灰條熟爛 Cats Ear and Ash Stalk
逐句解 Line by line
Cat's-ear, wild luobi, and ash-stalk stewed soft is fit to eat;
Two of these are guesswork even for a Chinese reader. 貓耳朵, cat's ear, is a plant here and not a body part, though the same phrase names an ear elsewhere in this chapter. 野落蓽 is an obscure name with no settled identification, and its middle character keeps the ordinary reading it would have anywhere else — nothing in the plant name calls for a different one. And 中吃, fit to eat, takes 中 as zhòng, the hit-the-mark reading, not the middle one.
scissor-stalk, ox-pond-li, upturned pond-snail and broom shepherds-purse;
The source cuts these three lines at semicolons and they are exactly matched — three characters, three characters, seven — but three limbs are not a pair, so they are kept separate. 倒灌 takes 倒 as dào, the inverted reading.
broken-rice shepherds-purse, lettuce shepherds-purse — several kinds fragrant and green and slippery too.
Three sorts of one family in a row. 滑膩 is slippery and smooth on the tongue, which is a texture note — this catalogue keeps remembering that it is describing food.
Black-flower stir-fried in oil, water-chestnut greens well worth the praising.
甚可誇 takes 甚 as shèn, the intensifier — very much worth praising — which is one of only three places in the chapter that reading is right against fourteen where the questioning one is.
Some of these plants cannot be identified with any confidence, and that is part of the texture rather than a problem with the text. They are local names for local weeds, and four centuries have lost several of them.
The cat's-ear is worth a moment. The same two characters name an ear a few passages back, when Wukong pulls the rod out of his. Here they are a vegetable, and the reading happens to come out the same — but a note that glossed it as a body part would be reading the wrong plant.