Special Feature: Culinary Travel

Chinese Food Glossary

by Rachel Timmons

introduction | regions | recipes | glossary

Baozi—a steamed bun with a pork and vegetable filling

Cai—Mandarin, ‘dish,’ (type of cuisine, i.e. ‘ Shanghai cai’) or ‘vegetable’

Cha--tea

Cassia bark—a type of bark with a cinnamon-like odor, used in western Chinese cooking

Dou fu—(tofu) soybean curd

Fan-- ‘rice’ or ‘food ’

Jiaozi—boiled dumplings with meat and vegetable fillings

Jiu—wine

Litchi—(lychee), a small, round sweet fruit with a brown peel and white flesh grown in south China

Longan—a litchi-like fruit

Mantou—steamed bun

Ma la—‘numbing-spicy,’ used to describe a certain combination of flavors in Sichuan food

Mien—noodles

Rou—‘meat’ Jirou—chicken, Zhurou—pork

Sichuan peppercorn—a tiny reddish peppercorn with a flower-like appearance and a ‘numbing’ taste, used in Sichuan cooking

Taro root—the starchy, potato-like root of the taro plant, used in soups and stews

Yue bing—moon cake, small round cakes with various sweet fillings, eaten during the Moon Festival

Zhou—rice porridge

Further Reading

These books, written by an anthropologist and a chef respectively, are excellent sources of information on China’s cuisine and culinary history.

Anderson, E.N. The Food of China. Yale University Press, 1988.

Lo, Eileen Yin-Fei. The Chinese Kitchen. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1999.

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