金盤高壘 Gold Dishes And Silver Bowls
逐句解 Line by line
Fried in oil and drenched in sugar, heaped in flower-clusters and brocade patterns.
花團錦砌, flower-clustered and brocade-laid, is still the ordinary Chinese for something gorgeously massed together — you would use it today of a display of blossom or a well-dressed crowd.
Gold dishes stacked high with great steamed buns, silver bowls filled up with fragrant rice.
饝饝 is the northern steamed bread, still eaten daily across the whole of north China. After fifteen lines of sugar lions and nautilus cups the poem puts bread and rice on the table, which is where a real meal actually starts.
Peppery hot soups with long strands of noodle, dish after fragrant dish carried in and changed away.
辣煼煼 and 香噴噴 both use a doubled suffix to intensify — hot-hot-hot, fragrant-fragrant — which is a living pattern in Chinese and sounds exactly as informal as it looks. After all the display, the poem ends on food that is hot and being eaten.
The last three lines of description put actual dinner on the table: bread, rice, noodles in hot soup. The poem has walked from the decorated doorway through the show-plates and the sugar sculpture and arrived, finally, at something you could fill up on.
That ordering is not accidental, and Bajie is about to prove it. The poem has just told the reader which end of the table matters.