Adventures with Kake

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:

As I mentioned on Wednesday, one cooking method that appears frequently on Chinese menus is 水煮 (shuǐ zhǔ), or "water-cooked". It would be a mistake to translate this simply as "boiled", however. The "water" is actually a flavourful, fiery stock enhanced with chilli bean paste (豆瓣醬/dòu bàn jiàng), and the spice level is increased further just before serving with a generous sprinkling of sauteed dried chillies and Sichuan pepper (花椒/huā jiāo).

The main ingredient of the dish might be beef (牛肉/niú ròu), rabbit (兔/tù), sliced pork (肉片/ròu piàn), tripe (肚/dǔ), or fish (魚/yú). Because it will be cooked only very briefly (a minute or so), the flesh is sliced thinly, against the grain where applicable. This, along with the choice of simmering rather than stirfrying, helps it stay nice and tender.

Appetite For China has a version of Fuchsia Dunlop's recipe for 水煮牛肉 which I tried out earlier this week. The recipe says to use flank steak. Because I learned to cook roughly a decade before I started eating meat, and hence still have some catching up to do in terms of expertise, I consulted my butcher — he told me that while he didn't have that cut on hand, rump would do nicely, so I bought a pound of that. It worked fine.

Where the recipe says to cut the celery into 2-inch lengths, I think it meant julienne, so that's what I did. It didn't say whether to crush the Sichuan pepper or not — I didn't, and I think I would have liked it a lot better if I had. The numbing flavour only really came out when I was lucky enough to crunch on a peppercorn, and I would have preferred it to be spread more throughout the dish. Also, I was concerned about too much saltiness, which I've found in the past can be a hazard of using chilli bean paste, so I skipped some of the salt in the recipe — I shouldn't have.

As shown in the photo at the top of this post, 水煮牛肉 is basically served as slices of beef swimming in copious amounts of oily, chilli-laded stock. You're not meant to drink all the stock, just lift the beef out and eat that. The recipe linked above uses 3 cups (700ml) of chicken stock for the liquid. I'm not entirely convinced that this much stock is absolutely necessary, and it feels a bit wasteful given that most of the liquid isn't eaten. Bob also mentioned that the flavours seemed to be a bit diluted, and the dish was less oily than when we've had it in restaurants. I may try using a little less stock next time.

In the first of my "concepts" posts, I briefly mentioned pronunciation, and linked to a couple of videos to demonstrate the four tones of Mandarin:

• China-8.com Chinese Lesson: Pinyin Tones (1 min 15 sec)
• Chinese sample lesson 1 - tones (5 mins 14 sec)

While I had trouble with the tones at first, I mostly have the hang of them now, in isolation. However! Syllables are not pronounced in isolation. In actual speech, certain changes take place when syllables come together to form words — and note that these phenomena occur in many languages (not just Mandarin) and in many aspects of pronunciation (not just tones).

The way that the tone of a syllable changes depending on its neighbours is known as tone sandhi, and in Mandarin it's governed by a number of rules. Perhaps the most apparent of these to the non-native speaker is the rule that deals with two third tones (falling-rising tones) in succession — the first of these tones becomes a second (rising) tone, and the second of them has its latter (rising) part de-emphasised. This is why the greeting 你好 is pronounced as "ní hǎo" even though the actual pinyin is "nǐ hǎo", and why the "ants" (螞蟻) in ants climbing a tree are pronounced as "má yǐ" rather than "mǎ yǐ". Note that the pinyin spellings remain unchanged, though.

Mandarin has several other tone sandhi rules, and there are a number of pages on the web which list them; here's one with embedded audio examples. The Sinosplice blog also has an interesting post on another way of thinking about Mandarin tones.

If you only want to learn to read menus, you don't actually need to know about this stuff. But I do think it's interesting! Not to mention that being able to pronounce the name of a dish as well as point to it will increase the chances of you actually getting what you intended to order...

瓜 (guā) is the character for "gourd", and is generally used for things in the somewhat hard-to-pronounce Cucurbitaceae family. Like the characters I mentioned on Monday, 瓜 varies in different fonts in a way that really confused me to start with (screenshot). It's worth getting to recognise, though, since not only is it used in its own right in several food-related words, it's also the radical for a few characters including the 瓣 (bàn) of 豆瓣醬 (dòu bàn jiàng) (screenshot).

Here are some ingredients that use 瓜 in the name:

As well as the above, superpitching recently discovered another 瓜 vegetable — 勝瓜 (shèng guā), which apparently translates as "sponge gourd", "angled luffa", or "Chinese okra" (pulchritude notes in comments that this is also known as 絲瓜/sī guā). I have never noticed this on a menu, but will be keeping my eyes open from now on, because in my brain a loofah is something you use in the bath, and so I would dearly like to eat one.

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

When I first began pondering the thought of teaching myself to read Chinese menus, I asked a few people whether they thought it was a good idea. While some said "yes" immediately, others warned me that I might find it difficult or even impossible, due to the common use on menus of "flowery" or poetic descriptions of dishes.

I took this warning to heart, and gave up on the project for some time, but then I came to realise that this is not by any means an intractable problem. If I'm capable of learning that "spotted dick" is not a venereal disease, surely I'm also capable of learning that "ants climbing a tree" is actually mung bean thread noodles with minced pork; or that the "three freshnesses of the earth" are fried potato, green pepper, and aubergine; or that "lions' heads" are large meatballs, usually braised with cabbage or some other vegetable to represent the lion's mane.

Indeed, regular readers will already know that pockmarked old woman's beancurd is tofu in a spicy sauce with minced pork and chilli bean paste, golden sands corn is fried sweetcorn kernels seasoned with mashed salted egg yolk, and fish fragrant aubergine in fact contains no fish. Perhaps the best way to look at it is as having to learn two categories of knowledge: first, what the characters mean, and second, what the dish names mean. The second set of knowledge needs to be acquired regardless of the language you want to learn to read a menu in — even to read a menu in your native tongue.

So, how do you learn the things in the second category? Having identified the characters in the name of a dish, how do you find out what the dish actually is? I have three main strategies for this, all involving searches on the name (as written in Chinese characters):

• Search for it on Flickr (example) or on Google Images (example). With luck, this will throw up several photos of the completed dish.
• Search for it on YouTube (example). You're quite likely to find a video of someone making it. Note that unlike Google, YouTube sometimes gives different results depending on whether you search with traditional or simplified characters, so it's worth trying both.
• Do a regular web search but also include the English translation of one or more of the characters (example). Sometimes all you'll find is a succession of less-than-useful translations along the lines of "chicken in sauce", but other times you'll find recipes or even entire essays on the history of a dish.

These strategies aren't foolproof — I still have no idea what 老成都耙耙菜 is in English, for example — but I find it works way more often than not.

A fourth strategy, of course, is just to go along to the restaurant where you saw the dish advertised, and order it. There's a blog post on Sinosplice that backs me up on this one! In fact, the dish linked in the previous paragraph is one that I ordered partly because I had no idea what it was (other than that it involved vegetables) and I wanted to find out. It was pretty damned tasty.

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:

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.

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).

Literally translated, 擔擔麵 means "peddler's noodles". As I noted on Wednesday, 麵 (miàn) on a menu pretty much always refers to wheat noodles. 擔 (dàn) is a less-common character in the context of the Chinese menu. The only other dish I'm aware of that includes 擔 in its name is 擔仔麵 (dàn zǎi miàn), or danzi/tan tsai noodles, a Taiwanese noodles-in-soup dish that also translates as "peddler's noodles". Wikipedia seems to think 擔擔麵 and 擔仔麵 are the same thing, but this doesn't sound right to me, and other sources also indicate otherwise.

Like mapo tofu, which I posted about a couple of weeks ago, dàn dàn miàn originates from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. In my experience, though, 擔擔麵 is much less likely than 麻婆豆腐 to turn up in a dumbed-down version on Anglo-Chinese menus, perhaps because the Westernised Chinese canon already has its exemplar noodle dish in the form of chow mein.

Of the Chinese dishes I've covered so far, 擔擔麵 is perhaps the one with the greatest variation in styles. Some versions are fairly dry, others almost soupy. Some are served hot, others cold. Some recipes insist that a peanut sauce is mandatory, while others prefer a sesame-based sauce, and others still omit both peanuts and sesame. Some include Sichuan preserved vegetable (芽菜/yá cài[see footnote] or 榨菜/zhà cài), while others use chopped cucumber.

Most reputable sources, however, agree that the key to good dàn dàn miàn is the aromatic spiciness imparted by Sichuan peppercorns (花椒/huā jiāo) and carried by the oily dressing. The quality of the noodles is another important factor. At Sichuan Restaurant in West London, the noodles used in 擔擔麵 are fresh, hand-pulled noodles (拉麵/lā miàn). It's not necessary to go quite this far — just choose a type and brand of noodles that you know you like. Not too thick, not too thin, made from wheat rather than rice. Dried or fresh will do.

Like many Chinese dishes, 擔擔麵 includes a small amount of pork mince for flavour and texture. It's fine to leave this out. If you do include the pork, cook it in a wok over high heat, aiming to get nice crispy bits (but don't burn it). You can drain the cooked pork in a sieve after cooking, if there's too much residual fat for your taste.

On to the recipes... first of all, if you'd like to try making your own Sichuan chilli oil (紅油/hóng yóu/"red oil") to use in the dish, Sunflower's Food Galore has a recipe.

Sunflower also has a recipe for dàn dàn miàn, of the "sesame and peanut" school. Alternatively, take a look at Fuchsia Dunlop's recipe, which uses neither sesame nor peanut. Personally, I like to use a fair bit more Sichuan pepper than specified in either recipe. Even more variations on the theme can be found at this Chowhound thread on dan dan mian. Finally, Appetite For China has an explicitly vegetarian version that uses smoked tofu.

Footnote: [0] You may recall from my post on beans that 芽菜 is also the word for "beansprouts", which can cause some confusion when shopping — see Fuchsia Dunlop's post on the subject for a photo that may help you track down the actual item.