Ordinary Food Given Beautiful Names | Thirsty Thursday & Hungry Hearts

Welcome to Thirsty Thursday and Hungry Hearts, an original weekly meme hosted at (un)Conventional Bookworms.

The idea of Thirsty Thursday and Hungry Hearts is to share a quote with food or drinks that showed up in a recent read, as well as if it’s something you think you’d like or not.

For the first edition of Thirsty Thursday & Hungry Hearts here at Whatever You Can Still Betray, we are going to look at two of the named dishes in The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang.

“You could act less like a dazed peasant, you know,” Kitay said as Lan laid out a spread of quail, quail eggs, shark fin soup served in turtle’s shell, and pig’s intestines before them. “It’s just food.”

But “just food” was rice porridge. Maybe some vegetables. A piece of fish, pork, or chicken whenever they could get it.

Nothing on the table was “just” anything.

Seven Treasure Soup turned out to be a deliciously sweet congee-based concoction of red dates, honeyed chestnuts, lotus seeds, and four other ingredients that Rin could not identify.

Lion’s Head, she discovered with some relief, was not actually a lion’s head, but rather a ball of meat mixed with flour and boiled amid strips of white tofu.

“Kitay, I am a dazed peasant.” Rin tried fruitlessly to pick up a quail egg with her chopsticks.Finally she gave up and used her fingers. “You eat like this? All the time?”

Kitay blushed. “You get used to it. I had a hard time our first week at school. The Academy canteen was awful.”

How the Chinese name their dishes is quite fascinating; and for those who didn't grow up in their culture, well, they'd be like me: "Is that even edible?"

But being exposed to a bunch of wuxia TV series growing up, one becomes used to all the fancy names, (i.e. The Pursuit Soup, 24 Bridges on a Moonlit Night, and Who Hears the Plum Blossoms Amongst the Jade Flute's Melody) and just go: "What poem/season/story/part of nature are they alluding to?" 

Image Source: Baidu

For example, in the book quote above, Seven Treasure Soup is mentioned. I've never heard of Seven Treasure Soup before, but it could be an allusion to the more well-known Eight Treasure Soup. 
Eight Treasure Soup  (八宝粥) is a sweet congee, sweet and creamy. It is so named after the popular symbols of Chinese art and on Chinese numismatic charms. Baidu has an article that states that there are no rules set for this soup. Frugal versions can contain three to four ingredients, while the more luxurious ones can contain ten or more.
There is another Eight Treasure Soup (八珍汤). But instead of a dense soup of seeds, rice, nuts and dates, it's lighter and made of traditional Chinese herbs -  more of a tonic.

Image source: SCMP

The other dish mentioned, Lion's Head, is so named for it is supposed to resemble the head of the Chinese guardian lion. Another story points that the dish originated from the Sui dynasty during Emperor Yang's reign. It's said that travelling through the Jiangsu province, he was enamoured by the valley of sunflowers. Returning to his palace, he ordered his chef to create a dish that would remind him of the sight. The rolled minced meat was fried a golden brown to resemble that of sunflowers.
Naming conventions aside, there is no denying that these are beautiful names, and for a story-hog like me, a veritable source of never-ending tales. The true test would be if they taste as good as they're named.