Chinese Food

Completely Unrelated Points based on the same title.

My podcast tells me that Caribbean and Central American Chinese foods are derivative and boring, except in Panama, which has the most regional varieties of anywhere outside of China itself. I am assuming it is the canal and the many traders?

Chines cuisines are extremely varied, but tend to consistently diverge from Western tastes in the greater attention to textures, so that there are more slithery, gelatinous, gristly, spongy, and just plain wetter foods that have little flavor. Crunchy, crispy, and crusty are considered distinct. Spicy might mean wildly different things, even on the same plate. There is also more contrast rather than blending from course to course and even dish to dish.  Europeans might have contrasting flavors in a meal, but there is more attention whether cabbage goes with another salty or sour dish. In China one is more likely to have spicy alternate with sweet fruit, then salty, then bland but textured. 

Hotpot has become the fast food of China, because it retains the high sociability of eating in a group, has familiar dishes enjoyed across classes, has widely-available ingredients, and takes less technical skill to prepare and so are more economical. At the highest levels, chefs have competitions on the cleaverness and speed of slicing alone, and have for decades. Mao Zedong's destruction of Chinese cuisine was not only the decreased availability of delicate and intricate ingredients in general because of famine(s), but the transferring of artisanal ingredient producers to become laborers. That knowledge was often lost entirely in two generations.

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The phrase "Chinese Food" is an excellent example of how the backshift works in English, the moving of the stress to earlier in the word, or even the phrase. One can listen to TV sitcoms from the 50s and even 60s, when eating Chinese food was much less common - the traditions of Christmas Eve and New Years Eve did not come in until the 80s - where it was pronounced Chinese FOOD. This seems strange to our ears now, but was common for all the ethnic foods then.  One did not go out for ITALIAN food, but for Italian FOOD. That was the other nationality whose dinners (the usual restaurant food) became common early, eventually becoming just one word. "We sent out for Chinese." "I'm thinking maybe Italian?" We have so many ethnic foods now that many more have become single words. Mexican. Thai. Vietnamese. Others are still not quite common enough. Dinners from Peru are PERUVIAN Food, same for Nigerian, French-Canadian, Swedish. But alert listeners will hear the switch to the single word in highly ethnic cities, such as Houston or Los Angeles, sometime soon, I will bet, if it isn't happening already. If the style is considered an elevated or complicated one and it is a cuisine, then the stress stays on the second word. We don't order out for French, Viennese, or New Nordic, and the shift to the first word is incomplete in most cases.

It happens with single words even more.  It used to be a chalk BOARD, now it's a CHALKboard. Even more so with colors, when applied to anything. BLACKboard, BLUEbird, GREENway used to be two words, stress on the second one.  The color white resists this more than other hues. White NOISE, white LIGHTNING, but it is hard to tell whether this is only because the backshift happens more frequently with common words (it does), or whether it is the brighter colors that resist the backshift (yellow FEVER).

The backshift does not occur in French, which is why we got rhyming poetry from that literature while the Germanic languages preferred alliteration. Stressing the ls syllable is the quickest down-and-dirty way to fake a French accent, Italian stress is middle or later syllable except as a short geographic title: VEnice, SIcily, but SiCILian, VeNEtian.