夫妻肺片

Meanings

Etymology

This original name for this dish may be unattested. However, a married couple's version of this dish became very famous, thus earning it this name. Perhaps due to food scarcity, this snack, which originated in the 1920s, initially included sliced beef lung. Later, perhaps because the beef lung was not very palatable in terms of taste, it was removed from the dish. However, the original name has remained. Another theory is that in the Sichuan-Chongqing region during the Qing Dynasty, beef offal was usually the leftovers that the rich didn't want and the poor would slice it up to eat, calling it 廢片／废片 (“sliced waste”). Later, as food became more abundant, the character 廢／废 (fèi, “waste”) was changed to a homophone 肺 (fèi, “lung”) to make the name more appetizing. But this theory is unlikely because the form 廢片／废片 (“sliced waste”) is almost never attested before this theory and beef offal wasn't regarded as leftovers in earlier times. Alternatively, some people think that the earlier name of this dish may be 燴片／烩片 (“chop suey slices”) or 薈片／荟片 (“assembled (filtrated) slices”), and because 肺 (fèi, “lung”) is a homophone of 燴／烩 (huì, “to stew”) in Sichuanese, and that many people are not familiar with 燴／烩 (huì, “to stew”) and 薈／荟 (huì, “to assemble”), so the name was confused to be 肺片 (“lung slices”).

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Components

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