Tuesday, May 04, 2010

Anyone fancy some Jew's Ear Juice?

You've heard of Yinglish - the mixture of Yiddish and English? Now, courtesy of the New York Times, comes Chinglish - the mixture of Chinese and English:

For English speakers with subpar Chinese skills, daily life in China offers a confounding array of choices. At banks, there are machines for “cash withdrawing” and “cash recycling.” The menus of local restaurants might present such delectables as “fried enema,” “monolithic tree mushroom stem squid” and a mysterious thirst-quencher known as “The Jew’s Ear Juice.”

A quick search on Google shows this stuff actually comes in a can - and is a black fungus juice. What it has to do with Jews still remains unclear, but one blogger ran a review:

It’s a nasty-looking thick semi-transparent cloudy brown liquid. It’s smell is weird, like a mix between the apple vinegar drink and turkey gravy. It’s a little thick and slimy, but the flavor is actually mild. The flavor isn’t anything at all like the cooked wood ear that I’m used to eating.

It’s so strange that it tastes like bland, bad, old apple cider...

Well, what do you expect with a name like 'Jew's Ear Juice'?

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