Linguistic difficulties, Taiwanese cuisine

[bwv544]

My post is two-fold.

Are there any experts on Taiwanese cuisine out there?

My family is Taiwanese---I am American-born.  I can navigate Mandarin (conversation) but am illiterate (my parents are bitterly disappointed.)  I love going back to see family and they feed me well...but much of the time I don't know what I'm eating and we don't know how to communicate.  Is there an authoritative Taiwanese cookbook?

My uncles and aunts and etc speak mostly Taiwanese (Fujianese if you will) exclusively and I don't know any at all, beyond a few insults and very few foods.  Since it isn't a written language AND i'm illiterate anyway, I don't have a way for googling some of the dishes I really love.

Unrelated, but still puzzling note---the majority of Chinese grocery stores here are Cantonese speakers, and I don't understand Cantonese at all.  Is the cantonese "choy" the same as the mandarin word "tsai?"

 

[huiray]

I'm certainly not an expect on Taiwanese cuisine but this website (I've moved it to the English version option) may be a convenient starting point for you:

http://taiwanfoodculture.net/mp.asp?mp=1502

 

p.s. the link given on their "about us" page (on the left-hand-side) for the Taiwan Government Information Office is a dead link.  The active one is http://www.taiwan.gov.tw/ct.asp?xItem=25474&ctNode=1957&mp=999 from which one can get to the same taiwanfoodculture article with a suitable search but which has a slightly longer url: http://taiwanfoodculture.net/mp.asp?mp=1502#49387

 

The "Fujianese" you refer to (Taiwanese Hokkien, really) is a written language.  The same ideograms are used by the various dialect groups (which began after unification of the script started some two millenia ago) although there are various exceptions (e.g. there are ideograms/characters used in Cantonese which are not used/absent from Standard Mandarin) and the use in modern times of the simplified script (e.g. in mainland China and "officially" in Singapore) versus the traditional script (e.g. in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other places especially where the old Chinese diaspora ended up in).  BTW I imagine you know that Taiwanese mandarin differs somewhat from Standard Mandarin...

 

Yes, the Cantonese "choy" (菜) [Yale would be "choi3] for "vegetable" (or "food" or "cuisine" depending on context) is the same as Mandarin "tsai" (which is actually ts'ai in Wade-Giles) [pinyin would be "cài"]

(p.s.2. You might actually be hearing Toisanese rather than standard Cantonese in those shops, depending on where you are)

Edited May 16, 2014 by huiray (log)