anzu

I just bought some Lotte Xylitol Blueberry Mint gum today. Though made in Japan, it's labelled entirely in simplified Chinese, so obviously intended for export to China. Now for the fun part: so as to be able to sell it in Europe, where the ingredients apparently have to listed in a language that can be read locally, they've stuck a little paper label onto the back of the pack. It lists the ingedients in six languages, and then has another sticker again with Nutrition Facts - Calories, Fat, Protein, Sodium and 'Hydrocarbons'. Okay, I can sort of understand getting carbohydrates and hydrocarbons the wrong way round, but it has still made my day.

Chufi, in Joyce Goldstein's The Mediterranean Kitchen , she describes her long quest to find the secret for light gnocchi. Her final conclusion was that if you bake the potatoes rather than boiling them, they end up far lighter. So maybe you should also try potatoes which are as floury as possible. According to her recipe, bake the potatoes whole, cut in half and scoop out the insides while still hot, put the insides through a potato ricer, then add salt and as little flour as you can possibly use to hold it together. Also, she said, try making the gnocchi smaller. I have to admit I haven't made this, but if you are experimenting then it's worth a try, right?

Here's a question about the actual containers people are using. In particular, I want to know how good their seal is. I've been giving my husband a bento (mostly consisting of leftovers ) for years. Since we came to Germany, where I bought new plastic containers, he's been complaining that the containers leak and so it's a problem every time he's carrying anything with even the tiniest trace of liquid. I accused him of probably hurling the containers around with great force as soon as I'm not looking , but he says he's been handling them carefully. He does have to commute on the subway, so clearly there will be more jostling than placing them on the passenger seat on the car... Then, upthread, I read that Torakris is even giving soup to her husband, and I'm thinking: how can she do that??!! I can't even manage with giving solid food. So, if you are happy with the seal of your containers: what brands of containers are you using, where did you buy them, and how much liquid is there in the contents you are packing in them? Is it perhaps the case that all the brands in Japan are actually okay as far as leakage is concerned? (I don't recall leaking ever being a problem when I lived in Japan earlier). Recommendations for Japanese brands in Japan are fine, we're meant to be visiting later this year, and if I learn of a brand that will suit my purposes, I'll buy them then. TIA.

I used to teach both Chinese and Japanese at a university in the UK. It wasn't all that rare for people completely unrelated to the university to come in to the department with a copy of some kanji that they had come across in a tattoo parlor and wanted to get a tattoo of, but before getting it done they wanted to know a) what it meant or (b) if it meant what the people in the tattoo place said it meant. A lot of the characters were either wrongly written, or were made-up nonsense that looked vaguely like a kanji if you didn't know any, or the meaning they were told was quite wrong. I still quite often see people with kanji tattoos that are absolute non-words. In the broader sense of your question, there are some characters that do have a different meaning in Chinese and Japanese, but there are not all that many of them. The most famous pair is 手紙, which means 'letter' in Japanese, but 'toilet paper' in Chinese. While on the subject, there are also a certain number of 'made in Japan' Chinese characters which no Chinese will recognize. 辻 (crossroads) is one example. Vietnamese also used to be written with Chinese characters, and there are also a lot of 'made in Vietnam' Chinese characters as well. Maybe your person just liked the symmetry of yang/you? (Maybe 'wood' 'sun' and various others that are also symmetrical are still to come. ) You know, I'm quite shameless. I wouldn't let on that I know either Chinese or Japanese, and I'd go up to him and ask him all innocently what it meant.

This got me checking up my history books, because some of this wasn't quite gelling with what I vaguely remember. Starting with the language stuff. I checked this up, and Mandarin is the language in Sichuan due to population shift, not due to the language of the rulers. There was a plague in Sichuan in the 12th century, the population was radically reduced, and following this a large number of people moved into Sichuan from the Mandarin speaking area to the north-east of Sichuan. As far as mandarins going from Beijing is concerned: it was my understanding that the actual ruling elite came from all over China, and was, in turn, sent all over China. Once you got to a certain level of learning, you went to Beijing to sit the Imperial exams. People who flunked the exams might well have stayed on in Beijing for quite some time, either doing something else, or studying further hoping to pass the exams the next time around. Nonetheless, not that many people were actually FROM Beijing. People who passed were sent to rule over any area EXCEPT for the area they originally came from. It was considered that, if they were posted in their home region, they were too likely to be partial to certain people or groups. If they went to an area where they were a stranger, they were more likely to rule impartially. Incidentally, there's a famous poem dealing with the exile from one's local region that being a succesful official involved. (i.e. you could only go home again once you had stopped being an official). Link to it here in Chinese and English. Of course, this was the ideal. I'm sure there were plenty of times in Chinese history where corruption won out, and people were sent consistently from place A to place B. Maybe you are right, and there was a time when people originally from Beijing were sent consistently to Sichuan. I'm always happy to learn more! This raises an interesting issue. Surely all of these officials would have wanted to eat the food they grew up eating, and there would actually have been a lot of movement of chefs who cooked in particular regional styles moving around the country as these officials got posted around? What kind of influence might this have had in spreading ingredients and cooking styles? Has anyone studied this? (if not, are there any food historians out there who read classical Chinese and are happy to plough through heaps and heaps of boring documents? ) I've read articles talking about how, in pre-modern China, various regional products ended up getting sold in places far from their place of origin, and also how the travel of merchants was accompanied by their setting up places where they could eat 'home-style' cooking, but the food of officials is not a subject I've ever seen mentioned. All this thinking about language and population movement got me thinking further. After all, black pepper - which is essential to all but the modern bastardized forms of the soup - is indigenous to India and not to China. In fact, the Chinese name for pepper, hujiao, indicates this, since the'hu' in this word refers to non-Chinese peoples living in the north and west in ancient times, and is applied also to things associated with that area. So where was black pepper originally being brought into China from and by whom, and (importantly) to which areas and via which areas? Once you know the answer to this, it might well be clear where hot and sour soup originated. So where are those Chinese food historians when you need them?

I think it actually developed not from 'chou' as cabbage, but from the verb 'choyer', which means to look after tenderly, to pamper, or to spoil. Mind you, I think this development happened quite a while back, so most people would first make the assocation with cabbage.

I've tried this spiral technique. It's not nearly as bad as it sounds (and I'm not that dextrous). It does help to start off with more olives than you'll need, though, so that any failures can be kept aside for some other use. Kevin, your thread has managed to radically increase the amount of Italian food I am cooking at home. It's utterly inspiring.

As far as the first post goes: I was left wondering if you were trying to say that the American diet is so much fattier than the French diet that a warning is more necessary in the US. Either way, not funny, I'm afraid (seeing as you did ask). As far as never having been served green vegetables in Alsace - are you not even counting the choucroute you mentioned?? Cabbage counts as a green vegetable in my book, and I believe that the pickling process actually improves the nutrition available to the human body. Furthermore, go into any market or supermarket in Alsace, and people are buying vegetables. They are certainly going to be doing something with them...

Daniel, I think I see it differently from you. Firstly, with the restaurant issue: I personally wouldn't order all three dishes, but only one. Maybe this is not doable for some, I don't know. I simply don't order more than I am able to eat. Both my husband and I have medical conditions which are partially controlled by relatively strict diet, and the idea of some type of restraint is always present in our eating. I am the sort of person who will eat only one square of chocolate, only one peanut, etc. and not lust after the remainder in the pack. Incidentally, when I lived in the US, I did occasionally buy a half or quarter order of some food which was served in portions so large I would have been unable (and unwilling) to eat it all. When I made it clear that I was willing to pay the full price for a partial serving, I was given that which I requested. Sometimes I got some rather odd looks, but it is possible. This is not, of course, meant to be a comment on what you personally may eat or order. I'm talking about this as the concept of a perfect diet which would be followed by numerous people. Secondly, I am well aware that many people in this world are hungry. I have lived in places where parts of the population have chronic malnutrition (this can be observed easily, as it is often indicated by hair discoloration). And it is partly because of that very hunger that I find the idea of deliberately food wastage among the better-off extremely distasteful. I don't believe in consuming food in the sense of 'Finish the food on your plate, think of the starving children in Africa.' (or whichever other region may be undergoing hardship at that particular time). That is a ridiculous argument. However, taken as a global whole, resources are spent in ploughing land, and then planting, growing, harvesting, refining, storing, moving, refrigerating, and preparing the foods that we eat. To then waste two thirds of that is, in my opinion, terribly wasteful. If that which was never going to be eaten were not bought or prepared in the first place, then surely those resources might be directed more usefully, and might - being terribly optimistic here - even help those who do suffer from hunger. Of course, that would be merely a drop in the bucket compared the huge amount of wastage in this world. But, in my opinion, why add to that wastage?

Sounds like a rotten idea for the environment to me. Imagine if the whole population of the world were preparing three times as much as they needed, and throwing two thirds away. Why not prepare/order/place on one's plate the one third and no more?

For making your own khoya at home all you have to do is reduce milk, the same as for rabri, etc., but just keep on reducing it until all the liquids are gone. Minimum requirements are lots of time, lots of patience, lots of milk, and a thick bottomed pan with a broad top to allow as much evaporation as possible to occur, but preferably not so shallow that the milk can easily boil over. Same as for any other time you reduce milk, it's better not to use a non-stick pan as - for me at least - with non-stick pans the milk tends first to get cooked to the base and stick to it, then gets released in little brownish strips as you stir. If you are not stirring often enough, these will be little burnt strips of milk instead. This doesn't happen with a regular surface, so even though you might think that non-stick would surely be better, in this case it is not. To speed up the process as much as possible, divide the milk into several pans and heat them all on the stove at once. No cookbooks I ever see mention this, but (unless my science is wrong) the greater the surface of heated milk, the faster the liquid can evaporate, so it makes sense. Also, if you are unlucky enough to have milk burn on the inside of a pan, you have not wasted you entire batch of milk. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat if you have problems with the milk boiling over, or with potential burning. Keep stirring...and stirring...and stirring. Do not stop stirring the pan at any point. It will get very thick. At some point along here, I transfer all the milk back into one pot, and put my tava between the flame and the pan, so that the heat is less direct. This reduces the chances of burning, and allows you to have the heat on full so as to reduce the milk faster. If you don't have a tava, I'm guessing that a flame tamer would help, as long as it is fairly heavy duty. I've done it quite a few times. It takes maybe 40 minutes (? I never timed it that carefully). With the amount of effort involved compared to the smallness (and pitifulness in color and texture) of the khoya I always get, I'd say that any of the substitute recipes for khoya look like a good idea, though actually I haven't tried any of them yet. (been intending to for a while, which is why I had the Bawarchi page bookmarked). They certainly make it more likely that the home cook outside of India will try making any of the dishes that contain khoya. I'm hoping that Rupen will report back on how it went.

You wouldn't remember the restaurant name, would you (she asks hopefully)? I'm planning to be in Japan again later this year, and your excellent list up above has me drooling in anticipation.

In English it's called horned water chestnut, or water caltrops. They grow in water in the same way as water chestnuts, and apparently should never be eaten raw (though my mother-in-law does, and nothing has happened to her yet). Were yours boiled? The latin name is Trapa bicornis. Cute, aren't they.

Just looked up three different books I have. Two claim Sichuan, one says Beijing. A friend of mine from Shanghai has always claimed it is a Shanghai dish, and that the idea of adding vinegar to the soup was derived from the Russian immigrant population that Shanghai used to have. (doubtful, IMO, given that so much other Shanghainese food is heavy on the vinegar). Take your pick... Perhaps they developed independently? After all, chili (or, in some cases, black pepper) and vinegar as flavoring agents are not present only in one region. Just a thought...

Have you tried any of the suggestions here in Bawarchi?

I suspect there's a terminology issue here. When Indians talk about curds, they mean yogurt. Since you are referring to buttermilk, I presume you are talking about curdling milk to get curds in the sense of 'curds and whey' (i.e. not the sense that 'curds' is being used by Indians). If you're talking about what to add to boiling milk to curdle it, I've used buttermilk, sourish yogurt, lime juice, lemon juice, and various types of vinegar. These are all on different occasions, of course, not together. The choice of which agent to use depends on the final taste desired and whether the curdled milk product (hesitating to say curds here ) is going to be used in a sweet or savory dish. In general, vinegar has the most obtrusive taste in the end product, though lime and lemon can be pretty noticeable too. If your yogurt is sour enough, it works well, and I like the taste of the end product. I've heard of using citric acid as well, but this is not something I've done myself. If I've completely misunderstood you, and you are talking about making yogurt from buttermilk, then this is another issue altogether. It's not something I've ever heard of, and I would gladly learn more.

Well, I've also eaten in the Indian places in Chungking Mansions. For me, the reason is that my husband is Indian, and I've lived in India, and I find it interesting to compare the different types of food. I also stayed (alone, and as a female) in Chungking Mansions several times. I had no money and it was the cheapest place to stay, and very conveniently located also. This was more than ten years ago, maybe it has been cleaned up since then. However, at that time it WAS sleazy. At first I thought it was just run-down, but then one time I was going in from a side entrance, and someone was lying dead in that very entrance from a drug overdose, with the needle still hanging out of their arm. There were also small shops selling sex toys and such like near the smaller entrances (these entrances are not immediately visible, but still...) It's also a major fire hazard, with all kinds of flammable rubbish piled in the stairwells. Another, earlier, time I was staying there, there was a big fire in maybe the second floor. The only reason I knew was that I had a room facing the street (unusual, most of the rooms face onto unspeakably vile light shafts with decades worth of filthy gunk thrown down them), and could see the smoke drifting past and, looking down, could see that traffic on Nathan Road had been blocked off and that people were staring at the building. There was, of course, no actual fire alarm. If the fire had got out of control, most of the people in the building would probably have died as there would have been no warning whatsoever to get out. (hint here, if you ever have to leave a building that is on fire, take a novel and a list of the restaurants you want to visit, as it will probably be hours before you can get back into the building. ). As far as the ethnicity of the people living there is concerned: although it looks like one large building from the ground and second floor, it is actually five separate towers. One of them - I forget which - has a higher concentration of Indians, but the others mostly had Chinese (Cantonese, and also quite a lot of Shanghainese). It's a mixture of apartments, hotels, and tiny factories. Most of the Indian restaurants are no higher than the third floors, and can often be reached only via the staircases and not via the elevators - they are situated at a type of mezzanine level within the staircases. Bottom line: maybe the building has been cleaned up and is less sleazy, and maybe the food in this restaurant is good. However, based on what I know of the place, I would never go there with kids along. Not even for a good meal.

I am not certain what this actually means (from their website) but it does appear that they are popular enough to offer reservations ... ← Translation: Please note that online reservations can be taken into consideration only if made (within) 48 hours in advance of the requested reservation time. Please make your reservation by means of the attached form. Seeing as they also give a phone number on the web page, and they don't give a time limit there about when the reservation should be made, it would probably be easier to phone in a reservation.

The local Chinese stores here in Berlin started selling mooncakes only this last week, so it wasn't possible to respond until now. There isn't a huge range: Double yolk with lotus paste, single yolk with lotus paste, single yolk with red bean paste, and lotus paste without egg. For a box of four, the prices ranged from eighteen Euros (double yolk) to ten Euros (no egg). In US dollars, thats $22 and $12. Another Vietnamese-run place had Vietnamese mooncakes with a nut filling. The price was 2.50 Euros for one (=$3). I bought just one to taste. The filling tasted rancid, and I ended up tossing it . So glad I didn't buy a box of them. For what it's worth, the mooncakes are not made in Europe, but are imported from Shenzhen. People were buying them pretty quickly. I really don't know what the Chinese population is here in Berlin. Most people who go to the Chinese groceries are actually Vietnamese or Thai. Maybe there are a lot of Chinese students, though, as Berlin and it's surrounding area has four universities (that I can think of, maybe more?) There are not many stores selling mooncakes, and at the speed they were going, they'll probably be sold out fast. However, relative to cost of living here in Berlin, I'd say they are pretty expensive. For comparison, a bread roll costs from 5 - 35 cents (cents = Euro cents, not of US dollars), and a liter of milk costs around 55 cents.

Several German books I have suggest that, when cooking dumplings/puddings in a pudding cloth, one should leave plenty of extra cloth at the top of the pudding, and tie this extra cloth around a ladle which is then laid across the top of the pot. The pudding is thus suspended in the boiling water without having to add a plate at the bottom of the pot to avoid burning, and the pudding can be pulled out easily when done. I must say that I haven't actually done this. I would prefer to have my pot covered, and I don't see how to do that easily with a ladle lying across the top. Nonetheless, I thought it might be worth mentioning.

Qualifier first. I'm not American, so I don't have any traditional feelings to overcome when re-arranging Thanksgiving menus. I spent 5 years in the US. The first year there we were invited to a Thansgiving meal with an American family (we had thought this was a gesture of pure friendliness, but once there we found that they were actually missonaries intent on converting us heathens - made for a slightly uncomfortable meal ). All subsequent years we ate Thansgiving dinner with another foreign couple we were close friends with - alternately at their place and at ours. None of these meals were traditional (for example, one year was lobster rather than turkey). One of those years, I decided just for fun to take all the usual Thanksgiving ingredients, to combine them differently, and cook them as (mostly) Indian dishes. I don't remember everything I did. What I do remember was: ground turkey koftas, with corn, pumpkin and green beans each as separate savory dishes, together with Lebanese bread salad (fattoush). I think I cut the corn off the cob and made it into small patties to mimic the shape of the turkey koftas (??) There was more, but I have no idea what it was. Dessert was sweetened poached cranberries, cooled, flavored with a dash of Angostura Bitters, then mixed with cream (I think, I forget whether I added it or not) and gelatine. Whirl the whole lot in the food processor to give a light foamy texture, then chilled till set. Thinking up the menu and making that dinner really was fun.

Of course, one's perceptions will be colored by the norms of the country one is most used to but, IMO, it was highly likely that they DID never smile. I've lived in 7 countries spanning 4 different continents, and find that such attitudes can differ as much as the physical distance people maintain. Nowhere else do people smile as much or act as friendly as in Japan and the US, for example. Mind you, I suppose that, within the limits of normal human variation, what someone from a 'friendlier' country sees as surliness might not be perceived as such in the country where that is the norm - just normal customer service instead. Illustrating that latter point, I used to know a person who grew up in India, then spent 6 years in Moscow, and then went to the American Mid-West, which is where I got to know her. When she had been there a short while she actually had to go counselling due to depression. Everyone was TOO friendly and smiling in the Mid-West - way beyond the norms of what she was used to - and she couldn't cope with it and found it extremely threatening. So this sounds rather like what people above were describing with respect to touching but, if from a background where extreme emotional distance is the norm, even people smiling at you to a greater extent can be unpleasant if you are not used to it. BTW, if she moved to Germany, she'd get a nice quota of surliness and unfriendliness again.

I think you're speaking of koldunai. I don't have exact quantities, but the dough is flour and egg. For 'one glass' (about three quarters of a standard measuring cup???) of flour, add one whole egg and two egg yolks as well as salt. If additional moisture is needed, use onion juice. Don't add water for extra moisture. Roll the dough out thin with a rolling pin (about 1 mm thickness). Filling: ground beef, bacon (one quarter of the entire filling quantity), onion that has been reduced to a paste in a food processor (should be smooth in texture), egg, marjoram, black pepper. For the sauce (again, no exact quantities), bacon, chopped onion, sour cream, salt. Render the bacon, add chopped onion and fry, then stir in sour cream and salt. If you make it, I'm sure it would qualify for the stuffed pasta cook-off! Source: W. W. Pochljobkin Nationale Kuchen: Die Kochkunst der sowjetischen Volker (National Cuisine: the cooking of the Soviet Peoples). This is the German translation of a book originally written in Russian and printed in 1978. It's out of print and, as far as I know, has never been translated into English. This is a pity, as it covers a lot of ground - recipes from all the main ethnic groups that were in the USSR, and which most other books don't cover, such as Moldavian, Azerbaijani, Uzbek, and Tajiki recipes, etc. I'm really having fun working through this book. In the Russian section of this book, there are about 18 different piroshki fillings listed, as well as 8 different types of dough. More on those later, when I have more time. Re Piazzola's earlier comment on the etymology of the name 'pirog' and 'piroshki'. I had rather been under the impression that the jury was still out on this one, and that there is also the view that it may derive from Old Slavic 'pir' meaning feast or merriment.

I think all my options are cheap ones. I've always been an impoverished student while in Japan, and could never afford the really expensive stuff. Yet another vote for MOS burger. I didn't see this on my last visit a year ago, but they also used to have a very odd selection of drinks, which kept changing. I remember way back there was a cheddar cheese flavored milkshake , and a couple of years after that there was an aloe vera milkshake which had aloe vera chunks in the bottom, and which was topped with cornflakes. How you were meant to drink/eat it, I don't know, as they only gave a straw with it and no spoon... So, MOS burger, and if the drinks are unusual, its an added bonus. Also, a fairly cheap option: go to a large supermarket such as Co-op or Daimaru Peacock find the section with cheap snack foods (the packs that are around 100 yen each), and choose from among karinto, candied sweet potato chips, the various senbei, etc. Some of these are so cheap that I never see them exported out of Japan. Maybe it just doesn't bring enough profit. There are these sweetish flat cookies with peanuts in that I gorge myself on every time I'm back in Japan. Of course, you can go more upmarket with the snack foods, and choose from the more expensive selections, such as various types of dried cuttle fish, and so on. Of course, there are also places specializing only in snack foods and sweets, it doesn't have to be at a supermarket. But it pays to visit as many places as possible (such hardship ) because they all seem to have a different selections. Also, various types of hard candy. Last year I came across ginger candy, which was , and also there are the tea candies that come in various flavors such as Assam, Darjeeling, etc. And of course, the Okinawan black sugar candies are great too. Whatever traditional sweets are in season. Warabi mochi if spring, etc. Hmm, I think there's a theme of mostly junk food here. Japanese snacks and junk food are so outstanding.

Since no one mentioned desserts or appetizers, my answer will deal with them. As far as appetizers go, zakuski are Russian appetizers. They are the equivalent of mezze or antipasti, there are numerous varieties of these, and serving just one thing as an appetizer is a less Russian thing to do. Ideally, you should be offering a selection. Try looking in the 'appetizers' section of the second link I give below. You could try, for example, eggplant 'caviar' (nothing to do with caviar, it's mashed eggplant salad, along the lines of baba ghanouj), vinegret (the original 'Russian salad'). There are also some ideas for zakuski here. Pate would also count as good zakuski material, and so would the blinis mentioned above. All should, of course, be washed down with vodka. Russian etiquette demands that a bottle of vodka, once opened, should be finished. No wimpy small quantities of vodka here. Desserts. These are suggested keeping in mind what is in season at the moment, and choosing things which can be made ahead with minimal effort (important especially if you ARE going to serve a lot of zakuski) Sharlotka, , i.e. Russian apple charlotte which, while invented in France, is extremely popular in Russia. The recipe here would be even better if the bread were not white, but instead sourish rye bread. Alternatively: kisel, made with any sourish berry of your choice, no need for them to be the ones given here, but they should ideally be sour. The amount of cornstarch in this recipe might be a bit excessive. Some people like their kisel quite thick, but I personally think it better if just very slightly thickened. Serve well chilled with generous amounts of cream. This is popular in Germany, too, under the name 'Kaltschale'. If you search for that as a keyword, you'll probably get more hits and ideas for it (though I haven't looked to verify this). Or: Gogol mogol. Not the recipe given on this site (that recipe is NOT gogol mogol) Try this one instead (scroll down to find it). Essentially, it's the Russian version of sabayon/zabaglione, however its also very popular in Russia.