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osprey_archerYou know how it is with modern daughters and mothers who think we are modern. And it is even more delicate with a mother and a daughter, both having had mixed experiences of eating, cooking, speaking, and writing. Now that we have not neglected to do the making-up with each other after our last recipe, it is safe for me to claim that all the credit for the good points of the book are mine and all the blame for the bad points is Rulan’s.
Next, I must blame my husband for all the negative contributions he has made toward the making of the book. In many places he has changed Rulan’s good English into bad, which he thinks Americans like better…
Like Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, Buwei Yang Chao’s How to Cook and Eat in Chinese was translated into English by a family member: in this case, her daughter Rulan, with occasional footnotes by Yuenren Chao (who once has dueling footnotes with Rulan). The book is part traditional cookbook, with recipes, but also partly a description of Chinese food culture in the early to mid twentieth century. (The book was published in 1945. For obvious reasons, the Chaos had been stuck in America for a few years at that point.)
Chao mentions, for instance, that although it’s common in China to serve tea throughout the day, no tea is served at meals. In fact, often the only liquid at meals is soup, and people will take spoonfuls of soup to refresh themselves between courses. There’s no dessert at the end of the meal, but at a banquet, sweets may appear at intervals between other courses; the other main use of sweets in Chinese cuisine is as tien-hsin, “dot-hearts,” (tim-sam in Cantonese), which are little meals/snacks eaten with tea - although these are just as likely to be savory, “flour things which are baked, fried, or boiled and may be made sweet or salty.”
I loved the translation “dot-hearts” and wish it had caught on in English; it sounds so much more elegant than “snack.” I also loved the phrase Chao mentions as a description of fine food, “mountain rarities and sea flavors.” Isn’t that so evocative?
In many cases Buwei and Rulan are not just translating from Chinese into English but actually making up an English word or phrase to correspond to the original Chinese. Some of these caught on, like stir-fry (defined as “a big-fire-shallow-fat-continual-stirring-quick-frying of cut-up material with wet seasoning”); others didn’t, like wraplings for what I believe, based on the description and the line-drawings, English-speakers now call dumplings.
She does have a dumpling recipe - for a New Year Dumpling that is made by concocting a nut stuffing (ground walnut & almond, & sesame), sprinkling the balls of stuffing with water, and then rolling them till coated in glutinous rice flour and then sprinkling then coating etc etc until there are four or five layers of rice flour, and then you boil the whole thing up. If you google New Year Dumpling today, something completely different comes up! Is this because New Year Dumplings have completely changed direction in China, or because the dish Chao describes now goes by a different name in English?
As it’s a cookbook rather than a memoir, it has less forward motion than Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, so I found it a little harder to get into - but the process of translating from one language into another that doesn’t yet have a word or set phrase for the things you’re describing really intrigued me. And the food descriptions kept making me hungry!
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Date: 2021-12-16 03:32 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2021-12-16 04:08 pm (UTC)- New Year in China actually lasts 23 days, starting a week before Jan 1 on the lunar calendar. On Jan 15 of the Lunar calendar, there's a celebration of the first full moon of the year, and nowadays it's known as the lantern festival. You make 汤圆 (tangyuan), which is as described (I usually eat the ones with sesame filling, other people prefer red bean filling. Using walnuts is if you can't get enough sesame.) Anyway, if you have it normally, it's called Tangyuan as above, but for Jan 15, it's called 元宵 (Yuanxiao). It is super yummy. Here's the wikipedia entry on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangyuan_(food) . My guess for why Tangyuan would be called dumplings in the book is because it's closest in form factor to American dumplings.
- There's actually no good way to say "dumpling" as a category in Chinese, since each thing is its own distinct (and often regional) dish, and serves different purposes. Cantonese style dim sum is very different from what I call dianxin (same word) -- for me, dianxin is sweet, whereas if you go to a Dim sum restaurant, there's a lot of not sweet things there. Some are for snacking purposes, some are the main meal. Usually people think of jiaozi as the standard dumpling, but my family mostly makes wontons. But my wontons from Shanghai are different from traditional Cantonese wontons. And then there's baozi, which is literally "wraplings", but those are the buns.
- Stuff like "dot heart" and "mountain rarities and sea flavors" are direct translations for Chinese phrases -- 点心 and 山珍海味. 山珍海味 is a standard phrase to describe bountiful, high rarity food, but is kind of ... well, it's a set phrase that has lost the feeling of beauty in Chinese. It's like if I'm like "wow, 'rolling thunder' is so evocative!" and everyone is like "um, that's what you call the thunder if you're out of words for it." Of course, usually in historical texts when 山珍海味 is specified, they mean things like bear paw or geoducks so ... please keep the adventurous Chinese palette in mind when you're imagining these things.
- Lastly, I'm glad that they weren't in China during that time period! Although I'm also curious how they managed to get around the Exclusion Act.
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Date: 2021-12-16 04:51 pm (UTC)I didn't go into this in reviewing either of Chao's books (just too many other aspects to talk about!), but she talks a lot about regional differences in food etc. in different parts of China. She lived MANY different places (her family moved a few times when she was young, and then her husband the linguist was going hither and yon to study dialects, and THEN the university moved and moved again to stay ahead of the advancing Japanese army... So she had been many places, and then sometimes her husband pops in with a footnote about how things are done in his own hometown.
I looked this up when I first read Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, and apparently there was an academic exception to the Exclusion Act - both for Chinese college students studying at American universities, and for Chinese academics teaching there. IIRC, Yuenren Chao studied philosophy in the US and then came back as a linguistics professor.
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Date: 2021-12-16 07:23 pm (UTC)If there is an Asian grocery store near you, they can generally be found in the frozen section. :)
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Date: 2021-12-16 04:34 pm (UTC)Is this a reference to slang, or...?
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Date: 2021-12-16 04:39 pm (UTC)But I also think to a certain extent Buwei is just poking a bit of loving fun at her husband.
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Date: 2021-12-17 04:42 pm (UTC)However, the dumpling that truly broke me are the "dumplings" in traditional Indiana chicken and dumplings, which are just thick noodles. Just noodles! Why are they called dumplings??? Is it because they get dumped into boiling water? But does that make boiled bagels dumplings...?
Maybe I shouldn't say that too loud or the word dumpling will add another foodstuff to its harem.