Reciting the Menu

Introduction

A traditional crosstalk patter piece, split off from the old Nuanchang routine, that reels off a Manchu-Han banquet

Reciting the Menu, also called The Bill of Fare, is a traditional crosstalk piece famous for a long patter passage that rattles off the dishes of the Manchu-Han imperial banquet in one breath. It goes back to an early script called Nuanchang, in which a braggart boasts that his charity shelter feeds more than three hundred people for free. As older performers reworked and enlarged it, Nuanchang split into two routines: one became Opening a Porridge Kitchen, and the other grew from talk of famous Chinese and foreign dishes into Reciting the Menu, devoted to the Manchu-Han banquet. The difficulty of such long patter is to speak fast without stumbling while keeping the speaker's air of self-satisfaction. Crosstalk took shape in Beijing in the Xianfeng and Tongzhi reigns of the Qing, its duet form includes the patter type known as guankou, and it entered the second national intangible heritage list in 2008.