Moo_shu_pork

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Moo shu pork Moo shu pork Moo shu pork Traditional Chinese: Simplified Chinese: Hanyu Pinyin: ??? or ??? ??? or ??? mù xū ròu or mù xī ròu Moo shu pork (also spelled moo shi pork or mu xu pork) is a dish of northern Chinese origin, possibly originally from Shandong. It is believed to have first appeared on the menus of Chinese restaurants in the United States in the late 1960s,[1] and is also a staple of American Chinese cuisine.[2] Description In its traditional Chinese version, moo shu pork consists of sliced or shredded pork chop meat and scrambled eggs, stir fried in sesame and/or peanut oil together with thinly sliced wood ear mushrooms (black fungus) and day lily buds. Thinly sliced bamboo shoots may also be used. The dish is seasoned with minced ginger and garlic, scallions, soy sauce, and rice cooking wine (usually huangjiu). In the United States, the dish seems to have appeared in Chinese restaurants in New York City and Washington, D.C. in approximately 1966, receiving mention in a New York Times guide to Washington, D.C. restaurants published in that year.[1] One of the first restaurants in Manhattan to serve the dish was Pearl’s, one of the best known New York City restaurants to serve non-Cantonese food in the 1960s.[2] A 1967 article in the The New York Times states that another of the first restaurateurs to serve the dish in Manhattan was Emily Kwoh, the owner of the Mandarin House, Mandarin East, and Great Shanghai restaurants.[3] The dish was also early on the menu at Joyce Chen’s, a celebrated pioneering Mandarin-style restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At that time, the dish was at first prepared in a traditional manner, but, as wood ears and day lily buds were scarce, a modified recipe was developed. In this modified recipe, which gradually came to predominate in North America, green cabbage is usually the predominant ingredient, along with scrambled eggs, carrots, day lily buds, wood ear mushrooms, scallions, and bean sprouts. Shiitake mushrooms, bok choy, snow pea pods, bell peppers, onions, and celery are sometimes also used, and dry sherry is often substituted for the huangjiu. The vegetables (except the day lily buds and bean sprouts) are generally sliced into long, thin strips before cooking. While these are the typical ingredients, there is some variation in the recipe from chef to chef or restaurant to restaurant. In both the Chinese and Americanized versions, monosodium glutamate, salt, sugar, corn starch, and ground white pepper are also often added. In less authentic North American restaurants, the wood ears and day lily buds (ingredients less familiar to most American customers) are often omitted entirely. Because finely sliced cabbage and carrots make up a large portion of the American-style recipe’s ingredients, pre-bagged coleslaw mix is often used to save the time of slicing these vegetables. Although most commonly made with pork, the same basic dish can be prepared by substituting another meat or seafood; generally only a single meat is used. If made with chicken instead of pork, the dish is called moo shu chicken, and the name is similarly altered if prepared with beef or shrimp. If prepared without any meat, it is called moo shu vegetables or moo shu tofu. 1 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Moo shu pork Scrambled eggs have an appearance that reminded people of the mixed yellow and white flowers, so "mù xī" or "mù xū" (there is some variation in pronunciation of the second character) was a poetical way of referring to the scrambled eggs used in preparing this dish. The character ? by itself means "rhinoceros." The tree is named "rhinoceros tree" because the shape of its leaves reminded people of rhinoceros horns.[4] To distinguish its botanical meaning from its zoological meaning, it is often written ?, and the Sweet Osmanthus tree is then called ??, yielding ??? (pinyin: mù xī ròu). The pronunciation of ? and ? can vary depending on linguistic and social context, with both xī and xū being given by Gao’s dictionary. There are numerous variations on this name (see below for a full list of variants). The second way of writing the name of this dish, and the one that is most commonly seen in Chinese restaurants in the United States, is ??? (pinyin: mù xū ròu). The pronunciation is the same as the name for the osmanthus tree, but the meaning of ? does not fit in with the name of a kind of tree. Instead, it has the meaning of "whiskers," and is often given an additional determinative component in writing (to distinguish the meaning of "whiskers" from the other meanings of ?) so that it comes to be written as ?. It is possible that ??? (literally "wood whiskers pork") might have been used on the menus of the first American Chinese restaurants to serve the dish in place of the correct compound ??? ("sweet osmanthus pork") due to haste or simply because of the limitations of Chinese typewriters. It may also merely have been the result of writing the wrong character because it has the same pronunciation. But it is difficult to explain the instances wherein it is written as ??? ("wood whiskers pork"). Those writers must have concluded, at some point in the development of this tradition of writing the name of the dish, that the intended meaning really was "whiskers." While in Chinese American restaurants the dish’s name is nearly always rendered in Chinese characters as ??? (pinyin: mù xū ròu), in China it is most often given as ??? (pinyin: mù xī ròu), the middle character meaning "Sweet Osmanthus." One theory regarding the use of this character proposes that the scrambled eggs in the dish resemble Sweet Osmanthus flowers.photo An extension Serving Moo shu pork is served with a small dish of hoisin sauce and several (generally four) warm, steamed, thin, white tortilla-like wrappers made of flour, called "moo shu pancakes" (Chinese: ???, pinyin: mù xū bǐng), "Mandarin pancakes", or báo bǐng (??, literally "thin pancakes"); these are similar to those served with Peking Duck. In the late 20th century, some inauthentic North American Chinese restaurants began serving Mexican-style flour tortillas in place of the traditional moo shu wrappers, which are thinner and more brittle in texture. If additional pancakes are desired, they must generally be purchased (again, usually in a group of four). The moo shu pork is then wrapped in the moo shu pancakes, which are eaten by hand in the manner of a soft taco. The diner typically wraps his or her own pancakes, although waiters in Chinese restaurants are often willing to perform this function as a courtesy to diners who are unable to do so. First, a small amount of hoisin sauce is spread onto the pancake, then a spoonful or two of moo shu pork is placed in the center of the pancake. The bottom of the pancake is folded up slightly (to prevent the contents from falling out), and the pancake is either folded or wrapped from left to right, in the manner of a soft taco.[3] Unlike the practice in wrapping a burrito, the top is usually not folded over, as the pancake is generally eaten immediately and thus there is no danger of the food falling out of the top, which is the part that is eaten first. Because the dish often contains a great deal of liquid, care must be taken that the pancake does not become soaked through and break during rolling or eating. Like Chinese noodle dishes, moo shu pork is not typically served with steamed white rice. Etymology There are problems relating to how the name of this dish is to be written and explained. There are two basic and contending traditions. The version of the name with the earliest extant record gives the name as ??? (pinyin: mù xī ròu). ?? (pinyin: mù xī) is the name for the Sweet Osmanthus, a small ornamental tree that produces bunches of small, fragrant blossoms that may be yellow or white. 2 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia of this theory is the fact that, at Chinese Confucian death anniversary celebrations, the Chinese word for "egg" (?; pinyin: dàn) is avoided when referring to dishes containing eggs, as many Chinese curses contain this word. Thus, the word dàn was typically substituted using the euphemism xī (?), meaning "Sweet Osmanthus."[5] By this reasoning, in this version of the dish’s name, the first character, mù (?) is short for mù’ěr (??, meaning "wood ear fungus") and xī (?, meaning "Sweet Osmanthus tree") is short for guíhuā (??, meaning "Sweet Osmanthus flower"). There is also a neighborhood in Beijing called Muxi Di (???), which is home to the Muxi Di train station (????). Although moo shu pork is a popular dish in Beijing and other parts of northern China, it is unclear whether the dish is named for this neighborhood, or whether this association occurred later, as an example of folk etymology. The dish is occasionally also called mùsù ròu (???; literally "alfalfa meat"), although the origin of this name is unclear; it may also be an example of folk etymology since the pronunciation is similar to the other, more standard names for the dish. Moo shu pork • 1,970 for "????" ("sweet osmanthus shredded pork")[12] • 1,610 for "????" ("sweet osmanthus shredded pork")[13] • 1,560 for "???" ("wood shavings pork"; traditional character)[14] • 1,530 for "????" ("wood shavings shredded pork" traditional version)[15] • 1,510 for "????" ("alfalfa shredded pork")[16] • 1,260 for "????" ("cooked sweet osmanthus pork")[17] • 1,180 for "????" ("wood shavings shredded pork"; alternate traditional character)[18] • 435 for "????" ("fried wood shavings pork"; traditional character)[19] • 394 for "????" ("fried alfalfa pork")[20] • 376 for "????" ("wood shavings fried pork")[21] • 286 for "????" ("wood shavings fried pork")[22] • 172 for "????" ("alfalfa fried pork")[23] • 150 for "???" ("shredded pork"; alternate traditional character)[24] • 8 for "????" ("sweet osmanthus fried pork")[25] • 5 for "????" ("wood shavings fried pork"; alternate traditional character)[26] • 3 for "????" ("fried wood shavings pork"; alternate traditional character)[27] • 3 for "????" ("sweet osmanthus shredded pork")[28] Relative frequency The relative frequencies of these compounds, as they appear on the World Wide Web, are indicated by the following counts: • 30,800 for "???" ("shredded pork")[4] • 9,300 for "???" ("alfalfa pork")[5] • 8,340 for "???" ("sweet osmanthus pork")[6] • 7,450 for "???" ("rhinoceros tree pork" rhinoceros with tree determinative)[7] • 4,210 for "????" ("fried sweet osmanthus pork")[8] • 4,020 for "????" ("fried wood shavings pork")[9] • 2,060 for "????" ("wood shavings shredded pork")[10] • 1,990 for "????" ("fried sweet osmanthus pork")[11] References [1] Washington: The New York Times Guide to the Nation’s Capital, by Alvin Shuster (R. B. Luce, 1967, p. 268). [2] Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads, by Sylvia Lovegren (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, p. 26). [3] "No Matter How You Spell It, It’s Still Mo-Shu-Ro," by Craig Claiborne (The New York Times, November 2, 1967). [4] Gao Shu-fan, Xing yin yi zong he da zi dian, p. 763 [5] ????????: Moo shu pork????????????? Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moo_shu_pork" Categories: American Chinese cuisine, Pork dishes, Shandong cuisine, Egg dishes This page was last modified on 21 March 2009, at 05:03 (UTC). All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details.) Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a U.S. registered 501(c)(3) taxdeductible nonprofit charity. Privacy policy About Wikipedia Disclaimers 3