Food and specialties
- Ice cream was discovered in China some 4,000 years ago. The Chinese people back then combined milk, rice mixture and snow to create the yummy dessert. It is said that Kublai Khan, the founder of the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) added preserves and jam to his favorite icy drink, creating the world’s first ice cream prototype. In order to keep the ice cream production process private, he issued a decree that no one except the royal family could make ice cream.
- You thought eating bugs or dogs was weird? Try a ‘sophisticated’ version of boiled eggs: urine eggs, which are boiled for an entire day in the urine of boys under the age of 10. Locals believe they have myriad benefits, such as increasing circulation of the blood.
- Ketchup is known to be an American condiment, however, its origins are anything but American. Ketchup comes from the Hokkien Chinese word, ‘kê-tsiap’, the name of a sauce derived from fermented fish.
- Historians speculate that because of the growing population in early China, cooks had to cut food into small bite-sized pieces to allow them to cook quickly and conserve cooking fuel. These small pieces eliminated the need for knives, and eventually lead to the invention of chopsticks.
- The first vending machine to sell live crabs debuted in 2010 in a subway station near Nanjing. The machine sells an average of 200 live crabs a day—with prices ranging from 15 to 50 yuan (about $2-7 depending on size). A sign next to the machine guarantees each crab will come out alive, offering compensation of three live crabs for every dead one that pops out.
- And talking about machines; Covid-19 has lead to the world’s first a face-mask vending machine.
- In Chinese, there is a specific name for the starch or carb component of a meal, called zhu shi (主食). Zhu means main or primary and shi means food, and the zhu shi of a meal typically provides the bulk of calories. This is usually food made from grain (wheat or rice as most common) such as steamed buns, noodles, steamed or fried rice, or starchy root vegetables such as potatoes or yams.
- The closest English translation for zhu shi is ‘staple food’, but there are some important differences in linguistic usage. ‘Staple food’ is a more academic term and describes a broader category of food, whereas zhu shi is quite common in everyday Chinese speech. A daily exchange in a Chinese home, when preparing dinner, might be ‘What will we eat as the zhu shi?’ whereas in English, you would hardly hear people say ‘Which carb should we eat?’ and even less conceivable, ‘What kind of staple food do you want to eat tonight?’
- Hot or warm drinking water is more common than cold water in China, and iced water is especially rare. Main factor for this practice is that it is a prevalent Chinese belief that drinking warm water is better for the digestive system and overall health. Boiling water also is a sanitation measure, to kill bacteria that may be in tap water.