What’s In a Name? For Chinese Food, Sometimes It’s Not What You Think

 

What’s In a Name? For Chinese Food, Sometimes It’s Not What You Think - Menuism Dining Blog, July 11, 2013


 

With today’s health and dietary concerns, more attention is paid to what’s in the food that we eat. However, when it comes to popular Chinese menu items, some dishes are misnamed, and in some cases downright misleading. Here are some offerings that you may find at your local Chinese restaurant where the name of the item doesn’t correspond to what the dish really is.

Cantonese Pineapple Buns

I love the pineapple buns you get at dim sum restaurants, cafés and bakeries (known in Cantonese as bo lo bao, literally “pineapple bun”). This is in part because I really like the flavor of pineapples. I always thought the pineapple was the powdery yellow stuff on top of the bun, so imagine my chagrin when, after decades of eating these, I find that there’s no pineapple content at all. The term pineapple bun describes the look of the bun, craggy on top like the surface of a pineapple, and has nothing to do with the ingredients. The only thing that makes me not feel completely silly is that very few people are aware of the lack of pineapple in pineapple buns. Oh well.
 
 

Taiwanese Chicken Roll

I’ve watched my intake of cholesterol my entire adult life, so going to Taiwanese restaurants has been a challenge. With a menu full of items like fried pork chops, pig ears, and pig tripe, it’s rough finding dishes conforming to my dietary preferences. Consequently, an old standby for me has been the Taiwanese chicken roll, with a crispy tofu wrapper and a pastry or minced meat filling. I recently learned that there is no chicken in the Taiwanese chicken roll. Similar to the Cantonese pineapple bun, it’s called chicken roll because the crisp bean curd skin wrapper looks like chicken skin. And the filling is made out of fish paste and pork.

Sichuan-style Saliva Chicken


Finally a dish with a chicken name that actually has chicken in it! Hopefully nobody thinks saliva chicken has anybody’s saliva (human or chicken) as an official ingredient. But what could the name possibly refer to? The dish itself consists of steamed chicken flavored with a wide variety of ingredients, including ginger, sesame seeds, peanuts, onions, cilantro, salt and sugar. The explanation of the name? It is supposed to be so delicious that the thought of eating it makes you salivate. Still, you think they would have called it yummy chicken, or mouth-watering, or something like that instead.

 

Fish Stew Soup


I first encountered fish stew soup at a Chinese restaurant in Washington D.C. Chinatown, expecting maybe some kind of Chinese cioppino or chowder. What I ended up with was fish maw soup. For the uninitiated, fish maw is the dried bladder of a large fish. Fish maw soup is commonly found on the menu of Hong Kong-style restaurants, and I happen to like fish maw soup, so I was fine with my order. (Fish maw, like birds nest, shark’s fin, jellyfish, and bamboo pith are Chinese ingredients that have little taste of their own but are prized for their texture.) Fortunately, most Chinese restaurants serving fish maw soup use the correct name. But not all of them do, and I feel really sorry for the unsuspecting who are blindsided when they order fish stew soup.

 

French-style Shrimp and Fish

One of the most popular recent additions to the menus at Hong Kong-style restaurants in the United States is French-style filet mignon, a slightly spicy, slightly sweet, slightly savory dish served on a bed of lettuce leaves and raw onion rings and garnished with tomato slices at each end of the dish. This presentation is fairly uniform in all the Chinese restaurants. And now one sees Hong Kong-style restaurants serving dishes called French-style shrimp and French-style fish fillets. The fish and shrimp dishes are served in a similar manner to the filet mignon dish in the same spicy, savory, sweet sauce with shredded lettuce, raw onion rings and sliced tomatoes. But what the restaurants who serve French-style shrimp or fish don’t seem to recognize is that French-style refers to “French cut,” where the steak is cut into small cubes. It does not refer to the accompanying ingredients and manner of presentation. And French-style shrimp and French-style fish are definitely not cut into little cubes. What’s next? French-style rice?

 

Cats Ears


No, the Chinese didn’t do the unthinkable to poor tabby. This is another visually named dish, originally from Shanxi province — chewy clumps of dough usually served stir-fried, but also found in soup. But if you’re like a cat fancier friend of mine who won’t eat catfish, you might be inclined to avoid this dish too.

Fish Noodle Soup

 

Fish noodle soup is a dish found predominantly in the eastern part of Manhattan Chinatown at Fujianese-style restaurants. This item is actually opposite of the other dishes discussed in this article — the name is misleading because it is too accurate. People ordering fish noodle soup expect a hearty broth containing fish and noodles. What they get is plain noodle soup and no fish. So how can the name be accurate? The noodles are made out of a fish-based flour. These noodles have an elastic crunch to them, likely another Chinese food item whose primary selling point is the texture, rather than the taste sensation.

 

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How The San Gabriel Valley Became A Mecca For Chinese Dining

Image
As far as the younger generation and more recent immigrants are concerned, the gigantic Chinatown that is the San Gabriel Valley is something that has always existed.   I remember a comment on one of my interviews about the San Gabriel Valley was along the lines of "I always thought that my family used to live in East Los Angeles because they couldn't afford to live in Monterey Park at the time."  But indeed, I remember a time when there were very few Chinese or other Asians living in the San Gabriel Valley, and in fact at one time that the San Gabriel Valley was the most racist, lily white areas in Los Angeles County. So naturally, the subject which intrigued me over the years is how such a gigantic Chinese dining mecca and Chinese community in terms of both population and geographic area could have developed in the San Gabriel Valley, and not anywhere else in the Los Angeles area or somewhere else in the United States.   Now it’s not that I didn’t have a clue, as some o
Read more

Why Are Chinese Restaurants So Similar? (Secrets of the Fujianese-American Restaurant Industry Go Public)

Image
Why Are Chinese Restaurants So Similar? - Menuism Dining Blog, February 18, 2019   This is my favorite of anything I have ever written.  As someone who has observed the Chinese restaurant industry for decades, I often why many mom and pop Chinese restaurants could seemingly serve identical dishes or offer uncannily similar menus. My first clue into the answer came from an unexpected place:  a story the financial press which I only stumbled upon while Googling something else.  My experience as an attorney and a CPA enabled me to follow the trail to find source documents that were filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that provided a trove of information that had never been made public.  And it took a combination of these things, along with my eating at many Chinese restaurants for this article to come about! But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Let's start at the beginning. Fujianese domination of Chinese restaurants   Since the late 1980s, immigrants have been
Read more

After 170 Years, Taishan Style Chinese Restaurants Are Opening Up In The United States

Image
  As I have often said, few among the American public realize that from the time of the arrival of the first Chinese in America during the gold rush, well into the mid-20th century, nearly the entirety of the Chinese population in the United States was rooted in the villages in or near the rural agricultural area of south China called Toisan, also known as Hoisan, and now referred to in the 21st century as Taishan.    (Note that in this article I will switch between references to Toisan and Taishan, depending on the time period being discussed.) So with Toisanese migrants being in California since the Gold Rush, how can the first Taishanese restaurants be just be opening now, some 170 years later?   Weren't there Toisanese style restaurants all over the United States in 1800s and the 1900s, since most of the Chinese were Toisanese and they opened restaurants to serve both their compatriots and outsiders?    Not really.  Historically there were never any restaurants in the U
Read more