Hotpot

[Laurence Horn]

On Jan 4, 2012, at 1:34 PM, Benjamin Barrett wrote:

> 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):
>
> -----
> 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.
> -----
>

As a longtime cat owner, on reading "cat hotpot", I first pictured a much more innocent (or at least more cat-friendly) scenario, in which the billionaire was sitting around the hotpot with some of his pet cats and unwisely decided to sample the fare.  (I had a hotpot in Shanghai that included live shrimp which had to be caught and dumped in the stock before it wriggled off the plate; I'm sure that would be a favorite with kitties, although they'd probably just as soon dispense with the cooking, much less the spicy sauces.)

LH

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