Chinese newspapers aggregate in the basket of commode reading in my bathroom. I rarely look at them, as I always bring my own reading material. I noticed yesterday that there was an advertisement for a Chinese restaurant somewhere in the Triangle that listed a bunch of names of dishes. This is an uncommon occurance in the US, as people tend to think "beef and broccoli over rice" or "general tsao's chicken" when they think of Chinese cuisine. Not so fast. Those aren't actual names of dishes.
I don't know too much about nomenclature, but I'm pretty sure that Chinese dish names are like proper nouns - there is only one way to make it, and everybody calls it the same thing. Most of the time you can't tell from the name of the dish what it's made out of, simply because the name of the dish comes from some historic story that nobody remembers.
Example: One of the dishes advertised bye the new restaurant was "married couple's lung slices" (Foo Chi Fey Pian). mmmm yummy.
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