Anyway, I put out a call for ideas on Twitter. One kind person did a Google trends search which showed that the overwhelming majority of searchable texts on the internet call it tofu, while ‘beancurd’ and ‘bean curd’ are both minority usages. Gary Stephens pointed out that his Google searches brought up 36 million hits for tofu, 1.6 million for bean curd; and only 331,000 for doufu! Andrea Nguyen, whose new specialist book on the subject, Asian Tofu, will be out in February 2012, said she’d pondered exactly the same issue and ended up plumping for tofu as the one most suitable for her readership.

Personally, I still find it a little weird calling it tofu because I’m used to saying dou fu in Chinese, so tofu doesn’t feel quite right. And as someone writing about Chinese food and culinary culture, shouldn’t I be advocating a Chinese-derived term when describing a foodstuff that has its origins in China? I suddenly noticed how many of the terms used by English speakers for Asian foods are derived from the Japanese: edamame rather than mao dou 毛豆 for green soybeans in the pod; daikon for luo bo 萝卜 white radishes; umami rather than xian 鲜 for delicious savouriness (although in that case, I have to admit that the Japanese may have been first to come up with the whole umami concept); yuba for beanmilk skin (which has various different names in Chinese); and now konnyaku or konjaku for mo yu 魔芋. In all these cases of introducing Asian food culture in the West, it seems that the Japanese simply got there first.

In the end, though, I capitulated. If tofu has become established as the standard English translation worldwide, and is the most recognisable term for those unfamiliar with Chinese cookery, it probably makes sense to use it in my recipes and my writing. I could try to run a one-woman campaign for dou fu or beancurd, but this might be at the cost of winning converts to the pleasures of Chinese food, which is, after all, the main point of what I do. So tofu it is. Hrrumph.

What do you all think?

Anyway, Ian has just returned from a trip to Italy, where he dined in an apparently very smart restaurant with a menu whose translations rival the very worst Chinglish atrocities (see this link for my Financial Times piece on Chinese restaurant menu translations). This is an excerpt from Ian’s email, reproduced with his permission:

Appetisers included…

Imagination of Lubranese Sea

First dishes included:

Drops of it gleans with clam and rucola

Linguine to escapes him

Spaghetti to the veracious clams

Second dishes included…

Fished to the crazy water

Fish boiled to vapor

And my favourite…

Resentful of calf to the lemon

Then in the section entitled “Chef’s Contours”…

Capricious salad

Peas bridegrooms

Any of you got any favourites?

I have to mention that when I was looking through one of my China notebooks this morning, I found a note about ‘one of best-ever translations!’, found on a Suzhou restaurant menu. It was

‘Boiled the soup with the ovary of toad’

I laughed a lot, because the idea of eating TOAD’s ovaries was so horrible, until I realised that the translation itself actually wasn’t too far off the mark, because it was actually a soup made with FROG ovaries (xue ha), and that while I might not myself find a frog ovary soup revolting, most normal English people probably would…