Hotpot

[Benjamin Barrett]

On Jan 4, 2012, at 10:59 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Hotpot
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>
> 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):
>>
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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....
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>> 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....
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>> 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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> 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.)

I purposely didn't put "cat hotpot" into the subject line to try to avoid that scenario :)

BTW, I see that I forgot to check the ADS archives for "hot pot." As noted there, the OED has "Mongolian hot pot" under "Mongolian."

The archives say that the OED has it from 1967 (Barry Popik: http://ow.ly/8ij9K), but I see it as 1992. (That post also has the spelling of "barbeque.")

According to Rima McKinzey, hot pots were for sale in the Bay Area around 1967 (http://ow.ly/8iiu1).

I might have missed one, but it appears the earliest the archives have it is a post from Barry Popik taking it back to 1972: http://ow.ly/8iiTV.

Benjamin Barrett
Seattle, WA

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