斜蒿青蒿 Wolfberry Tips and Dark Blue
逐句解 Line by line
Slant wormwood, green wormwood, mother-hugging wormwood; the lamp-moth flies up onto the buckwheat boards.
Three wormwoods in seven characters, and the third is called mother-hugging because its young shoots cluster against the old stalk. Given who is serving this meal and why, the name lands differently than it otherwise would.
Sheep's-ear-bald, wolfberry tips, with dark blue added and no need of oil.
枸杞頭 is the young tip of the wolfberry, still eaten as a spring green, and 不用油 — no oil needed — is the cook telling you this one does not require the expensive ingredient. In a poor kitchen that is a recommendation.
Several sorts of wild greens made one meal, and the woodcutter's sincere heart serves for the thanks he owes.
The closing line of the catalogue, and it does what the whole set-piece has been for. 虔心 is a reverent, wholehearted intention, and 為 is wéi here — the serves-as reading, not the for-the-sake-of one. It is precisely Bajie's argument at the graveside, returned at the end of the chapter by a stranger: what is offered stands for the feeling of the one offering it.
The last line of the catalogue is the moral of the whole chapter and it arrives disguised as the end of a recipe. Several kinds of weeds made a meal, and the heart behind it does the work the food cannot.
That is exactly what Bajie said over the pebbles, and Wukong shouted at him for it. Sixty passages later the same argument comes back, in verse, from a woodcutter's kitchen, and nobody argues with it at all.