liuzhou

Finalised my delivery stuff for this year's. All the way from England.

She was always something of a cult figure is the UK. Somewhere I have a copy of her Honey from a Weed (eG-friendly Amazon.com link). I think in my daughter's house in London. (Couldn't carry many books when I moved to China, almost 30 years ago.) Along, with, Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson they were pivotal. There is a good tribute here from the Guardian on her centenary in 2017.

I’ve been pining for this one. But I’m not fussy. There are no songs related to these that I know of but 松子 (sōng zǐ) or, less often, 松瓤 (sōng ráng) here are Pinus koraiensis, pine nuts. I’d always considered these to be European but I was very wrong. In fact, the top producing areas are all in Asia with China, Russia, North Korea, Pakistan and Afghanistan leading the way in that order.[ Pine and its nuts, from the Latin ‘pinus’ entered English over 1,000 years ago. The name ‘pignoli’, as sometimes used in America, is not the Italian name which is ’pinoli’. ‘Pignoli’ in Italy more usually means ‘picky’ or ‘fussy’. How, this amusing error arose is not clear, but I have theories which I won’t trouble you with. As with most ‘nuts’, pine nuts are not nuts in any botanical sense; they are simple seeds, gymnosperms in botanical terms with that being from the Greek ‘γυµνόσπερµ-ος’, meaning ‘naked seed’. There are 20 viable edible species, with P. koriaensis being the most common worldwide. Europe favours P. pinea whereas America tends to go most for P. edulis, P. monophylla or, in Mexico, P. cembroides. Here they are used in pseudo-salads, stir fries, braises with meats etc much as in the west. I use them to make pesto, a decidedly not Chinese sauce. I have to grow the basil. Pine nut oil is seldom used as it has a low smoke point rendering it unsuitable for frying. The producers can make more selling the nuts. Some (not many) people, when eating pine nuts, find they suffer from what is known as dysgeusia, a ‘taste disturbance’ popularly known as ‘pine mouth’. This can last up to two weeks. Symptoms are a bitter metallic taste in the mouth a day or two after consuming pine nuts. The US Food and Drug Administration investigated this and concluded that it was largely, if not entirely, caused by food fraud, with cheaper non-edible Pinus armandii being substituted for more expensive species. Results were not conclusive though as not everyone who eats the same nuts suffers the condition and some report the symptoms with other species.

The Japanese rice wine known to the world as sake was, on December 5th, 2024 added to the “intangible cultural heritage of humanity” list by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). That took a long time. Guardian story here. 🍾

I used to make this regularly about 35 -55 years ago, but stopped when I moved to China. No olives of any description. (China has what it calls olives but are a totally different plant and nothing like European olives.) A few years ago bottled real olives, imported from Spain, made an appearance when there was a pizza craze. They are far from the best olives, but better than no olives. So, I started again. Chicken with black olives, coriander leaf, chilli, garlic, and white wine. Served as I did before moving to the land of rice eaters, with rice.

Sashimi tuna with seagrass for breakfast? Why not? With soy and freshly grated real wasabi, and pickled ginger.

This one is for my mother. Corylus avellana are hazelnuts, cobnuts or filberts depending on species. The have several names in Chinese but 榛子 (zhēn zi) is most common for the unshelled nuts, while 榛仁 (zhēn rén) covers the shelled kernels. The English name ‘hazelnut’ is ancient, dating back to the Old English ‘hæselhnutu’ first recorded in 725 AD, ‘Filbert. came from the French ‘noix de filbert’ in the 13th century and ‘cobnut’ from their cobblestone-like appearance in the 15th. Hazelnut Kernels They are used here much as they are elsewhere – in cakes, pies and mainly in chocolate. I’m told some of Starbucks’ Chinese competitors do a hazelnut flavoured coffee, but I never go there. We even get Nutella (能多益 - néng duō yì) here. I most certainly don’t go there. Can’t stand the stuff. Nutella Ingredients. PD Image

Oh yes. I dont think it's that small. This one, filled with Maldon salt, is about 5½ inches / 14 cm tall and 6½ inches / 16.75 cm diameter at the top. I have three of them, all used for salt of various kinds, none iodized. Maybe I meant an urn for the deceased; not a receptacle for the body! It's certainly larger than the ash urns I've seen too many of. Regular table salt is also iodized here, too but not always. I have the choice, but seldom think about it. Never tasted anything metallic.

I did? I don't recall that, but there are a lot of things I don't remember! Do you have a picture?

Today I’m getting volcanic and beating about the bush. 火山豆 (huǒ shān dòu) literally means ‘volcano bean’ and is one name for a culinary nut, better known as 夏威夷果 (xià wēi yí guǒ), literally meaning Hawaii being a phonetic rendition and really meaning very little in a literal sense. This nut doesn’t originate in Hawaii, though. It is one of two species native to Queensland, Australia - Macadamia integrifolia or Macadamia tetraphylla. There are two other species of Macadamia but they are inedible as they contain cyanogenic glycosides which you don’t want to contain. They are named after chemist, medical teacher, and politician John Macadam, who was the honorary Secretary of the Philosophical Institute of Victoria beginning in 1857. The nuts were eaten in the bush by Australian aboriginals but only produced en masse commercially in the 1920s after seeds of the trees had been introduced to Hawaii in the 1880s. Today the largest producer is South Africa. The trees do not produce nuts until around seven years old and the nuts have to gathered by hand making them relatively expensive. Although, once they do produce nuts they go on doing so for up to 100 years. The are used mainly as snack nuts or in cakes and desserts. Macadamia oil is also available. It has a high smoke point, but is expensive. Their shells are extremely hard to crack; those sold here come with a key to facilitate entry. Note: Macadamias are toxic to dogs and cats.

I've got my wine laid in and have ordered some mince pies. What more do I need?

Sadly, the story has an unhappy ending. Police have found the van abandoned along with all the pies, both of which are damaged beyond hope and having to be written off. “It’s just so much waste,” [Banks] said in a video on Instagram. “It’s just rubbish. Sorry, it’s not a happier ending to this story.

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.