Don't worry. I am not becoming a food blogger. However there was some confusion over a (very pleasant) lunch in Shanghai today as to what exactly this - the dessert included in our set meal - was. There were excellent Chinese speakers there, but the giggling waitress was rather testing their vocabulary with an account of it being made (so they understood) from the generative organs of a frog. It actually looks more like frogspawn, which may well have been what she meant.
I was not up for trying it myself but it smelled quite pleasant. The idea was to pour syrup and milk on it and then scrape it, along with the fruit, onto a spoon and eat it. We were told it's good for longevity (though it doesn't seem to have helped its original owners in that respect).
Can any knowledgeable reader tell me what my braver friends were really eating?
You remind me of a fish meal I had when I was on a flying visit to Quinhuangdao. I was the only westerner in the party doing a DD on a mobile network for a client who was looking to buy it. There was the obligatory feast the night we arrived and it was all fish.
I'm not that squeamish when it comes to food but my Mandarin speaking colleague from Hong Kong, who had been naming everything else during the trip to four other cities, just told me to eat one dish and not ask - as the only westerner it was the old face thing.
To this day I have no idea what I ate and every time I see my former colleague he claims to have forgotten what it was.
The things we do for business, eh!
Posted by: SimonF | Saturday, September 18, 2010 at 07:36 PM
I see my fellow Queen of Google has come up with what is surely the answer in the first link. Not a fan of Google? Still it makes for a interesting post and non critical for a change.
Those Chinese beliefs that some thing is beneficial for this or that die really hard. My "twin", a Chinese lady from Macao who has a PhD in Chemistry and who has been married to a former professor of Pharmacology for more than 40 years, is always giving me Chinese herbal things to take. Bits of dried this or that and often she only knows the Chinese name and can't tell me what they are exactly. The sceptical former pharmacist swallows them down dutifully, unless they taste bad and then forget it! But she did convert me to green tea.
Posted by: JMB | Saturday, September 18, 2010 at 06:18 PM
I just did a search and came up with this and this. After reading the second one, I think you were wise to pass on the dessert!
Posted by: CherryPie | Saturday, September 18, 2010 at 01:41 PM