Adventures with Kake

Today's post is sort of a combined concept/character one — I'm going to talk about chopsticks, and the Mandarin Chinese word for them: 筷子 (kuài zi).

According to China Radio International, chopsticks probably evolved from the use of twigs to pick up hot food. Relatedly, Fuchsia Dunlop's blog post on chopsticks recounts a memory of a camping trip in Sichuan where her guide cut and peeled some twigs from the trees to make chopsticks for their dinner.

Gong Dan's Food & Drink in China describes how in the Zhou dynasty (11th-3rd century BC) chopsticks were used for eating meat and vegetables, while rice was still picked up with the hands. (Note, however, that pulchritude points out in comments that this may not be quite accurate.) These days, of course, rice is also eaten with chopsticks (assuming you're eating from a bowl — if you're given rice on a plate, often the most sensible way to eat it is with a fork and spoon).

Gong Dan also describes the etymology of the word. During the Zhou dynasty, chopsticks were known as 箸 (zhù). However, this is precisely homonymous with 住 (zhù), which means "to stop, to cease", and 住 was a taboo word aboard ships, since stopping a ship en route was considered bad luck. This problem was solved by referring to chopsticks as 快子 (kuài zi), a combination of 快 (kuài), meaning "quick", with the particle 子 (zi) as a suffix to make it into a "proper" word. Later, the bamboo radical (⺮) was placed above 快 to make 筷, since chopsticks are commonly made from bamboo, giving the modern word 筷子.

As someone who (a) didn't grow up using chopsticks and (b) was mildly teased at school for holding my knife and fork the "wrong" way, I'm reluctant to lay down any pronouncements about the right way to use chopsticks, but my preferred way of holding them is to lodge the bottom one firmly in the web between my thumb and index finger, resting it on my curled-in ring finger, and then to pivot the top one independently, pushing up with my third finger and down with my second finger as required, steadying it with my thumb the whole time.

I did find a pretty good YouTube video demonstrating this, but I've unfortunately managed to lose the link. There are lots of "how to use chopsticks" videos on YouTube, but be warned that some of them show rather suboptimal methods. Once you're holding your chopsticks in a way that you find comfortable, check out thorfinn's Chinese chopstick tips for what to do next.

Note also that chopsticks differ between cultures. Japanese chopsticks have pointed ends, while Korean chopsticks are made of metal and are flat rather than rounded in cross-section. Chinese chopsticks have blunt tips, and may be made from bamboo, wood, plastic, or less-common materials such as porcelain. I personally like the bamboo/wood ones because I find them more "grippy" than plastic ones.

The use of chopsticks to eat with is intimately connected with the way food is cut prior to cooking. Since there are generally no knives on the dining table, the cook must be careful to cut pieces of food in such a way that they can be picked up with chopsticks. This doesn't necessarily mean that everything must be bitesize — see for example this eGullet thread on ingredient sizing in Chinese cooking – but it's certainly something that must be borne in mind.

One issue that I've only really mentioned in passing, and not yet covered in its own post, is the vexed question of traditional vs. simplified Chinese characters.

Character simplification was a project undertaken from the mid-20th century by the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC), with the aim of promoting literacy. While the simplified characters resulting from this project are now the official forms used in the PRC and in Singapore, the traditional forms are still used elsewhere, for example in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Overseas Chinese communities, such as those in the UK, may use either or both.

In all my posts here, I've stuck to using traditional characters. This is partly because I prefer the way they look; partly because I don't want people to be scared off by seeing an overwhelming number of characters in the posts; and partly because even without including two forms of a character, I sometimes already find it hard to include the character, its pinyin, and its meaning(s) in a sentence without it looking awkward.

However, at least going by my experience in London, if you want to learn to read a Chinese menu then you're eventually going to have to learn both systems. While most of the menus I've seen in London's Chinatown use traditional characters, restaurants elsewhere in the city often use simplified characters. Some even use a mixture!

Simplified characters can look very different from their traditional forms. Some examples:

There are a number of patterns that can help you identify a simplified character that you're already familiar with in its traditional form. Wikipedia has an overview of methods used in the simplification project, which may be of some help. In many cases, characters are simplified component by component, so once you've learned the simplification for a given component, you can apply that knowledge elsewhere. For example, 魚 (yú/fish) is simplified to 鱼, and this is carried through to the characters that use 魚 as a radical: 鮮 (xiān/fresh) becomes 鲜, 魷 (yóu/squid) becomes 鱿, 鱔 (shàn/eel) becomes 鳝, and so on.

The distinction between character systems also comes into play when searching through information stored electronically. At the time of writing, Google and YouTube searches appear to be at least mostly traditional-simplified insensitive, whereas Flickr, Blogspot, and Wordpress searches will return different results depending on whether you search using traditional or simplified characters. (Dreamwidth search still doesn't work at all with Chinese characters, sadly.)

So it's probably always worth trying both systems if you're having trouble finding something. Finally, I'll mention again the commandline utility dets that I wrote to help me grep through the notes and menus I have stored on my laptop; full details at that link.

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 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 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.

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.

[Image: A map of China with Xinjiang shown in red. This is a public-domain image from Wikimedia Commons, originally created by Joowwww.]

While most if not all of the Chinese dishes I've posted about so far come from central/southern/eastern China, there is also some very good food to be had in other areas. Later this week, I'll be discussing a dish from Xinjiang, an autonomous region in the northwest of China, so I thought today I'd give some brief background on the region.

China is a huge country, with many different types of terrain and climate. Although it has a coastline of 14,500 km (9,000 miles) (source: CIA World Factbook), even a relatively central province such as Sichuan is 725 km (450 miles) from the sea at its very closest point, and 1,600 km (1,000 miles) at its furthest (source: Google Maps geocoding). Xinjiang, which borders on countries such as Kazakhstan and Mongolia, is even further away from the sea. In addition to the map above, Wikimedia Commons has a map of China which may help give some perspective on all this.

The vast majority of the land in Xinjiang is uninhabited desert; the population is found in the mountains and in oases around the edges of the deserts. The staple food is not rice, but wheat products such as bread and noodles. Commonly-used flavourings include cumin and other fragrant spices.

Xinjiang has a significant Muslim population, so you won't find the predominance of pork dishes here that you would in other Chinese cuisines [see footnote]. Instead, the main food animals are sheep and goats, though other animals such as chickens are also eaten. Typical dishes include laghman (handpulled noodles with a lamb-based sauce), big-plate chicken (a stew of chicken and potatoes), flatbreads, lamb grilled on skewers, and samsa (lamb-stuffed pastries similar to samosas). Rice is reserved for festive dishes such as pulao, a dish based on rice flavoured with meat and vegetables.

According to Wikipedia, the majority population of Xinjiang at the 2000 census was Uyghur (sometimes spelt "Uighur"), with Han Chinese coming a close second. Hence, while Mandarin is widely used in Xinjiang, so is the Uyghur language, which is a Turkic language (as opposed to the Sino-Tibetan Mandarin) written in an alphabet derived from Arabic. Here's an example of a menu from Xinjiang written in Chinese, English, and Uyghur. For the same reason, you may see the food of the region referred to as Xinjiang food (新疆菜/Xīnjiāng cài), Uyghur food, or sometimes Chinese Muslim food (though the latter is a broader term).

Uyghur food is not found only within Xinjiang; according to Beyond the Great Wall by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Dugiud, Uyghur restaurants and street food stalls are common in central China, and pinetree notes in comments that in fact Xinjiang food is now found all over China. Even London now has a Xinjiang restaurant — Silk Road in Camberwell.

For more on the food of Xinjiang, see Fuchsia Dunlop's Gourmet article on the subject and two Life On Nanchang Lu posts: food seen and eaten on a trip to Xinjiang, and ten must-try Uyghur foods.

Footnote: [0] Indeed, while in most regions of China the character 肉 (ròu, literally "meat") is taken in the absence of further qualification to mean pork, you can't necessarily assume that this is the case on a Xinjiang menu; here's a photo of part of the menu at Silk Road, which simply uses 肉 to indicate a lamb dish, rather than 羊肉 (yáng ròu/sheep/lamb). I'm not entirely sure how widespread this practice is, however.

I think I may have mentioned this before, but one very useful type of resource in learning to read Chinese menus is the English-language Chinese food blog, particularly those which include the Chinese names of dishes and ingredients.

Here are a few examples of the kind of blogs I find useful — I would love to hear of any others that people can recommend.

• Appetite For China
• Beijing Haochi
• China South of the Clouds
• Cooking The Books (China tag)
• Eat Drink Chengdu
• Eating Asia
• eGullet China Cooking forum (not actually a blog)
• Fuchsia Dunlop
• Life On Nanchang Lu
• Out To Lunch
• Rasa Malaysia
• Red Cook
• Show Shanti
• Sunflower Food Galore
• Yi Reservation

I'm mainly looking for sources that I can trust to know what they're talking about (and are willing to admit when they aren't sure about something), and that discuss the history and context of the food rather than just posting recipes. Have you got any good suggestions for me?

I'd also like to mention some blogs written by friends of mine; these have a wider focus than the ones listed above, but their authors know plenty about Chinese food and often post about it (usually, like me, in a London context): bellaphon, Eat Noodles Love Noodles, and Tamarind and Thyme.

Somewhat relatedly, here's advance notice that I won't be posting during October 2010 (except on the 1st, which is this Friday). I'm taking a month-long blog sabbatical and will be using the time to research new topics, take more photos, and seek out even more exciting Chinese food. I'll still be reading and commenting on other people's blogs, though, and I'm always available at kake@earth.li if you feel like inviting me out for an adventure!

I've previously discussed Chinese keyboard input via pinyin, but I've recently also been playing with handwriting input.

For reasons I'll describe below, I bought a Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet about a month ago. Sadly, my (OS X) laptop has no native support for inputting Chinese characters via handwriting — apparently only MacBooks with multitouch trackpads can do that, regardless of peripherals. (Note: iPhone owners might want to check out Finger, though I haven't tried it.) The tablet does come with its own input software, but it's a bit clunky — you can only enter one character at a time, and if you hesitate for a moment in the middle of writing it, it will make a (usually wrong) guess at what you intended and you'll have to start over. So I'm sticking with pinyin for now.

The reason I bought the tablet, though, was Skritter. This is an online tool that lets you practise writing Chinese (and Japanese) characters. It does cost money (just under US$10/month at the time of writing), but they offer a two-week free trial [see footnote].

The idea behind Skritter is pretty simple — to make character-writing practice easy and enjoyable. And it works! I knew within half an hour of starting to play with it that I'd be keeping up my subscription at the end of the free trial, and by the end of the next day I'd ordered my graphics tablet because I found it so frustrating to have to stop "playing" when my hand was aching from using the trackpad to write the characters.

The Skritter site supplies a number of character/word lists that you can learn from, but it also gives you the facility to make your own lists, which is very useful for someone like me who only wants to learn characters from a specific context. Like Anki, it uses spaced repetition algorithms to choose sensible intervals for retesting you on each word or character. Another very nice feature is one mentioned by a comment on a CNET post — [...] it draws beautiful characters, which makes me feel good everytime, much better than when I try to write on a piece of paper. — a post on the Plot Hatching Factory blog goes into this issue in more detail.

Learning to write may seem like a sidetrack from my goal of learning to read Chinese menus, but I've found that it's very helpful in terms of remembering the characters, learning to differentiate between similar-looking characters, and reading characters that are printed in a blurry or unusual font.

Finally, a note on ergonomics. When I first started using the Bamboo tablet, it made my hand ache/feel numb after a few minutes of use, but I figured out that this was due to my tendency to steady my hand by sticking out my little finger and resting it on the tablet. I stopped doing this, and the problem went away.

Footnote: [0] You need to supply credit/debit card details for the free Skritter trial, and will need to explicitly cancel if you decide not to continue after the two weeks. They do send a couple of reminders though. If you're thinking of giving it a go, you can use my referral link, which will give you two extra free weeks if/when you make your first payment (I also get two free weeks if you do this, but if that bothers you then I can always buy you a pint in return, or something).

A few months ago I posted about Chinese keyboard input via pinyin, mostly focusing on OS X (since that's the platform I use). Here's an update on things I've found out since then.

Firstly, I came across a couple of comprehensive websites on the subject: Pinyin Joe covers MS Windows, Ubuntu Linux, and smartphones, while [chinese mac] unsurprisingly covers OS X and other Mac operating systems.

There are also a few specific things that I've found particularly useful on OS X (10.6, though some of this applies to older versions too). One of these is that if you switch to pinyin input and then bring up the input methods menu again (by clicking on the little flag in the menu bar), it will have various extra pinyin-specific options including a Preferences dialogue. Under the General section in this, you can increase the font size in the "candidate window" (character dropdown) — very handy if you don't have brilliant eyesight.

Another Preferences option is "show input keys", which if ticked will show the pinyin and tones as you scroll down the candidate list. This does seem to slow things down a bit, but it can be useful on occasion if you're feeling the need to review your tones.

Something else I didn't realise before is that in pinyin input mode I can type "yu2" instead of just "yu", and it won't bother showing me things like 芋 (yù/yu4/taro).

Finally, in the comments on my previous post, pne asked about typing words rather than individual characters in OS X pinyin input. My reply was that while I'd noticed this was possible, I hadn't yet figured out how to add new words to the "dictionary" that OS X uses to decide which combinations of characters are plausible words. I have now! All you need to do is this:

• Switch to pinyin input mode (see instructions on my previous post).
• Type your word (e.g. type "niurou" for 牛肉/beef).
• Press SPACE to get the dropdown — if your word appears, just choose it. Otherwise, there are a couple of possibilities:
  • It may offer a word that isn't actually the one you want, for example suppose you type "huangjiang", aiming for 黃姜 (turmeric), but it only offers you 黃醬 (yellow bean paste). If this happens, just press BACKSPACE and it will jump back to the first component it recognises (which may be a single character or a multi-character word), and offer you a dropdown for this.
    • If the correct character(s) are shown in this dropdown, just select them by pressing ENTER, and it will set these down and then move on to offer you a dropdown for the next recognised component (again, maybe a single character or maybe a multi-character word).
    • If this component is a multi-character one, and the correct characters aren't shown in the dropdown, press BACKSPACE again to break the component down even further.
  • It may not have any matching words at all — in this case, when you initially press SPACE it will just jump back to the first component it recognises, and offer you a dropdown for that one, then proceed as above.
• The clever part is that it will now add this word to its dictionary, so the next time you type it, it will be there as an option in the dropdown.

Note that the above is more complicated to describe than it is to do — just have a play around with it and it should soon make sense. I also made a slightly clunky diagram, which may help.

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

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

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

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

A few notes on some of these:

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

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