Adventures with Kake

As regular readers will know, I am quite a fan of Chinese cold dishes. One that I order often is 涼拌木耳 (liáng bàn mù ěr), a dish of marinated black fungus, sometimes spicy, sometimes enlivened with a hint of Chinese black vinegar, sometimes both.

There are many variations of this dish, and many different names. I mentioned a few of the names I've seen on Wednesday, but others include 美味野生木耳 (měi wèi yě shēng mù ěr), literally "delicious wild wood ear fungus", and 爽口木耳 (shuǎng kǒu mù ěr), literally "tasty and refreshing wood ear fungus".

I couldn’t find a recipe in English for this, but I tried Google Translate on a few Chinese-language ones I found, and boiling the 木耳 seemed to be the way to go. I reconstituted the dried fungus by soaking in warm water for 30 minutes, then boiled it for 5 minutes (which was possibly a minute or two too long), then dressed it with black Chinese vinegar, a little bit of sugar to balance the vinegar, a splash of soy sauce, and some home-made chilli oil. I’d have added sesame oil too, but I'd run out.

It's worth noting that this fungus expands enormously when soaked, so even a smallish bag of it will feed many, many people. I used 20g of dried black fungus, which after soaking increased in weight to nearly 250g!

I've discussed the use of various ingredients in Chinese cuisine here before, including greens, potatoes, eggs, and chilli bean paste. I only have time for a quick post today, so I just want to give a quick shout-out to dried ingredients, and point people at the eGullet thread on the subject.

Some of my favourite Chinese dried ingredients are dried scallops (conpoy), dried black fungus (wood ear/木耳/mù ěr), and dried tea tree mushrooms (茶樹菇/chá shù gū). How about you? What dried ingredients do you like to use in cooking Chinese food? And what dishes using dried ingredients do you like to eat in restaurants?

心 (xīn) is the Chinese character for heart/mind/centre. In the context of the Chinese menu, it is perhaps most prominent as part of the term "dim sum": 點心. As I've mentioned before, "dim sum" is the Cantonese pronunciation; it would be diǎn xīn in Mandarin pinyin.

心 also appears in the names of various Chinese vegetables, such as 蒜心 (suàn xīn/garlic shoots). Another is 空心菜 (kōng xīn cài), literally "hollow-hearted vegetable", also known as 通菜 (tōng cài), ong choy, water spinach, morning glory, and so on.

Perhaps the most confusing is 菜心 (cài xīn), which I've seen translated not only as "choy sum" and "Chinese flower cabbage", but also as "pak choi" (example). However, "pak choi" is normally used to refer to a different vegetable; it's a Romanisation of the Cantonese pronunciation of 白菜 (bái cài). Wikipedia suggests that the reason for this apparent conflation might be that when 菜心 is used for pak choi, it's the literal meaning, "cabbage heart", that's intended — it signifies that only the tender centre of the vegetable is used in the dish.

心 can also mean a literal heart, as in 豬心 (zhū xīn/pig heart) or 鴨心 (yā xīn/duck heart). I've not seen either of these in the name of a dish, but I have seen them used on menus which give further explication of the ingredients in a dish; for example, Fuzhou restaurant in London Chinatown has a dish called 炒三味 (chǎo sān wèi), literally "stirfried three tastes", and the menu notes in brackets that these three tastes are 肚片 (dǔ piàn/sliced tripe), 豬心 (zhū xīn/pig heart), and 豬舌 (zhū shé/pig tongue).

Here are some dishes with 心 in the name:

As I mentioned on Monday, 心 in some form also turns up as a radical and a non-radical component in a number of menu-related characters and words. One where 心 is actually the radical is 怪 (guài/strange), which is used in the name of the dish 怪味兔 (guài wèi tù), or "strange-flavour rabbit". (Don't confuse the 忄 form of 心 with the "squashed" radical form of 木, which appears in e.g. 梅/méi/plum/prune.) Some examples using 心 as a non-radical component are 筷子 (kuài zi/chopsticks), 燜 (mèn/stewed), and 蔥 (cōng/spring onion).

The main purpose of this blog was to document my journey in learning to read Chinese menus. I started this project around the beginning of 2010 because I was intrigued by the many restaurants here in London that have Chinese-language menus with different dishes from the English-language ones. I find I generally prefer the food offered on the former type, so I needed a way to acquire it. A year later, I had become fairly confident in ordering from a Chinese-language menu, but decided to continue the blog because researching and writing the posts was a good incentive to continue learning more about the different cuisines of China.

The Chinese menu project is now officially retired, though the posts will remain open for comments.

I may in the future decide to use this blog 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.

Here are some useful posts to read if you're new here:

• On learning to read Chinese menus (first post, explanation of blog structure)
• How to comment here
• Index of posts on concepts (subjects)
• Index of posts on individual characters
• Index of posts on individual dishes

I mentioned in Monday's post on chopsticks that one important consideration in preparing Chinese dishes is making sure that the pieces of food are cut suitably for picking up with chopsticks. Today I'm discussing two common Chinese menu characters related to cutting up food: 丁 (dīng/diced) and 片 (piàn/sliced).

As john points out in a comment on my post on 雞/jī/chicken, 丁 in the name of a dish may indicate that the pieces of meat will be boneless, though in my experience this isn't a hard-and-fast rule.

片 doesn't always literally mean "sliced". For example, 魚片 (yú piàn), though literally translated as "sliced fish", may also be used to refer to whole fish fillets rather than fish slices. Also, as sung noted in a comment on my post on 茶/chá/tea, the Cantonese name for jasmine tea is 香片 (hong pian in Cantonese, xiāng piàn in pinyin), literally "fragrant slice".

Here are some dishes with 丁 in the name:

and here are some with 片:

I briefly mentioned jellyfish in my post earlier this week on 海 (hǎi/ocean/sea). The Mandarin Chinese word for jellyfish is 海蜇 (hǎi zhé), literally "sea sting", referring to one of their more notorious characteristics. According to Wikipedia, the journey of a jellyfish from the sea to the table is quite an extended one, with processing taking up to 40 days. Happily, the jellyfish on sale in Chinese supermarkets has already undergone this processing. It's worth noting, though, that there are two kinds; one is ready to eat, but the other needs to be soaked in water overnight to remove the salt. I don't think there's any great advantage to the kind that needs to be soaked, so it's worth looking out for the ready-to-eat type.

Jellyfish has no flavour of its own, but it's great at soaking up other flavours and providing interesting texture to a dish. I find the texture is fairly similar to the cartilage in chicken feet, which I quite enjoy crunching on at dim sum outings.

On Chinese menus, jellyfish generally appears as a cold dish, shredded and mixed with a savoury dressing based on soy sauce, vinegar, and sesame oil. Sometimes the dish also includes chicken (雞/jī) and/or cucumber (黃瓜/huáng guā or 青瓜/qīng guā).

The chicken may be listed as hand-torn (手撕/shǒu sī), and the character 絲 (sī/shredded) may also appear in the name somewhere; all of the main ingredients are basically shredded, but sometimes this is left implicit. Other ingredients, such as sesame oil (麻油/má yóu or 香油/xiāng yóu), may or may not be listed specifically. Finally, the character 皮 (pí/skin) may also be appended to 海蜇, perhaps in reference to the thinness of the edible part. Hence, there's quite a lot of variation in the name of this dish; I've seen it variously as 海蜇手撕雞, 海蜇拌雞絲, 青瓜海蜇絲, 海蜇黃瓜, and 香油海蜇皮, among other names, including simply 涼拌海蜇 (liáng bàn hǎi zhé), literally "cold mixed jellyfish", usually translated as "jellyfish salad".

Sunflower's recipe for the dish includes both chicken and cucumber, and spices it up with fresh chillies and chilli oil. Ken Hom's Chinese Recipes has a plainer, simpler recipe, which simply involves dressing 225g jellyfish with 2 tsp soy sauce, 3 Tbsp sesame oil, 2 tsp white rice vinegar, and 2 tsp sugar, marinating for 30 minutes, then scattering over 3 Tbsp toasted sesame seeds. I can personally vouch for Sunflower's recipe, though I prefer it without too much chicken in.

Last July, I discussed the issue of fonts and handwriting in connection with reading Chinese menus. To summarise, I had two main points:

• The more practice you get at reading Chinese characters in different fonts, the better you will be at it.
• Certain characters, such as 包 (bāo/package/bun) and 拌 (bàn/mixed), seem to vary between fonts in ways that to a naïve eye might make them appear to be different characters.

The first of these is fairly straighforward, but the second gave rise to some interesting discussion in the comments. Firstly, pulchritude pointed out that some of the examples I gave may only show differences when a Chinese font is compared to a non-Chinese (e.g. Japanese) font, though this doesn't get us off the hook either, since I've certainly seen such characteristics in at least one font used on Chinese menus in London.

Also, shuripentu noted that while 包 doesn't seem to mind whether its central rectangular area is closed or open, there's at least one set of three characters, with different meanings, that differ only in terms of whether the rectangular area is closed, half-closed, or open: 己, 已, and 巳.

Clearly this is a complicated issue! So I was quite pleased to recently run across the Wikipedia article on variant Chinese characters. It appears that while some of these variations are in fact down to aesthetic choices made by the designer of the font, others are considered to be true differences in the basic form of the character.

This might seem an arbitrary distinction, but when it comes to using Chinese characters in a computing context, the difference is explicit. Sets of variants which are considered sufficiently different will either be mapped to different Unicode code points[see footnote], or all mapped to the same code point but distinguished from each other by so-called language tags.

A brief digression here to explain what I mean by a code point. A code point is essentially a numeric label for a character. To simplify vastly, when you type and save a document on your computer, it doesn't store the individual pixels that make up the representation of the letters on your screen, but rather these numeric labels. When you come to view the document again, it reconstructs how it should look, using the characters' code points along with your chosen font(s) and other formatting information. It's easy to redisplay what you've written in a different font, because the underlying characters haven't changed.

I'm not aware of any common menu characters that are mapped to different code points, but there are some which are mapped to the same code point but have different representations under different language tags. Below are some examples of the same character rendered "in mainland Chinese" (zh-cn), "in Hong Kong Chinese" (zh-hk), and "in Japanese" (ja). These may or may not look different, depending on your browser setup, so I've added a screenshot of how they look to me (transcript in the alt tag).

What does this mean for the student of the Chinese menu? Perhaps not a great deal in practical terms. In general, the degree of this type of variation is much smaller than the degree of variation between traditional and simplified characters. Also, unlike the traditional/simplified case, I'm not aware of any patterns that you can use to predict how a character might vary. Finally, regardless of whether or not a character's variations are captured by different code point allocations, the most important thing is to become familiar with them to the point where you can confidently recognise them as the same character.

I still think it's interesting, though! And hopefully you do too.

Footnote: [0] Incidentally, this type of variation is by no means confined to Chinese script. In the Latin alphabet, for example, the lowercase letter "a" has two main basic forms of representation. The one most commonly used in handwriting (at least in the UK) takes the form of a circle with a vertical stroke down the right-hand side. The other has a hooked extension to this vertical stroke, curving back to the left over the circular part. (See diagram on Wikipedia.) In most contexts, the difference between the two is unimportant, a mere matter of the font designer's preference. However, in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), they represent different vowel sounds, and so there are two relevant Unicode code points: "a" (U+0061/LATIN SMALL LETTER A) and "ɑ" (U+0251/LATIN SMALL LETTER ALPHA). Depending on the font you're using in your browser, "a" and "ɑ" may look quite similar to each other, or very different. pne has a couple more examples in comments.

鮮 (xiān) is one of the characters I mentioned on Monday as having a fairly regular simplified form (鲜). Its radical is 魚 (yú/fish), and its other component, 羊 (yáng/lamb), is also often found on menus. The dictionaries I've consulted say that its main meaning is "fresh", though in her Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, Fuchsia Dunlop glosses it as "delicious and savoury, the Chinese equivalent of umami", and a post by blogger Red Cook backs this up.

鮮 appears on menus in a number of contexts. It's often used in connection with 蝦 (xiā/prawn), as 鮮蝦, perhaps to emphasize that the prawns are fresh rather than dried (though dried prawns are usually explicitly listed, as 蝦米/xiā mǐ). I've also seen it used in this way in connection with 魷魚 (yóu yú/squid) and 帶子 (dài zi/scallops).

It also forms part of the word for seafood: 海鮮 (hǎi xiān), literally "ocean [海] fresh"). In reference to this meaning, the term 三鮮 (sān xiān), or "three fresh things", is often used to mean "mixed seafood" (e.g. prawns, squid, and scallops). Note however that this should not be confused with the dish 地三鮮 (dì sān xiān), literally "three fresh things from the earth", which consists of deep-fried potato, aubergine, and green peppers in a savoury sauce.

Here are some dishes with 鮮 in the name:

Hand-torn cabbage (手撕包菜/shǒu sī bāo cài) is, as far as I know a Hunan dish (please correct me in comments if I'm wrong). I've seen it on the menu of two Chinese restaurants in London, both of which specialise in Hunan food (Golden Day in Chinatown and Local Friends in Golders Green), and there's a recipe for it in Fuchsia Dunlop's Hunan cookbook, Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook.

As I mentioned on Wednesday, 手 (shǒu) means "hand". 撕 (sī) means to rip or to tear, so 手撕 is translated as "hand-torn". 包菜 translates as "wrapped vegetable"; it's similar to the white cabbage that people from the UK might be more familiar with, though according to the abovementioned Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, its leaves are wrapped slightly more loosely. (I actually wonder if pointed cabbage/hispi might be a better analog than white cabbage.)

TravelChinaGuide has a plausible-looking recipe for 手撕包菜, in which the cabbage is first blanched in boiling water and then stirfried with garlic, spring onion, fresh red chillies, chicken stock, vinegar, and soy sauce, before being finished with a little cornflour thickener. Fuchsia Dunlop's recipe is somewhat simpler; she skips the initial blanching, uses dried red chillies instead of fresh ones, omits the garlic, spring onion, stock, soy sauce, and cornstarch, and triples the quantity of vinegar.

TravelChinaGuide explains that one reason for tearing the cabbage instead of cutting it is that this is believed to better preserve the vitamin C in the vegetable; and also states that the dish is usually served late in a meal, after the meat dishes.

Last Monday I looked at how to put a meal together in a Chinese restaurant. Today I'm going to talk about serving Chinese food at home.

A note before I start: as I've mentioned before, I'm neither Chinese nor of Chinese descent. Also, I've never eaten a Chinese meal in a Chinese home. So this is all from the perspective of someone who's learned about the cuisine via books, newspaper articles, conversations with friends, blogs, YouTube videos, restaurant food, etc. This disclaimer does of course apply to all my posts on Chinese food, but I wanted to make it explicit here since I'm talking about the culture of home cooking rather than about restaurant meals or individual dishes.

Having said that, I've been cooking various styles of food for over twenty years, and I do cook Chinese food at home fairly often, so hopefully this post will be of interest to other people who want to cook more Chinese food themselves.

One aspect that's often mentioned as being intimidating is the idea of cooking more than one "main dish" per meal. You don't have to do this — noodle soups such as sung's fishball noodle soup or other noodle dishes such as 炸醬麵/zhà jiàng miàn can make a satisfying and complete meal — but in general, even a very simple Chinese meal will include at least one dish per person (plus rice/noodles).

"Dish" here refers to a flavourful vegetable/meat/fish/seafood/beancurd/etc concoction. The rice or noodles provide the bulk, while the other dishes provide the interest. To get a good balance to the meal, there should be more than one of these "flavour" dishes, using varied ingredients, textures, and seasonings.

At first, this sounds a lot more complicated than simply making, for example, pasta with sauce, or stew with dumplings, or curry and rice, or sausages and mash, but in my opinion this is more a matter of practice and familiarity than anything else. There's some discussion of this issue on a thread on eGullet (if that link doesn't put you in the right place, scroll to post #77 for the start of the conversation). As the participants there point out, one key strategy is to have a repertoire of dishes that you know you can cook quickly without too much thought. Another trick is to serve some cold dishes, which can be prepared in advance and can also form part of multiple meals over the week.

Another eGullet thread, focusing on home-style dishes from the south of China, notes that steamed dishes are a nice addition to a home-cooked meal, and if you have a separate steamer this saves you from having to worry about making multiple dishes in the same wok. Soup also comes in handy.

Speaking of separate appliances, I'd be lost without my rice cooker. It does take up a certain amount of space in the kitchen, but I use it often enough that it's worth it. Particularly when I'm tired from work or in a rush to get dinner on the table, it really does take a lot of pressure off to just be able to throw rice and water into it, push a button, and not have to think about it or check on it until I'm ready to dish up.

Finally, there's not much there yet since I only started it a couple of months ago, but the "Chinese" tag on my home cooking Tumblr might be of interest.

What are your favourite Chinese dishes to cook at home? Any tips to add to those above?