Language Log

« previous post | next post »

A hot bowl of congee / zuk1 粥 (Cantonese) / zhōu (Mandarin) / rice porridge / rice gruel, in its multifarious varieties, is one of my favorite Chinese dishes — at its best, congee is absolutely divine.  We've written about it often enough that I think most Language Log readers have a good idea of what it's like.  Here I only want to add some new information about it from a historical, literary, and linguistic vantage.

The paragraphs quoted here are from Nandini Das, "Dark Propensities", a review of Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes:  Opium's Hidden Histories (John Murray, 2023) in London Review of Books (3/20/25).

A CHINESE FRIEND and I have taken to batting words at each other like ping-pong balls. I'm trying to improve my Mandarin and she is curious about Bengali, but some things stop us in our tracks. Rice porridge is one of them. Cooked rice can be revived by boiling in water, or simply by pouring water over it, although fancier versions use broth or green tea, as in Japanese ochazuke. It can be reassuringly warm in cold winters, or refreshingly cold in hot summers, and can be paired with side dishes from a single green chilli to pickled vegetables, or salted fish and eggs. My friend tells me that in Mandarin it is called 粥 (zhöu). I say that the Bengali word for the cold, overnight version is panta-bhaat, and the cooked version is phena-bhaat (bhaat means cooked rice). Then I remember that phena-bhaat is a regional term, associated with the Bengali of Kolkata, where I grew up. For my mother, whose culinary vocabulary was that of her childhood in East Bengal, now Bangladesh, cooked rice porridge was jaou, a softer pronunciation of the Mandarin zhöu. During my childhood, I realise, East Bengal's long-standing trade connections with the Chinese mainland were behind the steaming bowls of jaou-bhaat my mother cooked.

The British called it congee, a name now used by countless restaurants and food stalls, from Hong Kong and Taiwan to the Chinatowns of London and Liverpool. 'Congee' has an Asian root, though Indian rather than Chinese, and it too is a product of transcultural movements. It comes from the Tamil word kanji or kañci and its cognates in South India, and entered the English language thanks to the Portuguese, who were great believers in the food's easily digestible goodness. In 1563, it was mentioned in the Colóquios dos simples e drogas he cousas medicinais da Índia ('Conversations on the Simples, Drugs and Medicinal Substances of India'), printed in the Portuguese stronghold of Goa. Its author was Garcia de Orta, a converso who had managed to evade the Inquisition's crackdown on the Cristãos Novos (New Christlans), whom the Portuguese called marranos (swine). De Orta left for Goa, where he was a doctor to the local people as well as the Portuguese, and managed to escape the Inquisition until his death in 1568, though twelve years later his body was exhumed and burned as belonging to a crypto-jew. His monumental book is full of references to local medical practices. He is highly critical of most of them, but rice water, 'which they call CANJE', gets his approval. De Orta's book was translated into Latin by the pre-eminent botanist of the time, Charles de l'Écluse, or Clusius, almost as soon as it reached Europe, and went through multiple editions and translations. Much of Europe's understanding of Indian flora can be traced to its pages.

I hope you enjoyed those philological notes.

They are a far cry from this phonological-cum-graphological note that I added to this post about the word for congee that I saw written on a receipt at a Cantonese restaurant in Philadelphia's Chinatown eight years ago:

Phonological note:

zú 足 ("foot; sufficient; enough") — Cantonese zuk1

zhōu 粥 ("congee; porridge") — Cantonese zuk1

See the photograph in this post, where the waiter used the character for the word "foot" to stand for the word "congee" because they are homophones.

Selected readings

• *Congee: the Dravidian roots of the name for a Chinese dish" (11/13/17)
• "Chinese restaurant shorthand, part 2" (11/30/16)
• "Chinese restaurant shorthand, part 3" (2/25/17)

[Thanks to Leslie Katz]

June 1, 2025 @ 1:03 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and food, Phonetics and phonology

Permalink