It always does pay to look things up.

[conuly]

Yesterday we had stirfry, and today I finished it, and I thought - "Hm, I wonder when the word stirfry entered the English language?"

I assumed as part of this that it was a calque of the original, probably Chinese, term. But I was wrong! No, although "stirfry" as a word does characteristically look like a Chinese-to-English calque, in fact it was straight-up invented by the authors of this cookbook. (The term was, not the technique.)

*****

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Comments

[acelightning]

I had a copy of How To Cook And Eat In Chinese, which I got just as the craze for Chinese cooking swept through America's home kitchens. My mother gave it to me, because we both had been big fans of American/Chinese restaurant cuisine. I learned a lot from that book. However, I lost it when Superstorm Sandy destroyed half of my house. I tried to get another copy, but it seems to be out of print, and the only way to get it is to pay what the traffic will bear for a used copy.

My current most useful books on Chinese cooking are by Fuchsia Dunlop, who specializes in Sichuan and Hunan style food. (What a quintessentially British name she has!) She doesn't explain things the way Buwei Yang Chao did, but she explains things very clearly, and there are plenty of photos in her cookbooks so you can see what she's talking about. I learned how to make "Ants Climb The Tree" from reading Fuchsia's recipe. (And my warped mind came up with a visual of a number of middle-aged women with a family resemblance, wearing cardigans and sensible shoes, awkwardly attempting to climb a tree.)

[conuly]

Oh, that's unfortunate that you lost your copy.

I decided to try making Ants Climb a Tree because I'm a sucker for names like that. I got the bean paste, but just couldn't find the noodles. Jenn went to Chinatown, couldn't find them. Turns out they're in the produce aisle (?) of the other grocery store, not a mile from my house. D'oh.

Anyway, long story short, Ana loves the dish and Eva will eat it, so yay, but I just found out recently that all this time I've been using the wrong bean paste.

[acelightning]

"Ants Climb A Tree" uses cellophane noodles (which are made from mung bean flour), they can either be pre-soaked in hot water or taken dry from their package and deep-fried, which makes them puff up and get crunchy. The dish itself is basically a quick sauce made with ground pork (or sometimes even beef) and seasonings, that soaks into the noodles when you pour it over them. The name comes from the way the little nuggets of ground meat on the noodles resemble ants crawling up the flexible branches of a willow tree. The dish is easy to make, the ingredients are relatively cheap, and it's quite filling. I bought cellophane noodles in Whole Foods, but they were twice as expensive as the ones in the Asian grocery.

What kind of bean paste were you using? I've recently (because of Fuchsia) started usng dried black beans in a lot of my stir-fries; they add a particular kind of umami to the dish. I also use Roland Sichuan chili paste, because it has no garlic or onions in it. I like spicy food with lots of ginger.