Fruit and vegetables

Fruit is 水果 shuǐguǒ, literally “the fruits of water”, and vegetables are 蔬菜 shūcài. The character 果 guǒ is a drawing: a tree 木 bearing a round fruit at its top, and the gridded square up there has nothing to do with the field 田, even if it looks like it. Why “of water”? The 水 is usually explained by the juice, which would set fresh fruit against dried fruit, 干果 gānguǒ. It is plausible. On the other hand, I have found no ancient trace of it: the classical texts simply say 果. This page opens the category “Food and drink”; meat and fish will have the next one.

菜 cài deserves a closer look. At the top, 艹, grass; at the bottom, 采 cǎi, a hand 爫 placed on a tree 木 to pick: 菜 means the greens one picks ⟶ vegetables. But the word grew along with the Chinese meal, which splits in two: 饭 fàn, the grain that fills you up (rice, noodles, steamed buns), and 菜, everything you eat with it. A dish of braised pork is therefore a 菜, just as much as a plate of spinach. The Chinese eat their rice with vegetables, even when the vegetables are meat. Hence 买菜 mǎicài, shopping for the cooking, and 菜单 càidān, the restaurant menu.

The names of vegetables also tell which way they came, and three layers can be made out. Those that came through Central Asia carry 胡 hú, the name once given to the peoples of the North and the West: 胡萝卜 húluóbo, the carrot, “the radish of the Hu”, 胡椒 hújiāo, pepper, and the old name of the walnut, 胡桃 hútáo (English did the same with the walnut, by the way: the Old English walhhnutu is “the foreigner’s nut”). Those that arrived by sea, mostly under the Ming, carry 番 fān, the foreigner: 番茄 fānqié, the tomato, “the foreigners’ aubergine”, and 番薯 fānshǔ, the sweet potato, now more often called 红薯 hóngshǔ. The last ones, which came with the Westerners, carry 洋 yáng, the ocean: 洋葱 yángcōng, the onion, “the overseas spring onion”. The tomato has two names, too: the North tends to say 西红柿 xīhóngshì, “the red persimmon of the West”, the South 番茄.

The cucumber nearly joined the same batch. It used to be called 胡瓜 húguā, “the melon of the Hu”, and the story goes that a fourth-century ruler, 石勒 Shí Lè, himself a barbarian in Chinese eyes, banned the word 胡 in his kingdom: 胡瓜 would then have become 黄瓜 huánggua, “the yellow melon” (others credit the change to Emperor Yang of the Sui). The story is too good to be sure. It has at least one excuse: a cucumber left to ripen on the plant really does turn yellow. The journey also went the other way: 猕猴桃 míhóutáo, “the macaque’s peach”, is a Chinese plant, taken to New Zealand at the beginning of the twentieth century and brought back under the name kiwi.

白菜 báicài, Chinese cabbage, is the winter vegetable of the North: in the old days every family bought mountains of it in autumn and stacked them in the courtyard to last until spring. 齐白石 Qí Báishí, who painted it all his life, is credited with a teasing inscription: the peony is the queen of flowers, the lychee the first of fruits, so why does nobody ever say that cabbage is the king of vegetables? Painting proved him right, and the cabbage, the radish and the mushroom have their models on our page Vegetable models in Chinese gongbi painting. The cabbage also carries a pun: 白菜 sounds almost like 百财 bǎicái, “a hundred fortunes”, which is one of the reasons for the success of the jade cabbage in the National Palace Museum in Taipei.

Fruit is often chosen for what its name promises. The apple, 苹果 píngguǒ, sounds like 平安 píng'ān, peace, and is sold gift-wrapped on Christmas Eve; the mandarin, 橘 jú, recalls 吉 jí, luck, and fills the bowls at New Year; the pomegranate, 石榴 shíliu, is full of seeds, as a household would like to be full of children (see our page Model of pomegranates and grapes in Chinese gongbi painting). On the other hand, you never share a pear, 梨 lí, which sounds like 离 lí, to part: the custom is explained on our page Ceremonies and lucky charms.

No fruit has inspired as much writing as the lychee, 荔枝 lìzhī. The concubine 杨贵妃 Yáng Guìfēi adored it, and the emperor had it brought to her in Chang’an by relays of horsemen. 杜牧 Dù Mù drew two lines of verse from it: a horseman in the red dust, the favourite smiles, and no one knows that it is the lychees arriving. Where did they come from? Tradition says Guangdong; many historians lean towards Sichuan, much closer, and the question is not settled. More than three centuries later, 苏轼 Sū Shì, exiled in Huizhou, took comfort in them: 日啖荔枝三百颗, three hundred lychees a day, and he was willing to end his days in the South. Chinese medicine, for its part, warns: 一颗荔枝三把火, one lychee, three fires. (Three hundred a day: the sum is soon done.)

The trio 葱 cōng, 姜 jiāng, 蒜 suàn, spring onion, ginger and garlic, opens almost every recipe, which is why you find it here rather than with the spices. Confucius, says chapter 10 of the Analects, “always had ginger on his table” (不撤姜食). Garlic has given two tasty words. 装蒜 zhuāngsuàn, to play innocent, comes from a popular riddle: a narcissus that has not yet flowered looks just like a head of garlic, so it “plays the garlic”. And in 2010, when the price of garlic shot up, internet users twisted 算你狠, “you’re ruthless”, into 蒜你狠.

The last sentence in the list, 不时，不食, comes from the same chapter, and it shows clearly what a translator has to decide. The Jesuit Couvreur translates “he did not eat a fruit that was not ripe enough”, following the commentary of 朱熹 Zhū Xī. But the older commentaries, gathered in the third century by 何晏 Hé Yàn, read “he did not eat outside mealtimes”, and today’s China understands “he ate nothing out of season”: it has become a restaurant motto, and an argument against winter tomatoes, 反季节 fǎnjìjié. Three readings for four characters. 时 is the moment, and each reader chose his own (text and translation on our page Chapter 10 of the Analects of Confucius).

Lastly, the vegetable garden has taken over everyday language. A beginner is a 菜鸟 càiniǎo, a “vegetable bird”; a knock-down price, a 白菜价 báicàijià, a cabbage price; internet onlookers, who follow the scandal of the day without getting involved, are 吃瓜群众 chīguā qúnzhòng, “the melon-eating crowd”. And when a teacher retires, people tell him he has 桃李满天下 táolǐ mǎn tiānxià, “peach and plum trees everywhere under heaven”: his former students. A teacher asks for nothing more.

Click on any character on the page: its stroke order is shown stroke by stroke, with the arrow that gives the direction of the movement.