"James Silverton" <not.jim.silverton.at.comcast.net> wrote in message
...
<snip>
> There are numerous and sometimes unlikely recipes that I have
> never seen before but one of them referred to "eight-fold hot"
> oil and later said "Reduce the heat to six-fold". Does anyone
> know what these terms means?

well if you tell us which recipe it's taken from, we might be able to help.
The number 8 has a number of references in Chinese.

> Another recipe was for "new-born"
> pigeon and in that one was to select new-born pigeons weighing
> 400g. Is this perhaps a recipe out of the past for dodo (it
> *was* a pigeon) since 400g is about a pound :-)

it's a recipe for squab/young pigeons. Not a very popular dish outside HK,
Macau & Mainland but still popular there. I ate a few earlier this year when
i went there. Sometimes quails are substituted... someone(peter dy?) posted
pics from their San Francisco Chinatown trip/meal & quails were one of them.

side note : a lot of Chinese cooking you find in the West are Southern
Chinese dishes, mainly Cantonese as HongKong/Canton was the main route by
which many Chinese left Mainland China over the last 100+ years. It's only
in recent times that we hear, see or eat *other* regional dishes from China.

DC.