birdsnest soup

English

Noun

birdsnest soup (uncountable)

1. Alternative form of bird's nest soup
   • 1848, S[amuel] Wells Williams, “Architecture, Dress, and Diet of the Chinese”, in The Middle Kingdom; A Survey of the Geography, Government, Education, Social Life, Arts, Religion, &c., of the Chinese Empire and Its Inhabitants. […], volume II, New York, N.Y., London: Wiley and Putnam, pages 42 and 50:

     Travellers have so often spoken of birdsnest soup, canine hams, and grimalkin fricasees, rats, snakes, worms, and other culinary novelties, served up in equally strange ways, that their readers get the idea that these articles form as large a proportion of the food as their description does of the narrative. […] The famous birdsnest soup is prepared from the nest of a swallow (Hirundo esculenta) found in caves and damp places in some islands of the Indian Archipelago; […]

   • 1904, Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian and Other Dependent Peoples, The Lake Mohonk Conference, page 80:

     Birdsnest soup was the first course, but following came only American dishes.

   • 1978, Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper, Michael Turner, transl., Tintin in America (The Adventures of Tintin), Egmont, published 2012, →ISBN, page 45:

     When I tell you, sir, his grandfather was scalped by the Sioux forty years ago, and he has a profound dislike for birdsnest soup, you know everything I’ve spotted from a quick look round.

   • 1988, Daniel Mathews, Cascade-Olympic Natural History, Raven Editions in conjunction with the Portland Audubon Society, →ISBN, page 395:

     In Southeast Asia, swifts’ nests are gathered for the famous curative delicacy “birdsnest soup,” featuring filmy masses like boiled eggwhites—actually the special gluey saliva swifts work up for constructing nests.