CFT

Elementary my dear Tepee.http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/phorum/re...61921#msg-61921 "At least four or five Chinese books on Cantonese etymology give the following explanation on the origin of 炒魷魚 'to give/receive the bucket’. In the 1950s and 60s, shop assistants in Hong Kong usually lived in the rear portion of the shop where they had to bring along their own straw mat to sleep on at night. If they were fired by their boss, they would have to take away their mat which, being made of straw, could be readily rolled up. And this rolled-up mat, some of them had cross-shaped design, looked very much like a piece of freshly-fried squid which rolls up as a result of the cross-shaped cuts made on its back." Another variation is "se jiu chau yau" (stir fried squid with black bean sauce), but I bet it tastes just as bad a plain chau yau yue.

I also had Saturday Chinese school for about 16 years before Wikipedia.

Back to school for you Ben sook!The "yau zaa gwai" (youtiao) represent the minister Chen Kwui (Qin Hui) and his wife. They were the ones responsible for orchestrating the death Southern Song dynasty general Ngok Fei (Yue Fei). I also like the story of how there are statues of the 2 kneeling in front of Ngok Fei's tomb. Passers-by are encourage to spit on them. There is a theory that "yau zaa gwai" is a corruption of "yau zaa kwui", since people would not openly insult a minister of the imperial court. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yue_Fei http://www.answers.com/topic/youtiao I would translate them as fried doughstick.

We've always called them "maa jai" (little horses). From a Cantonese viewpoint, "ma lai" would be a closer phonetic transliteration in my opinion, but then I don't know what language it (Malaya/Malaysia) was transliterated from. On the same theme, sometimes the Chinese (Cantonese) transliteration is more accurate - i.e. it reflects local usage. I always wondered why the city of Bombay in India was called "Maan Maai" in Cantonese; when the Indians changed it back to Mumbai recently it all became clear. The country of Greece is known in Cantonese as "Hei Lip"/"Hei Lap"; again difficult to see how the Canto was derived until you realise that the Greeks call their country "Hellas".

My dad used to make deep fried battered oysters which were eaten with a lettuce leaf wrap. I don't know what seasonings, if any, were used. The hot-cold contrast was very nice.

Yep the American Red Delicious is called the "she guo" or "sair gwor" in Cantonese - literally snake fruit. I didn't know where this post was going until you talked about the apple. We Cantonese also call apples "ping gwor" but if you need to differentiate between different varieties then any translation or transliteration has its shortcomings.By the way, the choice of Chinese characters in the transliteration of the country names is no coincidence. First you determine the component sounds and then you look for "flattering" character combinations, or just keep it purely phonetic like "Yee Lai Huk" (Canto) for Iraq.

Dejah, have you forgotten your food triangles? Definitely generous with the ribs there!!!

Some people add whole shelled boiled eggs to the mix. Never heard of black sugar before. Maybe it's just some sort of rock sugar?

Meat products are banned by UK customs also, but people still try to sneak things in. The UK had a problem with Foot and Mouth disease in cattle less than 5 years ago which was attributed to imported meat product, so they have been advising travellers not to bring such items into the country.

This is a very typical Chinese response. In colloquial Cantonese we would ask for "peng, leng, tseng" - cheap, good quality and tasty. OK, it might be difficult to achieve all 3 but that is the ideal. But then price is a relative thing.

150c is 302 Farenheit. 150F is 66C which is only about the temp. of a nice cup of tea - certainly not a roasting temp.Ohhh, I stand corrected! Heston Blumenthal recommends roasting rib of beef at 130F for 20hrs !!! http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/database...eef_74821.shtml

Or how about drilling some more holes into your wok stand? Maybe many small to medium ones so that the structural integrity of the stand is not compromised. I think there is plenty of metal in the stand to do this.

I knew I'd misquoted! How can one overlook the Suzhou mei nui?

This reminds me of a saying that I'm probably going to misquote:"Sik joi Guangzhou, ju joi Hangzhou, sei joi Lauzhou" Eat in Guangzhou (no explanation needed! ) Live in Hangzhou (supposedly the best scenery in China) Die in Lauzhou (Liuzhou, because the best coffins come from there)

I think the tomato sauce is pretty similar to Italian passata (sieved tomatoes); I used it at the weekend to make Imperial Prawns, except that I didn't use stock or wine (I need to get some).

Do you think preference for dark meat is a Chinese thing? I prefer thighs, wings and legs, probably in that order. I just can't figure out why the British (I live in the UK) think that breast is best - although it certainly has its place in sitr-fry dishes. I just think that the other bits have more flavour and nicer texture.

Ng sai ng goi. We might also start to see more standardized Cantonese pingyum so there might be less confusion with terms.

There may be a problem getting the sound files to play if browsing the site using MS Internet Explorer. Here is my reply to a PM I was sent regarding the problem: I'm using Mozilla Firefox. Clicking on the loudspeaker icons kicks off a Javascript pop-up box which then prompts for whether you want to play the .wav file using a default application (e.g. Windows Media Player) or save to disk. I've just tried this in IE 6.0 SP1. I don't think it works correctly. Rolling the mouse pointer over the icons and looking at the link details in the status bar - the links don't contain references to the .wav files, just the query which returned the page in the first place. It may be that I don't have my Javascript settings set-up right in IE, or the site designers haven't tested compatibility with IE though this would seem unlikely. The think the former is more likely, but don't have time to look into it right now. Give Firefox a try in the short term.

Tepee do you see seemingly random squiggles and symbols? This is probably because you have "Western" character encoding switched on as your browser default. You need to switch the encoding to Chinese (Traditional). In Internet Explorer, you can click on: View --> Encoding --> More --> Chinese Traditional (Big5) or Right-Click mouse --> Encoding --> More --> Chinese Traditional (Big5) In Mozilla Firefox you can click on: View --> Character Encoding --> Auto-Detect --> Chinese (or Traditional Chinese) or View --> Character Encoding --> More --> East Asian --> Chinese Traditional (Big5 or Big5-HKSCS)

Guys, The Chinese University of Hong Kong have a "Talking Syllabary" page where you can enter the Chinese character or the romanization and it returns the relevant character(s) along with a sound file with Cantonese pronunication. http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Canton2/

I've added Cantonese pingyum (pinyin) following the Jyutping romanization system as proposed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong. Where some sounds are non-intuitive I've offered a suggestion of what the initial sound is like. I'm not too good with identifying the tones (on paper) so these are my best guesses. 6. 煲 - bou1 7. 燜 - mun6 8. 燒 - siu1 9. 叉燒 - caa1 siu1 (initial ch) 10. 滷 - lou5 11. 蒸 - zing1 12. 燉 - dan6 13. 烹 - paang1 14. 燴 - wui6 15. 拌 - bun6 16. 炸 - zaa3 17. 汆 - cyun1 (initial ch) 18. 炒 - caau2 (initial ch) 19. 爆 - baau3 20. 煎 - zin1 21. 淋 - lam4 (sounds like lum) 22. 溜 - lau4 or lau6 23. 貼 - tip3 24. 火& 邊 - don’t know, I guess bin1 25. 熬 - ngou4 26. 炆 - man1 27. 火 & 屈 - don’t know, I guess wat1 (sounds like wut) 28. 焗 - guk6 29. 火&倉 - don’t know, I guess cong (ch initial, don’t know what tone) 30. 塌 - taap3 31. 烤 - haau1 32. 烘 - hong3 33. 煨 - wui1 34. 燻 - fan1 (sounds like fun) 35. 扣 - kau3 36. 扒 - paa4 37. 醉 - zeoi3 (initial j) 38. 醬/糟 - zoeng3 / zou1 (initial j) 39. 醃 - jim1 (initial y) 40. 風 - fung1

At banquets in the UK, the restaurant staff serve up the soup and sweet broth (tong sui) for the first round. I've never seen them serve up any of the other dishes though.

With concerns about vCJD (aka Mad Cow's disease) I think most would shy away from eating animal brains. I don't think it is even possible to purchase cows and sheeps brains in the UK because it is removed in the slaughterhouse.

Ju2

酿 (Cantonese: yerng) means to stuff or stuffed.