Language Log

I've eaten a lot of muxu beef / pork / chicken / shrimp in my day, and I love the combination of meat strips, black "wood ear" fungus, scrambled eggs, daylily, and cucumber served wrapped in a thin, soft pancake.  Usually I'm compulsive about knowing the meaning of the names of dishes that I eat, but muxu has always defeated me.  I'm not even sure how to pronounce the name (it's also transcribed as moo shu, mushu, and mooshi) nor how to write it in characters (variants include completely unrelated 木须, 木樨, etc.).

When I first encountered the dish decades ago, I spent a fair amount of time trying to unravel the jumbled meanings, pronunciations, and written forms of the name.  However, since I was getting nowhere fast, I soon gave up on those investigations (in the days before the internet and search engines, things were much harder to figure out).  Then I spent so many years wandering around overseas, and I simply didn't encounter muxu for a long time.

"How Jane Austen’s Early Chinese Translators Were Stumped by the Oddities of 19th-Century British Cuisine:  How do you get a reader in 1930s China to understand what a mince pie is?" By Saihong Li and William Hope, The Conversation (9/15/22) / Get Pocket.

Jane Austen’s (1775-1817) works are globally renowned, but they were unknown in China until 1935 when two different translations of Pride and Prejudice were published. Today, her novels are increasingly popular and have been translated into Chinese many times – notably there have been 60 different retranslations of Pride and Prejudice.

Translators face the creative balancing act of remaining faithful to the source text while also ensuring that the translation is a smooth, informative read. One intriguing task for translators of Austen has been how to describe the 19th-century British food featured in the many convivial sequences that shed light on characters through their social interaction.

After I left Omaha and headed westward on Route 30 / Lincoln Highway, I began to notice that every little town along the way with a population of around three thousand or more had a restaurant called Runza.  My instinct was to pronounce that "roon-zuh", but the people around here say "run-zuh".

Because I was not familiar with them, at first I didn't pay much attention to the Runza restaurants, but then I saw a sign that said they made legendary burgers.  Since I'm a burger freak, always in quest of a superior hamburger, by the time I reached Cozad — which somehow has captured my heart, for more than one reason — I decided to stop in and try one.

"Lattes with onions are a hit in China", by Allan Rose Hill, Boing Boing (6/7/24)

Some might call that "over the top", I would call it "under the bottom". 

It's all part of a trend referred to as hēiàn liàolǐ 黑暗料理 ("dark cuisine").

Dark cuisine basically refers to food and drinks that put people's sensibilities to the test.

Basic Barista provides a recipe that boils down to the following: Finely chop a bunch of spring onions and drop them in a glass. Add ice, pour in milk, and then dump in that double shot of espresso.

[VHM:  many people pour in some soy sauce too.]

Assertively spicy and conspicuously Cantonese

That's almost a contradiction in terms, because Hong Kongers are not very big on spicy food and they generally are not very good at cooking it either.

Photographs of walls in a popular chain of special Yunnan style spicy noodles in Hong Kong:

(Facebook)

Photograph by Paula Roberts taken in Samarkand (4/29/24)

Photograph of an artistic arrangement on the wall of a tea shop in Philadelphia's Chinatown.

Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS)

Symposium on April 11, 2024

Registration by 4^th April at the latest

11 April, 11:15 a.m. SYMPOSIUM

Indo-European Food: Linguistic, Archaeological and Biomolecular Perspectives

ABSTRACT:

The symposium Indo-European Food – Linguistic, Archaeological, and Biomolecular Perspectives aims to explore the intricate relationships between the spread of Indo-European languages, the archaeological evidence of food production and consumption patterns, and biomolecular insights into ancient diets. This interdisciplinary event brings together leading experts from linguistics, archaeology, and biomolecular sciences to discuss the latest research findings and theoretical frameworks that illuminate the role of food in the migration, settlement, and cultural integration of Indo-European populations.

Photograph of a sign on a curry shop in Banqiao District, New Taipei City:

Who owns it?

It's sort of like who owns kimchee, Koreans (of course!) or Chinese — we've been through that many times — except that the question of who has the rights to claim they invented butter chicken is ostensibly internecine / intranational rather than international (but maybe not [see below]), as is the case with kimchee.

"India’s courts to rule on who invented butter chicken:  Two Delhi restaurants both claim to have the right to call themselves the home of the original butter chicken recipe" by Hannah Ellis-Petersen, The Guardian (1/25/24)

Judging from the account in The Guardian, the squabbling between the two Delhi restaurants is both picayune and misplaced:

No sooner have we addressed "The politics of frozen garlic in Taiwan" (1/11/24) than we now must look at the implications of dried mango for the current election in that island nation.  Here we will not be studying the obscene usage (gàn) that "dry" (gān) often gets mixed up with.  For those who are interested in that topic, which Language Log has been following since 2006), check out the last two items in "Selected readings") below.

Today's mango excitement derives from a pun based on the expression "dried mango" (mángguǒ gān 芒果乾); it has nothing to do with "$%#@!" mango.  The near pun is for "wángguó gǎn 亡國感" ("sense of national subjugation"), where wáng 亡 means "perish; death; die", though in this phrase, "subjugation" has become the usual translation.  Of course, guó 國, means "nation; state", and note that the "K" of KMT (Kuomintang [Wade-Giles romanization of 國民黨] "Nationalist Party") or the "G" of GMD (Guómíndǎng [Pinyin romanization of the same name]) is that same word, guó 國 ("nation; state").

Nicholas Tomaino, "The Most Spoken Words in Glasgow", WSJ 1/6/2024:

When someone says, ‘Would anyone like a cup of tea,’ he isn’t offering the best-tasting thing one’s ever had. But that isn’t the point.

The author begins:

I was 23 when I drank my first cup of tea. As an Italian-American, I was raised on coffee. My life changed, however, when I met my wife.