Harsh brown
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It is surprising how widespread this error is online, not merely in Chinglish.
This one is even funnier than just "harsh brown(s)" by itself, because what they're serving is not hash browns but something like tater tots.
The label says:
tǔdòu lì 土豆粒 ("diced potatoes; potato cubes")
An interesting aspect of the potato in China is how many different names it has, which is especially noteworthy considering that it is a recent import (early Qing / Manchu dynasty [1644-1912, i.e., by the 17th century]) from the New World. (See the Chinese Wikipedia article here for a listing of more than two dozen terms for potato in various topolects.) The two most popular are:
mǎlíngshǔ 馬鈴薯 — 13,500,000 ghits
tǔdòu 土豆 (lit., "earth bean"; in Taiwan it can also mean "peanut"), primarily of northern currency — 57,700,000
Etymological note on mǎlíngshǔ 馬鈴薯
The earliest known attestation in Chinese is found in the Kangxi edition of the Gazetteer of Songxi County (《松溪縣志》), published in 1700, but based on its description, it is improbable that it referred to the potato but, instead, referred to the air potato (Dioscorea bulbifera) (Xiang, 2018). The name probably originally made reference to the way air potatoes look like bells used in the tack for horses.
Alternatively, considering this word is mainly distributed in the South, and that other forms in the area, such as 荷蘭薯／荷兰薯 and 番仔番薯, usually include a modifier meaning “foreign”, Suzuki (2013) suggests that 馬鈴／马铃 (mǎlíng) may be a variant of 馬來／马来 (Mǎlái, “Malay”).
Japanese bareisho
Origin unclear. Attributed to noted Edo-period botanist and scholar of Chinese medicine Ono Ranzan (see 小野蘭山) in the late 1700s. May be from Sinitic 馬鈴薯／马铃薯 (mǎlíngshǔ), or may be a Japanese coinage later borrowed into Chinese.
According to one theory, this word is a compound of 馬鈴 (barei, “horse bell”) + 薯 (sho, “potato”), from the way the potato looks a bit like the bells used in the tack for stage horses. In another theory, 馬鈴 (barei) is an example of ateji for Malay, since potatoes were introduced to Japan via the Dutch East Indies.
The potato, which is highly adaptable to a wide variety of climates, terrains, and soils, is one of the main reasons (along with two other New World crops, maize and peanuts) for the population explosion that occurred in China during the approximately three centuries of the Qing dynasty (from around 100,000,000 to 300,000,000). The sweet potato was introduced to China during the mid- to late Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) which preceded the Qing / Manchu dynasty.
Incidentally, my search for "harsh brown(s)" yielded a lot of Indian fellows with the given name "Harsh", which means "happiness" in Hindi.
Selected readings
- "Potatoes Torch" (6/8/14) — includes a discussion of potato terminology in Sinitic languages
- "Indigenous languages and medicinal knowledge" (9/24/21)
tudza said,
June 25, 2024 @ 6:49 pm
I could read "earth bean" although I've never see it in writing before. Still maintaining my grade 3 level kanji skills ;-)
I like this one. It's like pomme de terre
Jim Gordon said,
June 25, 2024 @ 8:29 pm
If those potato puffs are deepfried in red spicy chili oil, then they may indeed be "harsh browns."
John Swindle said,
June 26, 2024 @ 5:12 am
It makes me hungry for spaghetti with bits of fried potato, mushrooms, garlic, and olive oil, something we used to get at a Hong Kong fusion restaurant.
I was surprised as a youngster to learn that the Volga German word for potato, Kartoffel (картофель), was BOTH German and Russian. I was more surprised later to find out that this strange-sounding word was Latinate and cognate with "truffle."
Victor Mair said,
June 26, 2024 @ 5:43 am
Any comments on the calligraphy?
I note that four of the horizontal strokes are curved.
Patrick King said,
June 26, 2024 @ 5:43 am
In the early days of computer viruses I inserted a floppy disk someone had given me. I immediately got a message saying that the disk was infected and that Harsh David would be coming to see me. Harsh turned out to be his first name, not the name IT gave to the staff enforcer.
Jerry Packard said,
June 26, 2024 @ 6:17 am
Hash browns, home fries, breakfast potatoes – I’m not sure we are totally consistent in what we term them. To me, hash browns are those stringy fried potato things served at Waffle House, and it is also what McDonalds calls their ground-and-compressed elongated patty things. Home fries seems synonymous with breakfast potatoes, which to my mind are potato chunks fried on the grill.
Philip Taylor said,
June 26, 2024 @ 8:45 am
For a Briton (well, for this Briton at least) "fried on the grill" does not make sense — either one fries in a frying pan (or a wok, or whatever) or one grills on (or more frequently, under) the grill. Could you explain please, Jerry ?
J.W. Brewer said,
June 26, 2024 @ 10:19 am
@Philip Taylor, I believe the "grill" being referenced by Jerry Packard is what wikipedia refers to as a "griddle, in the UK typically referred to simply as a frying pan or flat top." On the other hand, you may mean by "grill" what wiktionary marks as a distinctively British sense "A cooking device comprising a source of radiative heat and a means of holding food under it; a broiler in US English." I don't recall encountering anyone calling a broiler a "grill" and would hitherto have been confused if I had.
David Marjanović said,
June 26, 2024 @ 12:17 pm
All four characters seem tilted bottom-left-to-top-right.
Philip Taylor said,
June 26, 2024 @ 1:02 pm
JWB — "A griddle, in the UK typically referred to simply as a frying pan or flat top, is a cooking device consisting mainly of a broad, usually flat cooking surface" — it took me a little while to locate that (I should have used Google to search for the exact string rather than search Wikipedia directly) but having now found it I believe that Wikipedia is in error — if I summarise what I believe to be the erroneous part it would read "A griddle, in the UK typically referred to simply as a […] flat top" but to me, a Briton who has cooked for himself for the last sixty years, the term "flat top" is completely unknown. I suspect that it is an Americanism, unknown over here.
Terry K. said,
June 26, 2024 @ 2:08 pm
Wikipedia has an entry for flattop grill that has it as something different than a griddle, and originating in Mexico and Central America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattop_grill
I (middle of the U.S.) was not familiar with flattop for a cooking pan or appliance.
Jerry Packard said,
June 26, 2024 @ 3:10 pm
By ‘fried on the grill’ I meant on the griddle, where the short order cook makes eggs, pancakes and hamburgers.
Philip Taylor said,
June 26, 2024 @ 3:16 pm
OK, so if one "fries on the griddle", is the food placed directly on the griddle (and if so, what — if anything — retains the fat required for frying) or in a vessel (e.g., a frying pan) placed on the griddle, Jerry ?
Seonachan said,
June 26, 2024 @ 7:34 pm
The griddle is a flat surface, not grated. Like this:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/6f/dc/5a/6fdc5af3aed2d3146571e58ef8d907e1.jpg
It's commonly called a grill in the US, thus the confusion here.
Philip Taylor said,
June 27, 2024 @ 4:04 am
Ah, thank you Seonachan, all is now clear. The "grid" element of "griddle" clearly misled me. When I am next in the hotel kitchen I will ask what it is called over here.
Cheryl Thornett said,
June 27, 2024 @ 10:46 am
Philip, I have in the past heard 'griddle' pronounced 'girdle' on Radio 4, when the context was clearly cooking and not a women's undergarment. UK shops usually, I think, now sell 'griddle pans'–that is, a heavy-duty frying pan with parallel ridges, often non-stick, like so: __/\__/\__/\__. The fat drains away from the cooking food.
Philip Taylor said,
June 27, 2024 @ 11:40 am
I have such a pan, and use it to cook steaks (for which it is ideal, if heated to a sufficiently high temperature) but I don't think of it as a "frying pan" for the very reason you mention — "The fat drains away from the cooking food" — which is the last thing I would want if I were frying qua frying.
John Swindle said,
June 28, 2024 @ 5:59 am
Okay, I'll bite. It's not unusual that the horizontal strokes aren't completely flat. I don't see the characters as tilted as long as the vertical strokes are vertical. What does seem odd to me, looking on from a great cultural and geographic distance, is the u-shaped or n-shaped curve of some of the horizontal lines, especially in the 豆 character. Is it a faint nod to a much older script? Or maybe a special hand one learns for writing on boxes of "harsh browns"?
John Swindle said,
June 28, 2024 @ 6:02 am
I mean, "for labeling trays of 'harsh browns'?"
Michael Carasik said,
June 28, 2024 @ 7:12 am
Per the current Science podcast, something called a potato beetle (non–native) is now threatening China's potato crop.
James Britt said,
June 28, 2024 @ 9:42 am
I'm sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but the inclusion of the image in the RSS feed as data:image/png;base64 breaks my RSS reader. The image data makes the feed simply too large to be processed, so nothing gets updated with current entries. Perhaps your RSS set-up as an option to exclude images (or link to them rather than embed them)