Brad Collins wrote:
Back in the 90's a friend of mine was doing an environmental study for China Light & Power or the Hong Kong Gov. They were trying to put together a inventory of species of fish in Hong Kong waters. Finding the latin and English names for the fish was easy, but they were supposed to do everything in both English and Chinese so they went around the office asking people for the Chinese names for the different types of fish.
No one could seem to remember the names for any of the fish but all of them could think of a recipes for each fish..... It turned out that there was no agreement on names and that each little fishing village and southern dialect had their own names for each type of fish.
In the end they gave up and proposed making a cookbook of the recipes everyone had offered. I never heard if anything came of the cookbook....
Which reminds me of one of my favourite quotes by HRH the Duke of Edinburgh: "If it has four legs and is not a chair, has wings and is not an aeroplane, or swims and is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it." Cheers, Holden