Suanla chaoshou is a dish of Szechuan cuisine that consists of a spicy sauce over steamed, meat-filled dumplings. ''Suanla'' means "sour spicy," and ''chaoshou'' is what these particular large wontons are called in the Chinese province of Sichuan.
''Chao shou'' translates literally as "folded hands"; in Sichuan dialect this refers to a style of dumpling whose square wrapper is folded into two points, one crossed over the other. According to Peter Hessler , "In most parts of Sichuan, you can walk into a restaurant and order ''chaoshou'' without making a sound. Cross your arms and they will understand exactly what you want." One native speaker claims the Sichuan-only name for these dumplings may have originated at one time by a dialectic transposition, i.e. "chao shou" was originally "shou chao", meaning "hand-folded".
A restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts named Mary Chung's serves a dish called ''Suan La Chow Show'', which are dumplings in a spicy soy ginger sauce on top of a bed of raw mung bean sprouts. This popular dish is slightly different from the authentic Suanla Chaoshou, which has a hot garlicky peanut sauce on top of dumplings. A local restaurant reviewer noted the first version of the dish was introduced to Cambridge as Shanghai street food, by a nearby restaurant, Colleen's Chinese Cuisine,
where Mary Chung worked in the 1970's.
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2 comments:
do you have a recipe for this?...I'm looking for it. Also, btw, there are a number of restaurants in Cambridge and Arlington that sell the Suan La chow show...as it's spelled here...and the others are much better than Mary Chungs, where the house uses way too many pepper flakes and the sauce is very sour. But MC does have bigger portions :)
good job stealing the Wikipedia entry, shitwad
suan 4eva
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