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Q: What are some Chinese foods that you've never heard of in your country?
I have a bunch, but I'll list a few by the names my dictionary spit out:
Cabbage mustard 芥蓝- I really enjoy this vegetable
Chinese yam 山药 - taste is too bland for my liking, and feels like Japanese natto without the horrid taste
Job's tear grains 薏米 - had it in a soup today. The soup was sweet and tasted alright, but the actual Job's tear grains tasted like what I imagine laundry detergent to taste like.
Buddha's head? (forgot the Chinese name) - a kind of fruit I had one time that was alright.
Has anyone else had these, how did you like them, and what other strange foods have you come across?
All of it, except if you consider that Fortune Cookies, Orange Duck and Caramel Pork are Chinese cuisine.
Real Chinese cuisine (the one you find in China) is not popular among non-Chinese, when I see "authentic" Chinese restaurants in my country they are always filled with Mainlanders, no White or Black faces in there.
However "Chinese food" as we define it back home, is popular, but it's not any more Chinese than it is American (as it originated in the US before spreading to Europe).
Mr_Sausage:
Well actually, the Chinatown in Liverpool, England is older than San Francisco I believe, so how can you prove that it 'spread to Europe'?
Shining_brow:
Not true at all!
Most of the dishes we consume that are called "Chinese traditional food" back home may not have been traditional for the vast majority of the people, but if you search, you will find variants of them in some part and time and class of China. Obviously, we get the better stuff - the stuff the royalty and upper echelon would have occasionally eaten.
Anything Sichuanese... Scratch that : anything Chinese, which is not dumbed down Cantonese food. Such is the sad state of Chinese food in France. You can find some proper Chinese food in one of the Chinatown of Paris (ie. Belleville aka Wenzhou-on-Seine)
There is simply too many to name but I am glad I have discovered them because some are just amazing.
Chinese restaurants outside of China, with exceptions, are like non-Chinese restaurants in China that, with exceptions, serve localized versions of the original, either because it is too expensive to have the original or because the people running it realize that people might not like the original.
I never really liked real Chinese food, a lot looked like garbage, heads, feet, bone splinters in what is not the best thing I ever had. There are some dishes that I like, a yellow dumpling, but I was afraid to ask what the filling was.
