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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.

Recently, however, my zest for all kinds of Chinese recipes has been reignited, partly because some of my many Chinese students are good cooks and partly because my favorite Chinese restaurant, Sang Kee, right across the street from Penn's Van Pelt Library, has such a vast repertoire of delicious dishes that I go there often and have tried many of them.  Sometimes, as I scan the capacious, copious menu looking over the scores of items available there, I subliminally notice the absence of muxu.  When I ask the waiters and the laoban, they always say "We don't have it", even though they sometimes make special dishes at my request, such as new ones that contain dòuchǐ 豆豉 ("fermented black beans").  Maybe the powers that be at Sang Kee do not think it's a sufficiently authentic Chinese dish!  So I started scouting among the hundreds of Chinese restaurants in the Philadelphia area for muxu, and have found quite a few that supposedly serve it, including two right in the little town of Swarthmore where I live.

Before I located a place where I can eat muxu regularly again, I started to think about the many enigmas swirling around its names.  So I wrote to one of my students, Zihan Guo, who is a scholar of Chinese cuisine:

Lately I've been having a longing for some good muxu rou [the last word just means "meat"].  Sang Kee doesn't have it, and I don't know where to go to get it.

Be that as it may, since I'm an incorrigible language maven, while dreaming of muxu rou I couldn't help but think of the linguistics of that odd-sounding name with several very different orthographies and a vexing semantic / etymological problem:  did the flower get its name from the appearance of scrambled eggs, or vice versa?

Here are some etymological notes on the name from Wiktionary:

From the flower of the plant 木樨 (mùxī, “sweet osmanthus”), due to a similar appearance.

Qing-dynasty official and writer Liang Gongchen recorded the following in his Scribbled Notes on the Gardens of the North and East, 3:

北方店中以雞子炒肉，名木樨肉，蓋取其有碎黃色也。

---

In shops of northern China, people stir-fry meat with eggs and call the dish “muxi pork”, because of its mottled yellow appearance.

The pronunciation is due to assimilation of vowel roundness.

Zihan replied:

[VHM: 

*mùxī ("Osmanthus", a genus of about thirty species)
**guìhuā ("Osmanthus fragrans") — "Adaptation of 桂 (guì) to distinguish the osmanthus from the 肉桂 (ròuguì, 'cassia; Chinese cinnamon')."  (source)
***dàn ("egg") — synonym for "testicle" in many topolects]

Zihan provided a more precise quote from Liang Shiqiu's essay:

黄菜指鸡蛋。北平人常避免说蛋字，因为它不雅，我也不知为什么不雅。“木樨”“芙蓉”“鸡子儿”都是代用词。更进一步“鸡”字也忌讳，往往称为“牲口”。

The "yellow veggie" refers to eggs. People from Beijing often avoid speaking of the word "egg," because it is not decent. I don't know why that is the case.* "Osmanthus," "hibiscus," “chicken eggs [very colloquial]" are all euphemisms. Even the word "chicken" can be tabooed and is often called "draught animal."

[VHM:  *see my last note just above, also this post; either Liang Shiqiu was being extremely disingenuous or he was utterly naive and clueless.]]

Before I begin the wrap-up phase of this already long post, let me give a list of ingredients for muxu pork:

marinade

    1/4 tsp salt
    1 tsp Chinese cooking sherry/wine
    1 tsp corn starch
    1 egg white
    1 tsp vegetable oil
    1/2 tsp white pepper powder

sauce

    3 cloves garlic
    1 scallion
    1 tsp soy sauce
    1/2 tsp rice vinegar
    1/2 tsp white sugar
    1/2 tsp white pepper powder
    1/2 tsp salt
    1/4 tsp MSG
    1 tsp sesame oil
    2 tbs water

other ingredients

    250 g pork tenderloin
    2 eggs
    1 medium size cucumber
    5 g dried black "wood ear" fungus
    15 pieces dried daylily
    3 tbs vegetable oil

Made properly with the right ingredients, muxu can be divinely delicious.  Made improperly with whatever is at hand, so-called muxu can be a big let down.  Here's what happened when I set about systematically trying out some nearby places that claimed to have muxu meat dishes.

The first place I went is named Great Wall.  I called my order in:  "Do you have muxu pork?"  "Yes."  "How long will it take?"  "10 minutes."  The cook was a middle-aged mom, the person at the counter was a teenage girl whose little sister was sitting on a chair nearby — reading a book, mind you, not playing with a digital device.  The girl at the counter handed me a paper bag with the muxu pork inside.  As you would expect from a small strip mall Chinese restaurant like this one, the food was very hot (temperature wise).  There were two pliable, nondescript, unappetizing pancakes and a container with the muxu pork.  I opened it up and my face fell.  It had strips of hard pork (should be soft), but not one of the other essential ingredients:  no black “wood ear” fungus, no eggs, no daylily, and no cucumber!  What the devil?!  Just generic strips of cabbage, carrots, and other unidentifiable veggies (celery and tiny bits of bell peppers, perhaps).

When I asked the girl at the counter why they didn't include black wood ear fungus, she replied, "We don't serve wood ear fungus in any of our dishes."  I questioned, "Why not?"  She said, "Americans don't like it."  I retorted, "But if you don't include wood ear and egg, then it is not muxu."  Without missing a beat, she proclaimed, "This is our take on muxu."  That made me smile, because it was such an idiomatic English expression.  She was a teenager whose Mandarin was minimal but very au courant with her English, which completely disarmed me.

The second place I went was Bamboo Bistro.  I had gone there about 10-15 years ago when they first opened and ordered another of my favorite dishes, Singapore Noodles.  It was so horrible (rubbery, dirty broccoli and no sense of how to use curry, among other sins) that I never returned.  Now, however, in my urgent need for muxu, plus the fact that I walk right by Bamboo Bistro every day, I thought I'd give them a reprieve.  Who knows, maybe they got a new chef.

I went in to inquire.  Things didn't look too promising at first.  The waitress couldn't speak Mandarin and her English was below minimal (when she said "eggs" I couldn't understand her because I thought she was saying "X").  The female boss had to come out and interpret (the male boss stayed hidden and silent in the back).  Her Mandarin was good (she told my that the waitress was Malaysian [maybe she spoke Hokkien, Fuzhou, Teochew, Hainanese, etc., but I didn't have a chance to find out what it was] — later the waitress told me that she doesn't speak any kind of Chinese at all, only Bahasa Malaysia and English), so I could talk to her (the female boss) and was able to place my order.

What Bamboo Bistro served me was much better than Great Wall.  It had wood ear fungus for sure, a miniscule amount of scrambled eggs, the pancakes were appetizing, but no daylillies and no cucumbers.  Not too bad (they must have changed owners), but I'll still have to go searching for my tampopo-muxu.

I conclude with what Zihan told me when I asked her for suggestions about where to go to get muxu:

It seems like most Chinese restaurants around Swarthmore have it. Bamboo Bistro (you can walk there), Great Wall, Da Chen, etc. 柳记饭馆 in Philly's China Town also has it. I don't know if any is good, but the gist of moo shu, as I understand it, is the art of bricolage.

Indeed!

Selected readings

• "The language of spices" (1/6/24)
• Gábor Parti, "Mapping the Language of Spices: A Corpus-Based, Philological Study on the Words of the Spice Domain", Sino-Platonic Papers, 338 (January, 2024), 1-243.
• "Asafoetida: Satanically stinky spice" (12/10/23)
• "Garbler of spices" (8/21/22)
• "Sino-Semitica: of cinnamon, cassia, and katsura and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 2" (6/25/22)
• "Sino-Semitica: of gourds, cassia, and hemp and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (2/1/20)

Addendum

The "Etymology" section of the Wikipedia article on "Moo shu pork"

There are two competing histories regarding how the name of this dish is written and explained.

One story gives the name as 木犀肉 (pinyin: mù xī ròu). The last character 肉 (ròu) means "meat" and refers to the pork in the dish. The first part 木犀 (mù xī) is the name for the sweet osmanthus, a small ornamental tree that produces bunches of small and fragrant blossoms that may be yellow or white.

Scrambled eggs have an appearance that remind people of the mixed yellow and white flowers, so 木犀 (mù xī) is a poetic way of referring to the scrambled eggs used in preparing this dish. Additionally, at Chinese Confucian death anniversary celebrations, the Chinese word for "egg" (蛋; pinyin: dàn) is avoided when referring to dishes containing eggs, as many Chinese curses contain this word. Thus, the word dàn was typically substituted using the euphemism "sweet osmanthus." By this reasoning, in this version of the dish's name, the first character, 木 (mù) is short for 木耳 (mù'ěr, meaning "wood ear fungus") and 樨 (xī, meaning "sweet osmanthus tree") is short for 桂花 (guíhuā, meaning "sweet osmanthus flower").

The second way of writing the name of this dish that is commonly seen in Chinese restaurants in the United States is 木须肉 (pinyin: mù xū ròu). The second character 须 (xū) means "whiskers," and is often given an additional determinative component in writing (to distinguish the meaning of "whiskers" from the other meanings of 須) so that it comes to be written as 鬚. It is possible that 木須肉 (literally "wood whiskers pork") might have been used on the menus of the first American Chinese restaurants to serve the dish in place of the correct compound 木樨肉 ("sweet osmanthus pork") due to haste or simply because of the limitations of Chinese typewriters. It may also merely have been the result of writing the wrong character with a similar pronunciation.

Two additional explanations of the name have unclear origins and may be examples of folk etymology: there is a neighborhood with a similar name in Beijing called Muxidi (木樨地), which is home to the Muxidi station (木樨地站). The dish is also occasionally… called 苜蓿肉 (mùsù ròu) meaning "alfalfa meat".

Clear as mud, as my mother used to say.  Still, I give the folks at Wikipedia a lot of credit for grappling with the colossal confusion swirling around the not so simple and innocent Chinese dish called muxu.  Make of it what you will.

July 30, 2024 @ 2:02 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and culture, Language and food, Orthography, Pronunciation

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