This is a question for readers with knowledge of Chinese. How do you
say "water chestnuts" in Cantonese and in Mandarin?

More generally, does anybody know of a webpage aimed English/Western
speakers listing the *Chinese characters* (or at least the
phonetically transcribed words) for typical Chinese cooking
ingredients such as fermented black beans and Szechuan peppercorns?

Thanks in advance,

Jill

P.S. I know that there's a book out there on "demystifying the Asian
grocery store", but I think that if I could just find the Chinese
characters for the ingredients, I could get along fine.

P.S.2 Since my newserver does not carry alt.food.asian and Google
groups is a bit slow in showing new posts, I would appreciate to get a
copy of any reply by e-mail (but use the address I'm about to give
below!). The address above is not a good one though, since it is
usually filled with spam. To get a better address please replace
everything before the "@" with jkrugman345. Sorry for this
inconvenience.