liuzhou

In other articles the chef has been quoted as saying: 😎

Here is a tale of mistranslation, mispronunciation, mishearing and general linguistic chaos much like my daily life. Gingko Tree in summer (left) and (winter) - Liuzhou 白果 (bái guǒ, literally white nut), Gingko biloba is a living fossil dating back 270 million years and native to China. The trees are extremely long-living with examples still alive and well after 1400 years. The trees were Introduced to Japan in the 1300s and became known in Japanese as 銀杏 (gin kyo), literally ’silver apricot’ from the Chinese 银杏 (yín xìng). They are unrelated to apricots or anything else. This Japanese name was then mispronounced / misspelled when picked up by western botanists and when misheard and transliterated became gingko or ginkgo. Generally, both spellings are acceptable today, but ginkgo being preferred. Gingko is closer to the Chinese pronunciation of 银果 (yín guǒ), meaning ‘silver nut’, but not used to mean either gingko or ginkgo! 😕 Google N-gram showing relative usage of the two spellings. Whatever you call them, the nuts are credited by TCM with curing all sorts of diseases including dementia, asthma, bronchitis, and kidney and bladder disorders, although there is no conclusive evidence for these claims. Unshelled Gingkgo nuts They are widely used in soups, stir-fries, and hot pots as well as the famous Buddhist vegetarian dish 罗汉斋 (luó hàn zhāi), “ often referred to in English as “Buddha’s Delight” although the Chinese just means “Buddha’s Vegetarian Diet”. Shelled, cooked nuts They also featured in my dinner last night! https://forums.egullet.org/topic/166082-dinner-2024/?do=findComment&comment=2438490

Just over a month after The Great British Cheese Heist comes news of The Great British Pie Heist! Michelin star chef Tommy Banks has had his van stolen. The refrigerated van was parked overnight plugged in to keep it refrigerated as it contained 25,000 meat pies, a week's stock for his shop in Yorkshire. The full story is on the link to the Pie Heist above. Image - Tommy Banks' Instagram

@Smithy I just accidentally found a picture of the red pistachios. They look dangerous. Fluorescent! Radioactive! There is no way I'd put those in my mouth. How anyone thought this made pistachios look better defeats me. Image: Shutterstock

Chicken, black boletes and gingko nuts. With rice. The chicken was marinated overnight with Shaoxing wine and Chaoshan fish sauce, garlic and chilli.

According to the Oxford Companion to food, focaccia doesn't have a fixed form.

1. Those walnuts do look atypically smooth. Perhaps a different cultivar. Perhaps, I should have used this image which is, I think, more typical. 2. Red pistachios. An abomination indeed! Never seen those anywhere in my life and never want to. Why? A bit of digging around provides this weak excuse of an explanation. hmmm!

I have something to get of my chest. 栗子 (lì zi) are trees in the genus Castanea. There are several of such around the northern hemisphere which supply their nuts for human consumption. Here, I want to look mainly at 板栗 (bǎn lì), Castanea mollissima, the Chinese chestnut as these are what are available not only here, but most places. The most common chestnuts, Chinese chestnuts are joined by the European chestnut, C. sativa, aka known as Spanish chestnut; the Japanese chestnut; C. crenata; but sadly not the near-extinct American chestnut, C. dentata. Not chestnuts are the horse chestnuts, which are so-named because they look like chestnuts but are unrelated and mildly poisonous to humans. Neither are water chestnuts which aren’t even nuts in any sense; they are tubers of an aquatic herbaceous plant. Of course, the name chestnut has nothing to do with chests of any sort. It came into English from the French chesteine which in turn came from the Latin name. Chestaine morphed into chesten so we had chesten nuts for a while and this gradually changed into chestnut. Th name derives back to the ancient Greek κάστανον referring to a place called Castania where the nuts were prolific. No one is sure where this place was in Greece and there are competing theories. The Italian polenta was originally made using chestnut flour from antiquity until the 17th century imported the dreaded maize/cØrn instead. Chestnuts are unusual among nuts in that they contain little in the way of protein or fat, instead being mostly carbohydrates. Something to consider if you are avoiding carbs for any reason. Peeled chestnuts As a child in the UK, I loved the smell of roasting chestnuts around this time of year and still associate them with Christmas. Street vendors hawked them on every corner. However the actually chestnuts disappointed, although they were popular. So I was delighted to find the same thing here, not only at Christmas which is not celebrated in China. As in other places, here they are roasted in a mix of salt and sugar. I’d guess this is how most are eaten all across China. Roast Chestnut lady in Liuzhou They are very common and are sold raw and cooked, the latter usually vacuum packed but sometimes frozen, in supermarkets. A number of dishes use them. Fuchsia Dunlop has a recipe for Sichuan chicken and chestnuts in her The Food Of Sichuan (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) as well as a recipe for Red-cooked pork and chestnuts in her The Land of Fish and Rice (eG-friendly Amazon.com link), her book on eastern Chinese cooking. My take on Chicken and Chestnuts Sichuan style - not pretty but tasty. There are other regional variations on the chicken dish. I often make the Sichuan version in winter. The chestnuts give a texture like roast potatoes. I think I know what might be on the chez liuzhou menu for Christmas.

This will be a short one. Prunus amygdalus or Prunus dulcis, 扁桃 (biǎn táo) are almonds. These, too are not a true nut but a drupe. I never buy them in China and suggest no one should. The problem is that in China they are almost always Prunus armeniaca 杏仁 (xìng rén) instead. Although they are related, these are not Prunus armeniaca but apricot kernels. Almonds? Apricot kernels? Who knows? No thanks! Real almonds are imported from the USA, but that too is problematic. According to this article Also, the high price imports can fetch, some unscrupulous vendors may be passing apricot kernels off as “Californian”. This article is about fake imports in the fruit trade, but the same applies to almonds and other goods. The inclusion of a photograph of a market in Liuzhou does not imply it happens here, although it may. So, you still don’t really know what you’re buying. Avoid.

Next up we go to the wall. Or we don’t. 核桃 (hé tao) or less often 胡桃 (hú táo), are Juglans regia, Walnuts. Add 仁 (rén) to those names and you have walnut kernels. Both unshelled and shelled are widely available, 核桃 (hé tao) being walnuts in the shell and 核桃 仁 (hé tao rén). Walnuts are true botanical nuts. Of course walnuts are not etymology linked to over-devoted Pink Floyd fans or any other walls. Introduced to English from Frisian as walhhnutu, the ‘wal’ part ultimately originates in Old Teutonic walχo-z, meaning foreign. Foreign to the Romans that is. ‘Nutu’ is an early version of ‘nut’. 'Wal' is etymologically related to Wales, and was originally an insult to the people of that fine country who were regarded as foreign barbarians. Not only are they very popular in China, but China is the world’s largest producer, with 1.4 million tonnes in 2022, followed by the USA with 0.68 million tonnes. Again most are eaten here as snacks or incorporated in bakery goods- cakes and buns. One local bakery does a good jujube and walnut cake. There is a savoury use. Unlike the missing Chicken and Cashew dish, Chicken and Walnuts is popular in Cantonese cuisine, especially in Hong Kong. The interwebs have recipes. Hop Po Gai Ding in Cantonese. One interesting use of walnuts, although non-culinary, is interesting. 文玩核桃 (wén wán hé tao) means something like ‘cultural playing balls. Almost every day, I see usually elderly men like me, holding two walnuts in one hand and manipulating them. It is seen as a form of therapy. Over the years, the walnut shells become polished and red. This link explains in detail. I have two pairs myself along with the required brushes for maintenance. They were a gift. Mine aren’t red yet.

Now that we can't edit posts after 12 hours, i have to post this separately. Hmmm. Pistachios in a coconut shell bowl.

Researchers at the University of Bath, England, RWTH Aachen and Goethe University Frankfurt have found that sales of the last lonely banana on supermarket shelves rise by 58% if labelled as being 'sad and lonely'. The story is here. In other banana news some idiot from China has paid $6.2 million for a banana and eaten it. He needs a different sort of scientist - a psychiatrist. Clearly bananas. That story is here.

Pork with sugar snap peas, garlic, ginger, chilli, soy sauce, Shaoxing wine, Served with rice and a side of stir fried water spinach.

Today, I’m being happy. I’m looking at 开心果 (kāi xīn guǒ), literally ’happy nut’, Pistacia vera, pistachio nuts. Native to Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia, this is another drupe seed, rather than a true nut. Pistachios are members of the cashew family which also contains mangos. They were introduced across Europe by the Romans throughout their empire. In the 19th century low yielding varieties were introduced from Europe to the USA. The United States Department of Agriculture later introduced hardier cultivars to California collected from China and commercial production began in 1929 and now the USA is the world’s top producer, followed by Iran. Ironically, a good proportion of the pistachios sold in China, today are from the USA, presumably grown on those trees and their descendents. Very limited numbers are grown in China. 82,000 tonnes in 2022 compared to the USA with 400,000 tonnes - still enough to make China the fourth largest. American Pistachios As with cashews above, they are mostly eaten as a snack; as an ingredient they are used in hideously garish coloured cakes, for which they are sold as pistachio paste. Pistachio Cake - Helena is a large bakery chain. I’ve also seen pistachio bao buns. No thanks. Pistachio Buns The are used in pistachio ice cream and I’ve seen pistachio milk tea on offer. I can find no evidence of use in Chinese savoury dishes though There are a few recipes for stir-fries using pistachios, but they are all North American. Cake and bun images from Meituan shopping app.

That's interesting. Yet, Googling cashew chicken gives endless recipes for the dish on American websites or other sites claiming it's a Chinese American takeaway classic in Chinese restaurants. Wikipedia's entry for 'Cashew Chicken' says: