I can’t think of a snappy or concise heading to this topic. If it gets any interest, I could ask the moderator to change the heading.
I cooked a dish, a typical stir-fry… chicken and broccoli, acording to a leading recipe site or my Better Homes and Garden Cookbook. I forgot which. Anyway… it was greeted by a female friend of mine as being taboo… “We don’t eat it that way here”. was the strong response.
So… what’s the deal… No meat and veggies cooked together? My recipe was called Pacific Rim Stir-fry. Came out OK to my taste.
I guess your US Chinese Restaurant staple beef and broccoli would be right out!
Help us out here. I’d like to see a collection of easy to cook menus and recipes that we can impress the opposite sex with or at least have a decent meal that won’t have your table mates looking at you with disgust. Thanks.
I imagine that she merely meant it was not authentic; most of the Western stir-fry cookbooks have non-authentic (but perfectly acceptable) recipes in them, in my experience. There are certainly stir-fried dishes here which combine meat and veggies, so that can’t be it.
My old lady cooks that all the time. I’d say your friend just has a rather limited knowledge of what people eat here. Maybe she meant that her mother never cooked it.
But taboo? What on earth did she mean by that?
Having noodles and rice at the same time is a no-no here. :no-no: But the Japanese are fine with it, even adding fried dumplings to noodles and rice, all in the same meal.
but is there a taboo on putting specific things together in a dish? not as far as i know. and when it comes to actually mixing flavours and murdering the palate during the course of a meal by having umpteen totally different dishes served (and taken into one’s bowl) at the same time, the Chinese sure come up trumps.
plus they start with the sweets and end with the soup. I mean, how nuts is that?
Did she mean Taiwanese don’t eat that combination or the way you prepared? My wife would chuckle at my stir fries too because of the way I cut the veggies and meat.
I’ve never hard of a chicken-broccoli taboo. In fact, I’ve seen it served here. Why don’t you ask your female friend to clarify what she means, Taiwan_Student? I’m interested in knowing what she means. Maybe she was referring to something else.
I know certain foods are taboo for Buddhists (beef for milder Buddhists; meat, garlic, hot peppers for more stricter Buddhists).
The “chopsticks vertical in rice” is a big taboo, and depending on people’s sensitivity, even chopsticks stuck in at a near-horizontal can qualify as taboo. I wonder if any studies have been done on people’s angle tolerance levels…
Some colleagues in mainland China told me that you’re not supposed to eat rice when you’re drinking baijiu because the baijiu is made from rice. They drank at dinner pretty much every night, and would protest quite strongly if the waitress tried to give them rice before they were done with the baijiu.
Don’t know if people do that here too?
Well, you have ‘hot’ food and ‘cold’ food … can’t cook them together … :no-no:
It’s like yin-yang … is it crazy? :loco: I always tell my wife I really don’t care about taboo food when you have a cold or something … I eat what I like at that time … :discodance: hell yes …!
I’ve seen Chinese almanacs with a list of verboten food combinations on the back cover. There’s a picture of the foods and a one-word description of the effect, usually “poisonous” but there were some others too.
Let me clarify… No religious taboo. But the reaction surprisingly as strong. There seems to be strong ideas on which foods can be cooked together.
If you’d want a chicken dish, cook a chicken dish, maybe a few carrots or pineapple but not broccoli. You’d have to cook a broccoli dish. You can eat them together, just not cook them together.
[quote=“Taiwan_Student”]Let me clarify… No religious taboo. But the reaction surprisingly as strong. There seems to be strong ideas on which foods can be cooked together.
If you’d want a chicken dish, cook a chicken dish, maybe a few carrots or pineapple but not broccoli. You’d have to cook a broccoli dish. You can eat them together, just not cook them together.[/quote]
Well, taboo is an egregious misnomer, then. You’re just talking about ideas of what does or doesn’t go together. Words have meaning, and shared meaning has value. Such things should not be taken so lightly. I sentence you to twelve lashes.
The week before I left The Rock, I got thrown out of a joint for yelling at my food. In my defense, I didn’t appreciate what my pot stickers called my mother. But I did get a little loud. In Klingon.
What?
/why yes, I am single. Have been for a long time. And your point is…?
is it crazy? :loco: I always tell my wife I really don’t care about taboo food when you have a cold or something … 
I eat what I like at that time … :discodance: hell yes …!