Hotpot

[Benjamin Barrett]

The ADS archives have a brief mention of hotpot: "Shinsollo_ Fancy Hotpot...132" (http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0209D&L=ADS-L&P=R8170&I=-3&d=No+Match%3BMatch%3BMatches). It's a 2002 post of Barry Popik's, but this particular citation appears to not be dated.

The OED's definition is slightly different: "A stew of meat or fish and potatoes (and often other vegetables), traditionally oven-cooked in an earthenware pot with a tight-fitting cover."

In Chinese, Japanese and Korean cooking, a hotpot is a pot filled with a liquid and food and cooked at the table. Diners take food from the pot while it's cooking. This is eaten in restaurants and in homes.

On Wikipedia, this is called "hot pot, "Chinese fondue" and "steamboat" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_pot).

What brought this to mind was an article of a billionaire poisoned to death with a cat hotpot (http://news.yahoo.com/police-think-poisoned-cat-meat-killed-china-tycoon-040529940.html):

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One of the men, local official Huang Guang, was arrested by police on Friday on suspicion of poisoning the hotpot with a toxic herb....

Huang, deputy director of agriculture in Guangdong's Bajia township, is suspected of poisoning the hotpot with the herb Gelsemium elegans, according to a statement on the microblog of the investigating police....

They had eaten at the hotpot restaurant before, but this time the cat meat dish tasted a little different, the report said.
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Benjamin Barrett
Seattle, WA

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