Whatever happened to Bombay duck?
Posted by: Tony Lockhart on 26 December 2012
Tony
Hah, caught a bit of 'Cleo yesterday...Infamy!
Its only yucky if its dried & salted. I wouldn't call it yucky its an 'orrible smelly thing, and for once I am in full support of EU, its best left in India & far east.
In its natural fresh state Lizardfish has little or no real flavour, its usually fried with a mix of spices & teh spices make it taste OK. I was once staying in a company accommodation that was a 1 hour plus drive away from Mumbai & its fantastic restaurants. (long night-time taxi rides in India are not good for the digestion) Unfortunately my 2 weeks seemed to coincide with a glut of Lizardfish in the company eatery.
I went vegetarian PDQ.
Why is it still perfectly acceptable to refer to Bombay Mix (or Bombay Duck) and Peking Duck, and yet it is politically incorrect to refer to the cities as anything other than Mumbai and Beijing these days, I've often wondered?
Why is it still perfectly acceptable to refer to Bombay Mix (or Bombay Duck) and Peking Duck, and yet it is politically incorrect to refer to the cities as anything other than Mumbai and Beijing these days, I've often wondered?
Who says its not PC?
If you want to use the invaders name for a place (in the case of the most populous city in India) or the local southern China/Cantonese pronunciation for the capital city of China then I doubt anyone really cares. They might draw some conclusions about your world view, of course.
Why is it still perfectly acceptable to refer to Bombay Mix (or Bombay Duck) and Peking Duck, and yet it is politically incorrect to refer to the cities as anything other than Mumbai and Beijing these days, I've often wondered?
Nothing to do with political (in)correctness Rod.
In the case of Peking/Beijing or Mao Tse-Tung/Mao Zedong it's the result of moving away from the old Wade-Giles romanisation system to Pinyin. Pinyin is more accurate and easier for native Mandarin speakers to use, particularly in an age when millions of Chinese are using roman keyboards on the phones and computers.
With Bombay/Mumbai - Calcutta/Kolkata etc it's the result of lobbying by Hindu nationalists and others, who argued that the likes of "Bombay" were merely anglicised corruptions of the correct names.
Yeah, I know all that, but it doesn't answer the question, does it?
I'm perfectly happy to call the cities by the name their residents wish me to call them, (although to be honest the fact that the French say "Londres" has never bothered, and would never bother, me) but why haven't the foodstuffs caught up with the change?
You can buy "Bombay Mix" in Indian shops, labelled as such, and I had "Peking Duck", translated as such, in a restaurant in China (in Guangzhou ironically enough). Why not "Mumbai Mix" and "Beijing Duck"? No one would fail to know what they were.
That was the question I was asking. For which it appears that Siloch is accusing me of some kind of anachronistic racism. Christ this forum is weird sometimes.
By the way, the French still say "Pekin". Which may well be phonetically closer to the accurate than it is in English.
Ah.
Sorry - that wasn't what I meant. Re-reading it now I can see how it can read like that - so, apologies if offence was taken, but not what I was trying to say.
Perhaps it's just pure commercialism.
The world has got used to the names such as Bombay mix, and to change it would possibly have a big reduction in its saleable appeal !
So to go back to names of food -
In Beijing, in my experience, its very rarely called Peking duck - except in older very traditional foreigner hotels, perhaps. I guess for the current generation the transliteration of 北京 for westerners is always 'Beijing' - so its what's used.
Peking is closer to how 北京 is pronounced in Cantonese - which is certainly how it was explained to me by locals...