The word chow, as in chow hall or chow down, goes back to the British presence in Chinese ports during the 1700s. Chow chow was a pidgin term referring to a mixed dish of various foods, namely whatever was on hand. The joke was that it often contained dog, which is the same joke behind our encased sausage scraps known as hot dogs. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Chow Chow”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, Martha. How are you?
Doing well. Who’s this?
My name is Aaron Maddy. I’m calling from Turley, Oklahoma.
Turley, Oklahoma.
Turley.
Turley, Oklahoma. It’s just north of Tulsa.
Okay.
Welcome to the show, Aaron.
Thank you very much.
How can we help?
Well, I’m calling you today to pose a question on behalf of my mother and the women of the Federal Carswell Medical Facility in Fort Worth, Texas.
And their question is, where did the word chow, as in reference to food or chow hall, where did it originate?
They thought it was some type of military origin, but they don’t know any more than that.
Not a bad guess. Not a bad guess at all, actually.
And why were they curious about it?
Well, they have time on their hands, I suppose.
And they listen to your show every weekend.
Great. That’s fantastic.
They just were excited.
He emailed me and asked me to contact you, and here we are.
Ciao.
Ciao.
That’s a good one.
It’s got an interesting history.
It goes back to the British experience in Asia in the 1700s.
This is 300 years ago.
Wow.
The British were in Asia, and they picked up a term that was probably a variety of pidgin in the seaports of the world.
There have traditionally been these mixed languages that are a little bit of English, a little bit of Chinese, a little bit of Portuguese.
And in this particular dialect spoken in some of the ports of China, chow chow referred to these mixed dishes that were kind of not one thing and not another.
It wasn’t like a standard dish.
It’s kind of a little bit of whatever you have on hand.
And this term chow chow probably, unfortunately, this is speculation, not for sure, came from the common joke that what you were eating was dog.
Well, I had wondered that because, you know, when you think of chow, you think of chow chow, you know, the Chinese breed.
And I had heard that it could possibly have a Southern California connection during the immigrants, but that was way before the 1700s.
Oh, yeah. The Oxford English Dictionary has a citation from 1795 from a document related to the British embassy there at the time.
Possibly related to the dog. The word for dog gets used for the food.
It gets reduplicated. That is, instead of just being chow, it turns into chow chow.
It sometimes refers to very specific pickled dishes, and sometimes it just refers to food in general.
Then we re-shorten it in English.
It turns into chow, just referring to any food.
It’s always had a slang connotation or an informal connotation.
And then it starts to be used for things like chow hound and chow line or chow wagon.
Chow down is a verb.
Chow down, yeah, the verb to chow.
And here we are talking about it on the air.
It’s still got a life.
It’s the wonderful, so in that word is this tiny bit of history of the British experience in China.
That’s pretty amazing that it goes back that far.
Like I said, I had originally kind of thought maybe military, but then they referred to it as mess hall.
I thought chow may be referring to bad food.
So that makes sense.
It’s a little bit of everything, so it’s not a specific dish.
No, I can’t.
I mean, you’ll find sometimes people say this is the official recipe for chow chow, but then you’ll get somebody else going, no, this is, and they’re very different from each other.
Well, that’s very interesting.
I know it means a lot to the women in the facility that you took this question.
Hey, no problem.
They should feel free to pass questions through you anytime they’ve got something on their mind.
Oh, we’ll love to hear that very much.
Thank you so much.
Our pleasure, Aaron.
Thank you so much, Aaron.
Give them our regards, okay?
Okay, I sure will, and thanks for talking to me.
Bye-bye.
Take care now.
All right.
Bye-bye.
Yeah, the thing about eating dog, which is really funny, it was a joke, but this is…
This is funny to some people.
It’s an opportunity to bring up the fact this is why we call hot dogs hot dogs.
I was going to say, what’s the latest research on that?
No, well, it’s still the same old research, but we call them hot dogs because that was the joke, was that these sausages made from the remainders in scraps, somehow that there was a domestic animal in there.
And so you were literally eating a hot dog, and you can find old cartoons from the late 1800s that show little dog ears and noses sticking out of the hot dog bun.
Yep, head organ.
Yep.
