蜜調葵 Mallow Dressed With Honey
逐句解 Line by line
Turnips boiled soft; fragrant taro poured over with sugar.
And here it comes, and it is turnip. After the amber and the kingfisher blue, the first dish named at the greatest banquet in the novel is a boiled root vegetable. That is not a joke at the emperor's expense. It is a meatless meal for monks, and the kitchen is showing what it can do inside that rule.
Mushrooms sweet and rich; sea greens clean and strange.
海菜 — sea vegetables, seaweed. In an inland capital that is a luxury: it has come a long way in salt.
Several times they brought more ginger-hot bamboo shoots; round after round they served up mallow dressed with honey.
The lines stretch from four characters to seven, and the verbs arrive: brought more, served up. Until now the food has simply existed. Now there are servants. 蜜調葵 — mallow dressed with honey. The middle character is read tiáo here: to blend, to season, to dress a dish. Said diào it means to transfer an official to another post, which is what the bare reading gives. 葵 is mallow, a leaf vegetable that was a staple in China for two thousand years and has almost vanished from the modern table.
Wheat gluten and toon-tree leaves; wood-ear fungus and beancurd skin.
Four of the great inventions of Chinese vegetarian cooking in one line. 麵觔 is wheat gluten, made by washing the starch out of dough — the meat substitute of the Buddhist kitchen. 豆腐皮 is the skin lifted off simmering soy milk. 椿樹葉, the young leaves of the Chinese toon, which taste faintly of onion and are picked for about three weeks each spring.
Stone-flower and immortal greens; bracken starch and dried osmunda.
乾薇 — dried wēi, the osmunda fern. Its first character is read gān, dry, not qián, which is how the same character reads in the pair that names heaven and earth — 乾坤, the first two of the eight three-line figures of the Book of Changes. 薇 carries a very old weight: in the Book of Songs two brothers refused to eat the grain of a dynasty they thought unjust and lived on osmunda until they starved. It is the vegetable of principled hunger, served here at a victory feast.
Radish boiled with Sichuan pepper; shredded melon tossed with mustard.
花椒 is Sichuan pepper, which does not burn but numbs. 芥末 is mustard. The kitchen has run out of luxury and moved on to heat, which is what you do when there is no meat.
A few dishes of plain fare were well enough; but several kinds of rare fruit carried off the prize.
還猶可 — were passable, were all right. The poem turns on itself and says the vegetables were merely acceptable. 奪魁 — to seize first place, the word for winning the top rank in the imperial examinations. The fruit is described as coming first in an exam. And that is the hinge: nine lines of cooking, dismissed in three characters, and the next eight lines are all fruit.
After all that gold and kingfisher blue, the first dish named at the greatest banquet in the novel is boiled turnip. It is not a joke: this is a meatless meal for monks, and the kitchen is showing what it can do inside the rule.
Then nine lines of it — mushrooms and seaweed, wheat gluten, beancurd skin, toon leaves, bracken starch, radish with Sichuan pepper, shredded melon with mustard. It is a real menu, and every item on it is a way of making vegetables interesting. One of them, the osmunda fern, is the vegetable two brothers in the Book of Songs starved on rather than eat an unjust dynasty's grain. It is being served at a victory feast.
And then the poem turns on its own cooking. A few dishes of plain fare were passable — and the fruit carried off first prize, in the word used for topping the imperial examinations. Nine lines of kitchen work, dismissed in three characters, to make room for eight lines of fruit.