chuan Lao Hui (川老匯) brand instead [photo], which I much prefer. Unlike the Lee Kum Kee stuff, the Chuan Lao Hui bean paste has only four ingredients: chilli, broad beans, salt, and wheat flour [photo]. When this jar runs out, I'll be trying Fuchsia's top recommendation of the 豆瓣醬 from the Sichuan Dan Dan Seasoning Co Ltd (Londoners: this is available at See Woo on Lisle Street in Chinatown).

One of the most common 魚香 dishes is 魚香肉絲 (yú xiāng ròu sī) — fish-fragrant shredded pork. However, the dish I'm posting about today is a vegetable-based one — 魚香茄子 (yú xiāng qié zi), aka fish-fragrant aubergine (eggplant). My recommended recipe is Fish Fragrant Aubergine from the always-reliable blog Sunflower's Food Galore. While the recipe as written does include pork mince, Sunflower suggests using soaked and chopped shiitake mushrooms instead for a meat-free (and, in fact, vegan) version.

Vocab lists

Very early on in my studies of Chinese Menu, I ran up against the need to make vocab lists. As discussed in the comments on Friday's post, I think it's well worth making your own notes and vocab lists, rather than relying on those made by other people. Not only does this let you organise (and reorganise) things in a way that makes most sense to you, it also gives you extra opportunities to work with the characters and hence cement them in your brain.

The only really tricky aspect of this is that some of the most common menu characters are actually quite complicated to write, so I found the easiest way to make my vocab lists was on the computer. While you can get away to some extent with just copying and pasting characters from the interweb, it's a lot quicker if you can set up your computer to let you input Chinese characters by typing in pinyin.

Typing in pinyin under OS X (tested on version 10.6.2)

• Go to System Preferences -> Language & Text -> Input Sources.
• Tick the appropriate boxes. I have "Chinese - Traditional / Pinyin - Traditional" ticked.
• I also have "U.S. Extended" ticked, to let me use accents such as ā (ALT-a a), á (ALT-e a), ǎ (ALT-v a), and à (ALT-` a) — these are very useful when you want to input actual pinyin (as opposed to characters) into a document.
• To help me keep track of what language I'm typing in, I also have the "Show Input menu in menu bar" checkbox ticked, which gives me a little country flag on my menu bar that shows me what my current input source is.
• To switch between input sources, press CMD-SPACE.
• Once in pinyin mode, to type a Chinese character just type the pinyin and press SPACE; this will give you a drop-down menu of all the characters that match the pinyin. Use the up and down arrow keys to find the one you want, then press RETURN to select it.
• Handily, the drop-down menu will adapt and learn from your choices, so after you've used it a few times, your most commonly-used characters will appear at the top.

Typing in pinyin under Ubuntu Karmic

In comments, shuripentu says:

On Ubuntu Karmic, one method of acquiring some form of Chinese input is to turn IBus on (via IBus Preferences), then set the keyboard input method system to IBUS (via Language Support). You may or may not need to add IBus to your startup applications.

Cangjie input seems to interpret a space bar keypress as both a break between characters and as a space, so I'm ending up with spaces between all my characters. If anyone knows how to stop this, please let me know.

I'm afraid I can't give instructions for other operating systems — does anyone have any hints to share?

Edit, August 2010: I now have a follow-up post to this.

Looking things up

It is, of course, also very useful to be able to look things up. The website I use most often for this is CantoDict; although it's run by a Cantonese speaker, it also includes Mandarin pronunciations in pinyin, and it makes a point of highlighting when a given character, word, or phrase is restricted to one dialect or the other. If CantoDict can't find the thing I'm searching for, then I check mandarintools.com.

These two aren't the only Chinese lookup tools on the web by any means. If you have a favourite that I haven't mentioned, please feel free to evangelise in comments.