No character/dish posts this week, I'm afraid — I'm not very well, and I haven't quite finished writing them, so I'm postponing them to next week. Next post will be the second half of "putting a meal together", on Monday.
One aspect of the Chinese menu that I should probably have explicitly covered somewhat earlier than this is the method of putting a meal together. Chinese dining differs from Western dining in that dishes are not served to individuals in strictly delimited courses, but to the entire table to share[see footnote 0]. This is the case whether the meal is a simple homecooked lunch or a grand formal banquet.
I'm going to discuss larger-scale restaurant-style meals today, since many of the principles hold for all types and scales of Chinese dining, and next week I'll offer some suggestions for eating Chinese food in smaller groups and at home.
One consequence of the "sharing" model is that the usual Western method of restaurant ordering, where each person decides individually what they want to eat with little or no reference to what everyone else wants to eat, doesn't always work too well. A meal should be balanced in terms of ingredients, flavours, and textures; and with the Chinese method of dining, if everyone's doing their own thing it's easy to end up with an imbalance. One way to overcome this is for the host (the person paying, or the person with the most experience with the cuisine, or the person who's been to this restaurant before, or the person who organised the outing, etc, etc) to decide what should be ordered, either unilaterally or in consultation with anyone else in the party who has an opinion.
Fuchsia Dunlop has an interesting blog post about the context in which a formal Chinese banquet is eaten. According to Gong Dan's Food & Drink in China, a standard banquet will consist of four cold plates, eight main dishes, two major showpieces (such as a whole fish, suckling pig, or chicken), as well as soup, rice, pastries and fruit.
I've not yet been lucky enough to participate in a meal this elaborate, though I have enjoyed a few Chinese meals in large groups, perhaps most notably a Hunan feast at Golden Day in London, where ten of us shared fourteen dishes including a whole steamed fish laden with chillies and garlic (photo of the fish).
It's worth noting that as ![[identity profile]](https://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
sung points out in comments, the food at a formal wedding or New Year banquet is served in the style of a tasting menu, with one dish arriving at a time — I've previously linked to Red Cook's 2008 New Year banquet, which illustrates this nicely. This differs from less-formal restaurant meals, in which dishes may arrive in any order and all sit on the table together. With this difference noted, I'm going to take Gong Dan's list above as a framework for describing the type of dishes that I might order to make up a less-structured restaurant meal.
Working through the list in order, I've discussed cold dishes (涼菜/liáng cài) before. As I mention in that post, these are often labelled in English as "starters", but in reality they can be eaten at any time during a meal[see footnote 1]. At a restaurant, they will often appear on the table first (if only because many of them can be prepared in advance and just need to be dished out), but you're not expected to finish eating them before your hot dishes (Gong Dan's "main dishes") arrive.
Regarding the hot dishes, it's worth noting that these should not all be meat-based. Well-prepared vegetable dishes are just as "main" a dish as any meat dish, and in my opinion any Chinese meal is incomplete without them. In fact, the last time I was out for a Chinese dinner with friends, at least two of us felt that the Chinese leaf in spicy vinegar sauce (photo) was our favourite dish of the evening. If I'm out with a group, I like to order a dish of fairly plainly-cooked greens as well as the more strongly-flavoured vegetable dishes such as fish-fragrant aubergine or dry-fried green beans with minced pork.
Aside from the number of dishes served, the major difference between a simple meal and a more fancy one is perhaps the centrepiece/showpiece dishes. These can be thought of as analagous to, for example, the meat component of a Western "Sunday dinner", and they may in fact consist of roasted meat; a ham or a chicken, perhaps. (Personally, I prefer the "whole fish" option, but then I've never been a great fan of Sunday dinner!)
I've previously discussed the issue of soup (湯/tāng), and come to the conclusion that there's great variation in the way soups are included in Chinese meals. They may be served first, last, or throughout the meal.
Finally, an ample quantity of rice is a must. I usually serve/order plain rice with a Chinese meal, rather than fried rice. The reason for this is that many Chinese dishes are designed to be eaten in relatively small quantities with plenty of plain rice, and hence have strong flavours that can get overwhelming without the rice to balance things up.
Footnote: [0] Individually-plated courses are actually a relatively new development in British dining. Known as "service à la Russe", according to Wikipedia it dates back no earlier than the 19th century.
Footnote: [1] There's a discussion relating to the use of the term "starters" on English-language Chinese menus in the comments section of a recent post on sung's blog.
Today's dish is a simple but delicious cold dish — beancurd with century egg (preserved duck egg). As I've explained previously, 皮 (pí/skin/leather/rind) in combination with 蛋 (dàn/egg) refers to duck eggs cured in a high-pH coating, leaving the whites "cooked" through to a translucent amber and the yolks dark green and creamy. I also discussed 豆腐 (dòu fu/beancurd) a while back.
皮蛋豆腐 is not complicated to make, but relies heavily on the quality of the ingredients. You want to use a fairly soft beancurd for this, and you want it to be as fresh as possible. Don't use the type that's marketed as a meat substitute (Cauldron brand, etc), as the texture is wrong, and also be careful about using aseptically-packaged brands, as many of them have a characteristic and (in my opinion) unpleasant flavour. Similarly, make sure that you like the taste of your century eggs on their own before using them in this dish.
Slice or cube the beancurd, then arrange it in a serving dish. Shell the century eggs, then halve, quarter, or chop them and arrange them on top of the beancurd.
The sauce for the dish is simply a mixture of soy sauce with sesame oil and/or Chinese black vinegar and/or a little chilli oil. You can garnish it with spring onions, either just the green parts or white and green together. I've also seen some recipes on the internet that add pork floss as a garnish, but I've never seen this in a restaurant (update, May 2011: I have now — at Leong's Legend, a Taiwanese restaurant in London Chinatown).
One of the main contexts in which you'd see 皮 (pí/skin/leather/rind) on a menu is as 皮蛋 (pí dàn), which translates literally as "skin egg" but is more commonly translated as "century egg", "thousand-year-old egg", or "preserved egg". I've previously discussed 皮蛋 in my post on 蛋 (dàn/egg).
皮 is also used on menus in a more literal sense, as 脆皮 (cuì pí), or "crispy skin"; this could apply to fish, chicken, pork, various deep-fried things such as tofu or spring rolls, and so on.
Similarly, 酥皮 (sū pí) is used to mean "flaky skin", which I've only seen in the context of egg custard tarts — a dim sum dish made with flaky pastry — as 酥皮蛋撻 (sū pí dàn tà) or 酥皮雞蛋撻 (sū pí jī dàn tà). The latter variation adds the character 雞 (jī/chicken); as explained in the abovelinked post on 蛋, this is often done for reasons of euphony, and does not imply that 酥皮蛋撻 are made with non-chicken eggs!
Another manifestation of 皮 is as 腐皮 (fǔ pí), or beancurd skin. This is the skin that forms on top of simmering soya milk, lifted off the surface and dried to form a thin sheet (read more at the Soy Info Center). Beancurd skin is also used in Japanese cuisine, where it's known as yuba. On the Chinese menu, it turns up mainly in a dim sum context, where it's used to wrap various fillings into what are usually translated as something like "beancurd skin rolls".
Here are some dishes with 皮 in the name:
| 皮蛋豆腐 | pí dàn dòu fu | beancurd with preserved egg |
| 皮蛋瘦肉粥 | pí dàn shòu ròu zhǒu | congee with lean pork and preserved egg |
| 糖醋脆皮魚 | táng cù cuì pí yú | crispy sweet and sour fish |
| 脆皮炸大腸 | cuì pí zhà dà cháng | crispy deep-fried intestine |
| 脆皮鍋貼 | cùi pí guō tiē | crispy-skinned potstickers |
| 脆皮炸雲吞 | cuì pí zhà yún tūn | crispy deep-fried wontons |
| 鮮蝦腐皮卷 | xiān xiā fǔ pí juǎn | prawn-stuffed beancurd skin rolls |
| 百花腐皮卷 | bǎi huā fǔ pí juǎn | a more poetic name for the above, literally "hundred flowers beancurd skin rolls" |
| 齋腐皮卷 | zhāi fǔ pí juǎn | vegetarian beancurd skin rolls |
| 皮: | pí | radical 107 (皮) | Cantodict | MandarinTools | YellowBridge | Zhongwen |
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Just wanted to mention that if you're curious about what I cook/eat when I'm not eating Chinese food, I have a sort of food blog on Tumblr. It's basically a log of stuff I cook at home. There's a LiveJournal feed at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif){kind=small}
kakefood_tumblr, and I'm happy to make one here if anyone would find it useful.
I have another Tumblr blog too, Kakestuff. That one doesn't have original content; it's just a repository for links to interesting things I come across. LiveJournal feed at kake_tumblr. Sources are blogs, Dreamwidth, LiveJournal, Flickr, etc. (Have I friended you on Flickr? If not, please let me know!)
PS: If I don't follow you back on Tumblr, it's because I'm following your RSS feed instead. I'm still getting the hang of Tumblr, so I find it easier to use a tool (RSS reader) that I'm already familiar with for now.
I'm sorry I've taken so long to do this, because I know people have been wanting it for a while, but here, finally, is an index of the posts I've made on individual Chinese characters. I did have rather grander ambitions for this, which is why it's been a while coming, but I had to scale back a bit in the end. Anyway! Here it is.
Also, you may have noticed that I've started putting a little infobox at the bottom of each character post, in which I give the character, its pinyin, its radical, and links to its entry in three dictionaries: CantoDict, MandarinTools, and YellowBridge. I'm happy to consider linking to other dictionaries too, if anyone has any suggestions, though I don't want the infobox to get too wide.
Here are the characters arranged by radical and number of strokes:
( Read more... )And here they are in alphabetical order of pinyin:
( Read more... )
口水雞 (kǒu shuǐ jī) is a Sichuan cold dish of poached chicken pieces in a spicy sauce. I've already covered all the characters here; 口 (kǒu) means "mouth", and I posted about it earlier this week, 水 (shuǐ) means "water", and 雞 (jī) means "chicken".
口水雞 is often "amusingly" translated as "saliva chicken" (口水 does in fact mean "saliva"), but a better translation would be "mouthwatering chicken", referring to how delicious it is. Other translations I've seen include "poached chicken with chilli sauce", "Szechuan savoury hot spicy chicken", "tender boneless corn-fed chicken in an aromatic spicy herbal sauce", and "chicken on bone with black bean in chilli oil".
As made clear by the last two of these, there doesn't seem to be any consensus on whether the chicken should be served on the bone or not. I've tried 口水雞 both ways, and haven't noticed much of a flavour difference. I think the chicken is always steamed or poached whole, before being cut up and mixed with the sauce, so it just depends on personal preference. The version pictured above, which I ate at Red & Hot restaurant in London, was served boneless.
When I made this, I used the directions for poaching a whole chicken from Maki at Just Hungry. With this method, you put the chicken in a large pot with aromatics of your choice (I used ginger and spring onion), cover with water, bring to the boil, simmer gently for 15 minutes, skimming the scum occasionally, then cover the pan, turn off the heat, and leave the chicken to cook in the residual heat of the water for 60–90 minutes.
One important thing to remember here is that there is quite a lot of water involved, and so it will take some time initially to heat up to boiling point! On my (underpowered) stove, it took nearly an hour. You'll also want to make sure to leave plenty of time for the chicken pieces to marinade in the sauce after poaching, so realistically it's probably best to start heating the water at least three or four hours before you want to serve the dish.
After poaching and cooling briefly, I removed and discarded the chicken skin (chicken skin is delicious when browned and crisp, but less delicious when poached and soggy) and used my fingers to remove the chicken from the bones in fairly large pieces. I didn't use it all in my 口水雞, but saved around two-thirds of the breast meat to use in sandwiches. I did this because (a) I was only feeding two people, and I didn't want a ridiculous quantity of leftovers, and (b) I prefer the texture and flavour of the darker meat that's found on the legs.
The sauce used in this dish really is very tasty. The first few times I tried it from restaurants, I actually wondered if there was MSG in it, but after making it myself I realised that it's simply a combination of ingredients that go very well together. I used 3 Tbsp soy sauce, 2 Tbsp Chinese black vinegar, 2 Tbsp water, 1 Tbsp sugar, 1 Tbsp minced garlic, 1/2 Tbsp minced ginger, 2 Tbsp sesame oil, 2 Tbsp home-made chilli oil, plenty of ground Sichuan pepper, and 1-2 Tbsp minced fresh coriander. All of this was mixed with the cooked chicken pieces and left to marinate in the fridge for 2 hours, except for the coriander, which I added just before serving.
Other people's recipes vary; Cooking With Mun adds rice wine to the sauce, while Kitchen Tigress includes century eggs and mung bean sheets along with the chicken. Joshiboshi uses chicken thighs instead of a whole chicken, and, like a poster on the China Travel Guide forum, fries the Sichuan pepper and some of the chill-based sauce ingredients before using. Common features include a sprinkling of sesame seeds to garnish.
I've mentioned 口 (kǒu/mouth) before, in my post on 四/sì/four. In that post, I was mainly concerned with its use as a radical (of which more below). 口 does appear on menus in its own right, though, perhaps most notably as 口水雞 (kǒu shuǐ jī), or "mouthwatering chicken", a Sichuan cold dish of poached chicken dressed with a spicy sauce. I've also seen 口水兔肉 (kǒu shuǐ tù ròu), which I assume is the same thing but with rabbit (兔/tù) instead of chicken.
Another manifestation of 口 is as 青口 (qīng kǒu), literally "green mouth", which refers to a type of mussel. You might see this as e.g. 豉汁炒青口 (chǐ zhī chǎo qīng kǒu/stirfried mussels in black bean sauce).
I've also seen 口條 (kǒu tiáo), which literally translates to something like "mouth strip" — I think this means "tongue", but it was on a Chinese-only menu, so I don't have an English translation to compare against. The specific dish was 紅油口條 (hóng yóu kǒu tiáo), i.e. 口條 in chilli oil ("red oil").
I admit to remaining somewhat confused by a dish listed on the takeaway menu of Sichuan Restaurant in Acton — in English it's number 132, "fried beef with chilies & peppers", while in Chinese it's 口口香牛肉, which as far as I can tell means something like "mouth mouth fragrant beef". I would dearly love to know what's going on there.
Finally, 口 is used in the transliteration of "Coca-Cola": 可口可樂 (kě kǒu kě lè). You might see this on the drinks (飲料/yǐn liào) section of a menu.
Here are some characters that use 口 as a radical:
| 單 | dān | individual/list — used in the word 菜單 (cài dān), which means "menu" (and which you may recognise from the icon I use for this series) |
| 品 | pǐn | product/commodity — often used on menus to indicate the dessert section, as 甜品 (tián pǐn), literally "sweet things" |
| 吃 | chī | to eat — often used on menus to indicate a "snack" category, as 小吃 (xiǎo chī, literally "small eats") or 小吃類 (xiǎo chī lèi, literally "small eats category") |
| 各 | gè | each/every — sometimes used on menus as 各式 (gè shì) to indicate that an item is available in multiple styles (e.g. red-cooked, with black beans, with XO sauce, etc) |
| 味 | wèi | flavour/taste, as in e.g. 怪味兔 (guài wèi tù/"strange-flavour" rabbit) |
| 咕 and 嚕 | gū and lū | used together on menus as 咕嚕 (gū lū) to indicate a sweet-and-sour dish, e.g. 咕嚕肉 (gū lū ròu/sweet-and-sour pork)[see footnote] |
Footnote: [0] As sung points out in comments, this is a Cantonese name for this Cantonese dish which is often mistakenly transliterated into Mandarin as 古老肉 (gǔ lǎo ròu/"old-fashioned" pork); for example here. Update, October 2011: see Fuchsia Dunlop's article on sweet and sour pork for more on etymology.
| 口: | kǒu | radical 30 (口) | Cantodict | MandarinTools | YellowBridge | Zhongwen |
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Today's post is about how I got pinyin input working on my Android phone (specifically, an HTC Desire Z running Android 2.2.1). This post assumes (i) you're able to drive your phone using the visual interface, (ii) your phone wasn't preconfigured for the Chinese market (if it was, you're unlikely to need this info), and (iii) you have no other input methods installed (if you do, there may be extra options I haven't mentioned on some menus).
I learned how to do this from a video on YouTube. Note: the video has no subtitles, and I've extracted the information below rather than doing a verbatim transcript.
Here are the steps I followed:
The video also explains how to use the input method once you've got it installed. Essentially, when you see a textbox that you'd like to type some Chinese into, tap and hold in the textbox, and when you lift your finger again it should pop up a little menu for "Input method" (I sometimes have to do this a couple of times before it actually works). Tap on this and you'll get a choice between "Touch Input" and "Google Pinyin". The former is the normal input, the latter is pinyin! Tap on the one you want.
Note that switching on pinyin input will change the phone's input method globally, so whenever you go to type text, it will expect pinyin. My phone has two ways of indicating this status. If I have the built-in physical keyboard pulled out, the status bar has a little 中 if I'm in pinyin and a little "En" otherwise. If I have the physical keyboard retracted, the colour of the on-screen keyboard changes; black for pinyin, white for English. To get back to English input, do the same trick of tapping and holding in a textbox, and choose "Touch Input" this time.
When actually typing in pinyin, a bar will appear across the bottom of the screen offering characters that match your pinyin; just above this on the left-hand side will be a small box containing the letters that you've typed. You can type words (e.g. "yuxiang" — don't try adding a space between the syllables, it will do that for you), and if it recognises the word it will offer that as an option. If it doesn't recognise the word, you need to choose the characters individually, but after you've done this once it'll add the word to its dictionary. To choose a character/word from the list of options, either tap on it on the screen, or press the spacebar.
(I should also note that the IME sometimes crashes on me when I'm teaching it a word it doesn't know; I just tap on "Force close" and carry on, and it usually works the second time.)
One final tip; if you're in pinyin input, and you're using the onscreen keyboard, there's a quick way to switch temporarily back to typing English via a key near the bottom left-hand corner of the keyboard. On my phone this key has two "symbols" on it; 拼 on the left and "Abc" on the right. Tapping this key switches between pinyin and English input, though it doesn't switch back to the full "Touch Input" method; the keyboard stays black, and there are missing features such as predictive text. When I'm in full pinyin, the 拼 is large and underlined, and when I'm temporarily in English, the "Abc" is large and underlined.
For another view on this, and information on other phones, take a look at Pinyin Joe's page on Chinese language support on various smartphones.
As I mentioned in Wednesday's post on 生 (shēng/raw), one dish often eaten on the seventh day of Chinese New Year celebrations is 魚生 (yú shēng), or raw fish salad. This custom is perhaps associated more with the Chinese diaspora (particularly in Malaysia and Singapore) than with the mainland itself, and it's also a relatively recent invention (from the 1960s), but since I love raw fish I wanted to post about it anyway.
The Wall Street Journal has a nice overview of 魚生 written by Robyn Eckhardt of Eating Asia. As Robyn explains, the name of the dish is pronounced exactly the same way as the phrase 餘升 (yú shēng), which means something along the lines of "increased abundance".
魚生 essentially consists of strips of raw fish (perhaps most often salmon) combined with various finely-shredded vegetables (carrot, daikon, etc), some crispy bits (crackers, deep-fried dough crisps, or deep-fried crispy noodles), and a sweet-and-sour dressing. What makes it particularly special is the method of serving it — ingredients are added one at a time to a large platter in the middle of the dining table, with an auspicious saying recited for each one, and then all the diners take their chopsticks and toss the salad in a group effort to mix it up before eating. According to Wikipedia, the higher in the air each person tosses the salad, the greater the increase in their fortunes over the coming year.
Noob Cook has not only a recipe for 魚生, but also a list of the auspicious sayings associated with each ingredient; this list is in Chinese characters only, but see the bottom of this Singaporean article on 魚生 for a list in pinyin and English. Sunflower also has a 魚生 recipe.
If you don't want to do all the shredding yourself, you may be able to buy a "kit" which has the ingredients pre-shredded; here's a photo of a yú shēng stall in Singapore, with the characters 魚生 visible on its banner (the others being 發財, which I mentioned in last week's post on 羅漢齋/luó hàn zhāi/Buddha's delight).
生 (shēng) has a number of meanings — see its CantoDict entry for a list — and also appears in a number of contexts on the Chinese menu. Firstly, it forms part of the words for peanut (花生/huā shēng or 花生米/huā shēng mǐ) and lettuce (生菜/shēng cài). The literal translation of 生菜 is "raw vegetable"; I have no idea of the etymology of 花生, though 花, which I've posted about before, means "flower".
The character is also used in combination with 煎 (jiān/pan-fried) as 生煎 (shēng jiān), literally "fried from the raw", which according to blogger Carl Chu indicates that the item (usually a dumpling or 包/bāo/bun of some kind) has been cooked by frying directly in oil, without being boiled or steamed first.
生 can also indicate that an ingredient (usually fish/魚/yú) is added at the very end of cooking, in order to ensure it doesn't overcook, as sung noted in a comment on my post on 粥 (zhǒu/congee). I've also seen it in connection with 蠔 (háo/oyster), where I think it may mean that the oyster is cooked immediately after shucking (though this is pure speculation).
Finally, though I've never seen this on a menu, 生 appears in the name of a dish often eaten by Chinese people in Malaysia and Singapore on the seventh day of the New Year, which is today! I'll be posting more about this dish, 魚生 (yú shēng), which literally means "raw fish", on Friday.
Here are some dishes with 生 in the name that I have actually seen on Chinese menus:
| 腐竹花生 | fǔ zhú huā shēng | peanut salad with beancurd skin |
| 芹菜花生米 | qín cài huā shēng mǐ | celery and peanut salad |
| 生煎鍋貼 | shēng jiān guō tiē | literally "fried-from the raw pot-stickers" — aka pan-fried dumplings |
| 海鮮生菜包 | hǎi xiān shēng cài bāo | lettuce-wrapped seafood [see footnote 0] |
| 生魚片粥 | shēng yú piàn zhǒu | congee with sliced fish |
| 豆腐火腩生蠔煲 | dòu fu huǒ nán shēng háo bào | beancurd, roast pork, and oyster claypot (see recipe on eGullet) |
Footnote: [0] I wasn't actually sure before whether lettuce-wrapped seafood was a "real" Chinese dish or not, as it felt a bit like one of those invented-for-the-Westerners things, but I've seen it on several Chinese-only menus, and sung assures me that it's a Cantonese dish.
| 生: | shēng | radical 100 (生) | Cantodict | MandarinTools | YellowBridge | Zhongwen |
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Today is the fifth day of the New Year by the Chinese calendar. Unlike British new year celebrations, which are generally restricted to the evening/night of the last day of the previous year (and generally followed by hangovers), Chinese new year celebrations can continue until the fifteenth day of the new year.
Today I'd like to link to some New Year related blog posts I've enjoyed reading.
Sunflower has a great post from 2009 listing traditions associated with the different days of the New Year celebrations, and symbolically lucky foods that are eaten throughout.
Red Cook describes the planning and execution of a ten-course New Year banquet that he held in 2008.
Charmaine Mok has a lovely post with some great pictures detailing a New Year spent with her family after three years away. You may recognise one of the photos from my post last week on 羅漢齋 (luó hàn zhāi/Buddha's delight) — she uses the Cantonese transliteration, loh hon jai.
Helen Yuet Ling Pang describes and photographs some traditional New Year foods and their symbolism.
Milk and Cookies has some photos from the 2009 Chinese New Year celebrations in London.
Bread et Butter has not only a very comprehensive post on the foods of Chinese New Year, but also an explanation of Hokkien New Year, which is celebrated on the ninth day of the year.
I'm also going to sneak in a non-Chinese link here — the Vietnamese year starts on the same day as the Chinese year, and the New Year is celebrated in a festival known as Tết Nguyên Đán. Playing With My Food reports on several delicious-looking vegan dishes that his family enjoys on the first day of the new year.
One dish commonly eaten on the first day of Chinese New Year celebrations is 羅漢齋 (luó hàn zhāi). This is a vegetarian dish, often translated into English as "Buddha's delight" or "monk's vegetables". Many people prefer to stick to vegetarian food on this day, and 羅漢齋 is a delicious way to do this. It's a savoury stew of fresh and dried ingredients, flavoured with red fermented beancurd.
Finding a good version of 羅漢齋 on a restaurant menu can be a little tricky. I have eaten many, many fairly pedestrian dishes listed as "Buddha's delight" or "monk's vegetables", ordered from restaurants and takeaways that serve Westernised Chinese food rather than the real thing — often a sad selection of tinned vegetables (water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, baby sweetcorn, mushrooms) in a gloopy brown sauce, maybe with some fresh carrots and mangetout if you're lucky.
Ordering from a Chinese-only menu is probably safer, particularly if the name mentions specific ingredients that are usually omitted from the Westernised version, such as 粉絲 (fěn sī/glass noodles) and 南乳 (nán rǔ/red fermented beancurd). I had a rather nice version the other week from Joy King Lau in London, which was listed as 粉絲南乳羅漢齋煲 (fěn sī nán rǔ luó hàn zhāi bào) — the 煲 (bào) here refers to its being served in a claypot.
To make luó hàn zhāi at home, check out Sunflower's 羅漢齋 recipe. Note that the ingredients for the dish may vary between chefs and between families; see the Wikipedia article on Buddha's delight for a listing of other ingredients commonly and less commonly used.
As Sunflower mentions, an essential ingredient when serving 羅漢齋 as a New Year dish is 髮菜 (fà cài), known in English as "black moss", "hair moss", "hair weed", and variations thereon. According to Wikipedia, it's actually a type of bacterium. It's sold dried, in which form it resembles long, fine hair, hence the name. This ingredient is prominently visible in the photograph above.
The reason for 髮菜's importance here is that its name sounds similar to the phrase 發財 (fā cái), which means "becoming rich" — note that the tones are the only difference in pronunciation (in Mandarin, both tones differ, while in Cantonese, 髮 has the same tone as 發). 發財 forms part of the traditional New Year greeting 恭喜發財 (gōng xǐ fā cái), which translates loosely as "wishing you prosperity".
Do note, however, that according to Professor Wayne Armstrong of Palomar College, harvesting of 髮菜 contributes to desertification, and is now restricted in China. Relatedly, an article in the Hong Kong Standard notes that there is counterfeit 髮菜 on the market, at least in some countries, and it can be hard to tell apart from the real thing.
Other common 羅漢齋 ingredients are also considered by some people to have auspicious associations; see this article from a Hawaiian newspaper, which lists a number of such associations.
Gōng xǐ fā cái!
Gung hei faat coi!
Cung hỉ phát tài!
Happy New Year to everyone who celebrates it. And Happy Thursday to everyone who doesn't :)
As I mentioned on Monday, tomorrow is the first day of the New Year in the Chinese calendar. In the Chinese zodiac, this coming year is the Year of the Rabbit, so this seems an opportune time to mention the Chinese character 兔 (tù), which means hare or rabbit.
One thing to note about 兔/tù is that although its pinyin transliteration uses the same vowel character as 魚 (yú/fish), the vowel sound is different. As ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pne explains in a comment on an older post, this is because the "u" of "yú" is really "ü", and so is pronounced more along the lines of French "tu". Conversely, the vowel in 兔/tù is a plain "u", which is pronounced simply "ooh". Remember, the grave accent on the vowel means that it has a falling tone (fourth tone). There's an example pronunciation of 兔 on forvo.com.
Although many people see rabbits purely as pet animals, rabbit is a traditional source of meat both here in the UK and elsewhere. It appears on Chinese menus in various forms; here are some examples:
| 麻辣水煮兔 | má là shuǐ zhǔ tù | numbing-spicy water-cooked (水煮/shuǐ zhǔ) rabbit |
| 魚香兔肉 | yú xiāng tù ròu | fish-fragrant (魚香/yú xiāng) rabbit |
| 青椒炒兔肉 | qīng jiāo chǎo tù ròu | rabbit stirfried with green peppers |
| 怪味兔丁 | guài wèi tù dīng | "strange-flavour" diced rabbit |
Rabbit can also turn up in situations where you might expect to see chicken (雞/jī); for example, while 口水雞 (kǒu shuǐ jī/mouthwatering chicken) is a fairly common dish, I've also seen 口水兔肉 (kǒu shuǐ tù ròu), which I presume is rabbit done in the same style.
Finally, I want to point out that the lovely fu has created a latest things Dreamwidth feed for Lunar New Year. She tells me that any new posts tagged with "lunar new year", "chinese new year", or "new year" will appear in this feed. It's looking a little bare at the moment, but hopefully will fill up soon.
| 兔: | tù | radical 10 (儿) | Cantodict | MandarinTools | YellowBridge | Zhongwen |
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It is, perhaps, an appropriate time for this blog to come back to life, because this Thursday will be the first day of the New Year in the Chinese calendar.
The Chinese calendar is a type of calendar known as a lunisolar calendar, since it incorporates both the phase of the moon and the season of the solar year. To understand the difference between a lunisolar calendar and a purely lunar calendar, note that while a solar year (the time from one spring equinox to the next) is around 365.24 days on average, a lunar month (the time from one new moon to the next) is around 29.53 days on average, and so the solar year does not have a whole number of lunar months in it; a lunar year consisting of 12 lunar months is about 11 days shorter than a solar year. Hence, a purely lunar calendar (such as the Islamic calendar) will exhibit some "drift" in relation to the seasons, and festivals dated by such a calendar will be celebrated at a slightly different season every year.
A lunisolar calendar avoids this drift by adding an extra month — an intercalary month — every so often. Since the deficit per solar year is around 11 days, which is around a third of a lunar month, this extra month needs to be added roughly every three years. There is an obvious parallel here with the Gregorian calendar's custom of adding an extra day to the end of February every four years or so, to deal with the discrepancy between the solar year and the 365-day year. The next intercalary month in the Chinese calendar will begin on 21 March 2012, lying between the fourth and fifth lunar months.
The method of calculating the Chinese calendar is actually quite complicated, and has changed a number of times over the centuries. Helmer Aslaksen, a mathematician working at the National University of Singapore, has a fairly comprehensive page on the subject. For those who'd prefer to avoid the maths, he links to an online tool for generating Chinese calendars for particular Gregorian months/years; the code behind this is also available as a command-line program, though I haven't tried it out, as I already have the Perl Calendar module installed, which comes with its own command-line tool, cal.pl:
kake@the:~$ cal.pl -c 2 2011
2011年2月 辛卯年正月大3日始
Sun 日 Mon 一 Tue 二 Wed 三 Thu 四 Fri 五 Sat 六
1廿九 2三十 3正月 4立春 5初三
6初四 7初五 8初六 9初七 10初八 11初九 12初十
13十一 14十二 15十三 16十四 17十五 18十六 19雨水
20十八 21十九 22二十 23廿一 24廿二 25廿三 26廿四
27廿五 28廿六
Note, above, the entry for Thursday 3 February; 正月 (zhēng yuè), which denotes the first month of the year. Most of the other entries are numbers, for example the entry for Wednesday 2 is 三十 (sān shí), which means "thirty", this being the 30th day of the final month of the preceding year.
There are also various online calculators for a quick online conversion of a single date, for example Henry Fong's hundred-year calculator.
Hello! I'm back. Did you miss me?
First, I want to apologise for how abruptly I put this blog on hiatus a couple of months ago. Something came up without warning in my personal life, and I needed all my attention free to deal with it. Things have still not been put right, but at this point it seems unlikely they ever will be.
I'm bringing the blog back to life today, specifically, because the schedule was interrupted between a Wednesday (character) and a Friday (dish) post. On the Monday I posted about potatoes in Chinese cuisine, on the Wednesday I posted about 絲/sī/thread/fibre/shred, and today I'm posting about 土豆絲 (tǔ dòu sī), or shredded potatoes.
As I mentioned in the Monday post, potatoes in Chinese cuisine are treated more like an ordinary vegetable than like a staple carb, and so it would not be unusual to see a potato-based dish served with rice [see footnote]. For the same reason, the potatoes tend to be somewhat undercooked to Western tastes. Both of these characteristics apply to 土豆絲 — it's a fresh, crisp stirfry of very finely shredded potatoes that have been soaked in water before cooking, to remove as much of the starch as possible.
I've seen 土豆絲 on menus both as a cold dish (涼菜/liáng cài) and as a hot dish (熱菜/rè cài), and listed under a variety of names. Cold-dish versions I've seen include 涼拌土豆絲 (liáng bàn tǔ dòu sī) and 熗拌土豆絲 (qiàng bàn tǔ dòu sī); the former of these means something like "cold mixed shredded potato", while the latter replaces the character for cold (涼) with 熗, which has baffled me in the past, but may mean something like "pungent". Sometimes 嗆 is used instead of 熗; both are pinyinised as qiàng.
Hot dish/vegetable dish versions include 酸辣土豆絲 (suān là tǔ dòu sī), or hot (辣) and sour (酸) shredded potatoes; 香辣土豆絲 (xiāng là tǔ dòu sī), or fragrant-spicy shredded potatoes; 醋熘土豆絲 (cù liù tǔ dòu sī), or shredded potatoes with vinegar; and 青椒土豆絲 (qīng jiāo tǔ dòu sī), or shredded potatoes with green [青] peppers [椒]. They pretty much all include vinegar, it's just that some mention it explicitly in the name and others don't.
Making this dish at home is quite easy, as long as you have decent knife skills — the hardest part is cutting the potatoes into those fine slivers. Alternatively, you could use a mandoline if you happen to have one. Do note that you won't need nearly as much potato as you would for a Western potato dish; around one medium-sized potato per person is ample. Like most of the dishes I post about here, this should be served with several other dishes as part of a meal; you wouldn't just eat a big bowl of it by itself.
As suggested by the plethora of names for this dish listed above, there are many variations on how to make it. Beijing Made Easy has a nice basic recipe containing just potato, dried red chillies, oil, soy sauce, vinegar, and salt; while mmm-yoso's version adds Sichuan pepper. Charmaine Mok's version adds garlic, Travel China Guide's rendition uses ginger and green peppers (in addition to the chillies), while Sunflower's recipe even includes carrots and preserved vegetable (榨菜/zhà cài) for extra flavour. I can personally vouch for Charmaine's recipe, served either hot or cold, though I use groundnut oil for stirfrying instead of sesame oil, and add some ground Sichuan pepper just before serving.
Some of the above sources describe this dish as coming from Sichuan, others from Beijing. Recipes Tap mentions that Fuchsia Dunlop's Hunan cookbook includes a version, and indeed it also appears on the menu of Golden Day, a Hunan restaurant here in London. There are more thoughts on the distribution of potato use within China in my previous post on potatoes.
Footnote: [0] See also 螞蟻上樹/mǎ yǐ shàng shù/ants climbing a tree, which is a noodle dish that's often served with rice rather than as a carb per se.
絲 (sī) is a bit of a tricky one to translate succinctly in the context of the Chinese menu; "sliver" is probably the best single-word translation, though "shredded" seems to be used quite a lot too. When used as a single character, 絲 usually refers to an ingredient's being julienned, or sliced into long, thin strips. Among other things, pork (肉/ròu), ginger (薑/jiāng), potatoes (土豆/tǔ dòu), tripe (肚/dǔ), and pig's ears (豬耳/zhū ěr) commonly get this kind of treatment.
One thing to look out for is that 絲 doesn't always appear as a single character, but also forms part of a few words that tend to turn up on menus. 粉絲 (fěn sī) are a type of clear vermicelli made from mung bean starch; I've mentioned these before, in my post on 粉/fěn. 粉絲 are known by several names in English, including glass noodles, cellophane noodles, and bean thread noodles, and they're the primary ingredient in 螞蟻上樹/mǎ yǐ shàng shù/ants climbing a tree.
Another word that includes 絲 is 絲瓜 (sī guā), or loofah/luffa (see my post on 瓜/guā). You may also see it as 絲苗白飯 (sī miáo bái fàn), which as sung and I figured out a few months ago seems to be a way of specifying long-grain (絲苗) plain-cooked rice (白飯).
Here are some dishes with 絲 in the name:
| 魚香肉絲 | yú xiāng ròu sī | fish-fragrant slivered/shredded pork |
| 京醬肉絲 | jīng jiàng ròu sī | slivered pork in Peking sauce (see john's explanation of how 京醬肉絲 is served in a comment thread on my post on 醬/jiàng/sauce) |
| 涼拌三絲 | liáng bàn sān sī | three-sliver salad (one of the "slivers" is usually 粉絲; the others may be julienned carrot, kelp, spinach, etc) |
| 土豆絲 or 熗拌土豆絲 or 酸辣土豆絲 | tǔ dòu sī or qiáng bàn tǔ dòu sī or suān là tu dòu sī | various forms of stirfried shredded potato (unspecified, pungent, hot-and-sour) |
| 蘿蔔絲酥餅 | luó bo sī sū bǐng | deep-fried puff pastry filled with shredded daikon |
| 涼拌海帶絲 | liáng bàn hǎi dài sī | shredded kelp salad |
| 紅油耳絲 | hóng yóu ěr sī | shredded (pig's) ear in chilli oil |
| 酸菜粉絲湯 | suān cài fěn sī tāng | pickled vegetable and glass noodle soup |
| 絲: | sī | radical 120 (糸/糹) | Cantodict | MandarinTools | YellowBridge | Zhongwen |
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Today I want to talk about potatoes. The Mandarin Chinese word for potato is 土豆 (tǔ dòu), which literally means "bean of the earth"; I've posted about 豆/dòu/bean before, so the only new part here is 土/tǔ, which has a number of meanings including soil/earth/land. It's very rare to see 土 on a menu without 豆.
Potatoes play a rather different role in Chinese cuisines than in Western ones; rather than being a staple carb, they're treated like any other kind of vegetable. One consequence of this is that the potatoes themselves are often rather undercooked to Western tastes, particularly when served as 土豆絲 (tǔ dòu sī), or shredded potatoes, a crisp stirfry of finely-julienned potatoes cooked only very briefly to preserve the natural crunch of the vegetable.
"Undercooking" is not the only aspect that may confuse those more familiar with potatoes as a bulky side dish. Rather than being quite bland and served with a more flavourful protein or other "main" dish, a Chinese potato dish will often be deeply flavoured and even relatively spicy, and will generally be served with rice. Fuchsia Dunlop has an anecdote and some history relating to this — the comments are worth reading too, as is the Washington Post article she links to.
Another example of a dish that includes potatoes is 大盤雞 (dà pàn jī/big-plate chicken), a dish from Xinjiang in the northwest, which I posted about last week. Potatoes also appear in 地三鮮 (dì sān xiān), or "three [三] fresh [鮮] things from the earth [地]", a Dongbei (north-east Chinese) dish of aubergines, potatoes, and green peppers, all fried separately and then braised together in a savoury sauce.
Most of the Chinese potato dishes I'm familiar with, like those above, come from the cuisines of north/northeast/northwest and central China, rather than the provinces nearer the south/east/southeast coast. The ever-informative sung tells me in comments that this is because sweet potatoes and taro are more common than actual potatoes in the areas around the coast — and although potatoes are used in Cantonese home cooking, particularly in casserole/hotpot dishes, you're unlikely to see these dishes on a menu.
The Cantonese word for potato is 薯仔 (syu zai). This word isn't used in Mandarin, but the individual characters are; for example, the Mandarin for sweet potato is 番薯 or 蕃薯 (both pinyinised as fān shǔ).
For more thoughts on potatoes, see the eGullet thread on potatoes in Chinese cooking.
zvi and kake