嫩焯黃花菜 Blanched Yellow Flower Greens
但見那：但见那：
逐句解 Line by line
And there they saw:
Three characters, the cue for the longest set-piece in the chapter. What follows is a catalogue of wild vegetables that runs to sixteen units — more lines than the battle got, and more than the cave.
Tender blanched day-lily buds, sour-pickled dandelion.
白鼓丁 is one of the many regional names for the dandelion, and 酸虀 is the sour brine-pickle that keeps greens through a winter. Everything in this list is free: you gather it or you do without.
Floating water-pepper, purslane; river shepherds-purse, goosegrass.
Four plants in ten characters, named and not described. The poem assumes its reader knows them all by sight, which for anybody living within reach of a hillside in the Ming they would.
The swallows have not come, and it is fragrant and tender still; the shoots curl small, crisp and green yet.
燕子不來 dates the meal. Wild greens are picked before the swallows arrive, while the shoots are still curled and have not gone woody — so the line is a cook's note about timing dressed as a line of verse. 還青 takes 還 as hái, still.
Stewed soft, blue-flowered mallow; boiled white, dogs-foot-print.
狗腳跡, dog's paw-print, is a plant named for the shape of its leaf, and 熝 is a cooking verb for simmering something pale. The naming here is entirely rural: things are called after what they look like, not after anything learned.
This is the poorest meal in the novel and it gets the longest description. That is the joke and it is also the argument. The book has given set-pieces to a monster's cave and to a battle, and it gives its most loving one to a plate of weeds.
The names are the pleasure of the thing. Dog's paw-print, cat's ear, monkey's footprint, wheat-watching girl — these are what country people call plants when nobody has handed them a book, and the poet has simply written them all down.