Ice-Cream Insights

Most restaurants are closed for a couple of days so I had to go further afield for my nutrional needs today.

Near the central Hongbo Square (红博广场) I sighted a cosy little place, and while I examined the specials in the window, a little old lady beckoned me in.

It specialised in 火锅 or 'hotpot' - raw ingredients boiled in a big pot of often spicy soup; 烧烤 - those barbecued meats again; and stir-fried dishes 炒菜. I opted for a big plate of the latter - 鲜笋羊肉 or 'fresh bamboo shoots (and) lamb'. Worried that this might not constitute a balanced meal, I ordered an additional couple of meat-on-sticks.

The little old lady wandered off to the kitchen then came back and proceeded to double the quantity of all my meat stick orders, presumably because it wouldn't be economic to run the barbecue for such a small quantity. A few minutes later, she wandered back to tell me she'd jacked up the price on my lamb dish by 2RMB (12p) alleging that it was the holidays so there was a special holiday charge. Fine, I reasoned, support local family-run businesses and all that - it's hard to get mad when the difference is less than the spare change you can find down the back of the sofa.

The main dish came - shredded flakes of fatty lamb with thin slices of young tender bamboo. I don't know that bamboo is used in any cuisines outside of the Far East. It doesn't have much flavour of its own, so much of the pleasure lies in its texture which is crunchy and not fibrous as you'd expect from eating what is basically tree.

笋 or 'bamboo shoot' is often prefixed with 鲜 the word for 'fresh' but, as far as I know, it's not practical or economic to offer tinned vegetables when the fresh version is so cheap and readily available. Perhaps it's just a bit of marketing fluff to make eating what is essentially the young offspring of a building material more palatable.

But I digress. The food was hearty and rich, with a thick, sour flavour which lingered in the mouth. When my meat-on-a-sticks came, the old lady had annoyingly doubled the order AGAIN and I ended up eating a good fifteen or so (albeit small) items. I left uncomfortably full and 37RMB (£2.60) lighter, and hankering for some ice-cream to cut through the grease!

Remarkably, given the outside temperature, all the small family-run convenience stores I have seen so far, however small, have had a freezer, sometimes more than one, filled with ice-cream. It's said to be a legacy of Russian influence that Harbiners have a taste for pastries and dairy products, but it still seems shocking, even upsetting, that people would expend so much electricity and valuable retail real estate on cooling things at this time of year.

Flavours run from the usual vanilla and strawberry ice-creams, to ice-lollies flavoured with sweetcorn or peas! Sweetcorn in China is treated more as a dessert than as a salad component. You can often find it topping shaved ice desserts. It seems odd to my Western tastes, but logical. It is sweet after all.

In the little shop opposite my flat, I chose this bad boy. It says 巧克力味 in big letters on the front. The first three characters are a phonetic rendition of chocolate (qiao ke li), with the fourth meaning flavour. Underneath in smaller letters it says 雪糕 which I think is a beautiful translation. Literally it means 'snow cake' which I find much more evocative than the flat 'ice-cream'.

The alternative translation of ice-cream, more commonly used in the south I believe, is 冰淇淋. 冰 means ice, as described in an earlier post. So far, so good. 淇淋 (qi lin) though, is a frankly awful rendition of the English word 'cream'. I had heard this before but checked again with my dictionary - the ever-excellent 文林 (Wen Lin) - which editorialises with the scathing comment: "A good illustration that it's just as well that Chinese has generally avoided borrowing words phonetically from foreign languages."

The packaging goes on to add 新配方，更香滑 or 'new recipe, even more fragant (and) smooth', and 附赠小勺 or 'small spoon given away free' - just as well too given the sad contents of my kitchen. Nothing unusual here.

The translation of Nestlé is a little odd. The usual tactic when transliterating Western brands is to use auspicious words (like 'power' or 'wealth') and find a phonetic approximation. Good examples are 百威 (Bai Wei = Budweiser, literally 'Hundred Power') and 可口可乐 (Ke Kou Ke Le = Coca Cola, tricky to translate but something like '(It's) delicious (and) makes you happy'). Alternatively, sometimes the meaning of the brand is conveyed with a more direct translation, so Volkswagen (the People's Car in German) becomes 大众 (the masses) and Samsung (Korean for Three Stars) becomes 三星 (again, Three Stars).

In Chinese Nestlé is rendered 雀巢 (que chao). 雀 means sparrow and it is composed of the characters 小 (small) and 隹 (a radical now signifying bird, and found in words such as 'chicken' 雞 and 'hawk'). 巢 means nest and can be 'read' as a feather-filled nest atop a tree, even if the 田 and 巛 radicals in their form here mean 'field' and 'river', rather than 'nest' and 'feathers' respectively.

Well, something seems lost in translation here, as it seems the advertising boffins at Nestlé's China headquarters in Guangzhou have seen fit to take the 'nest' part separately from founder Henri Nestlé's name. Whatever the case, the ice-cream was good!

[Edit: Even though the origin of the name Nestlé is indeed from the company's founder, the corporate logo does in fact, for some reason, prominently show birds in a nest. Mystery solved!]