夫妻肺片

This dish might have had a unattested calling originally. However, a couple's version of this dish became very famous, and they might have handled the taste of the beef lung particularly well, thus earning it this name. Perhaps due to food scarcity, this snack, which originated in the 1920s, initially included sliced beef lung. Later, may because of the beef lung was not very palatable in terms of taste, it was removed from the dish. However, the original name has remained.

Another theory is that in the Sichuan-Chongqing region during the Qing Dynasty, beef offal was usually the leftovers that the rich didn't want, and the poor would slice them up to eat, calling it 廢片／废片 (“sliced waste”). Later, as food became more abundant, to make the name more appetizing, the character 廢／废 (fèi, “waste”) was changed to a homophone 肺 (fèi, “lung”).^[1]But this theory is skeptical because the form 廢片／废片 (“sliced waste”) is almost never attested before this theory, and the beef offal may won't be regarded as leftovers in the ancient times. Alternatively, some people think that the earlier name of this dish may be 燴片／烩片 (“chop suey slices”) or 薈片／荟片 (“assembled (filtrated) slices”), and because of 肺 (fèi, “lung”) is a homophone of 燴／烩 (huì, “to stew”) in Sichuanese, and that many people are not familiar with 燴／烩 (huì, “to stew”) and 薈／荟 (huì, “to assemble”), so the name was confused to be 肺片 (“lung slices”).^[2]

夫妻肺片

1. Sichuan cold dish made of thinly sliced beef and beef offal