jacko

Let me be so bold as to add my own small collection of mainly Taiwanese recipes. English only. http://www.eatingchina.com/recipes.html

Sounds quite plausible Jo-mei. Then again, what if the migration was in the other direction - from Sichuan to Beijing, via the same mandarins when they returned to the court? If you looked at the About.com link I mentioned above, you'll see something about the earliest hot and sour soup having a broth made of congealed pig's blood. The Taiwanese version ALWAYS has pig's blood. Is the the origin Taiwan? !!! As BarbaraY says, maybe we will never know. Maddening isn't it? Anyway here is the Taiwan version of hot and sour soup (which is not at all peppery) Recipe

Seems like Sichuan and Beijing keep popping up as possible origins. I have a eaten a bunch of different versions of hot and sour soup, and it seems to me that the most important ingredient or taste is the vinegar. The dish is supposed to hot as well as sour. Pepper and chilli are common all over, so is vinegar, but Sichuan cookery does not make heavy use of it as far as I can tell, unlike north China. Maybe this points more to Beijing? Also this very interesting snippet from about.com

Anybody know the reginal origin of hot and sour soup? I had always assumed Sichuan, and I think a couple of cookbooks imply as much. But I am not so sure. Thanks.

Land of Plenty Authentic Sichuan recipes personally gathered in the Chinese province of Sichuan. by Fuchsia Dunlop

What is Haw? English? Mandarin pron?

What about counties? I mean, the spelling is almost the same as for countries. I have eaten in quite a few counties. Does that count?

How would you write "dai chop wui" in Chinese? Could "chop wui' have morphed in to chop suey?

I am certainly glad this topic came up. I have a question about chop suey. E. N. Anderson in The Food of China quotes another author in saying that chop suey is, or at least based on a Toishan dish. If this is correct, what can anyone tell me about this dish in its home environment? If I went to Toysan today could I eat it? In a reastaurant, or is it more of a home cooked dish? How different would it be from that served up in overseas Chinese restaurants geared towards non-Chinese customers?

The Chinese version of the salad is pickled. Like this very lighty pickled one: <a href="http://www.eatingchina.com/recipes.html">Pickled Cucumber Salad </a>

Salad is a pretty hard term to define when you think about it. The dictionary is not much help. Raw veggies? What about potato salad? Cold? What about a Warm Thai Chicken salad? For a long time I didn't think Chinese ate salad. On stinking hot days in Taiwan I would be sweating into the same bowl of boiling noodles soup as in winter time. Where were the salads when you needed them? Chinese proably don't have a salad in the same sense that I think of salad. They even cook the lettuce! There is the cold plate served at the beginning of a banquet. It is usually mostly meat but there can be raw veggies too, even western-style salad dressing these days.

Personally I find them too cold and too hard.

yes it is easy enough to find in Taiwan. There is even a chain of restaurants. It is real simple, served exactly the same way as Chicken Rice - that is just a few shreds of turkey on a bowl of rice. Very tasty though. I am sure the meat comes from America.

I have had deep fried grasshoppers in Kunming. Taste just like you mght expect - deep fried grass. A friend told me that when she was younger her family sometimes caught and ate grasshoppers. They plucked off the hind legs, the stomach and stir-fried the remainder. I also had ants in a salad wrap thing. In a specialist insect restaurant I had battered bees fried in garlic and chilli & spring opnion. Crunchy and very tasty. But I think just about anything tastes good cooked up with garlic and chilli. Also had worms that are found in the soil around the roots of bamboo plants. Deep fried, these were then stir-fried with peanuts. Of course we have all eaten plenty of insects, usually unknowingly. Most of us have 'eaten' flies, mosquitoes and other UFOs a as we ride or run open-mouthed. And what about the microscopic ones we miss when we wash vegetables? yep, I we have all tried insects.