アンニンドウフ

杏仁豆腐 (xìngrén dòufu) is the Chinese source form for Japanese アンニンドウフ and 杏仁豆腐. 杏 means apricot, 仁 means kernel, and 豆腐 means tofu. Li Shizhen's 1596 Bencao Gangmu lists xìngrén as apricot kernels in Chinese materia medica; the dessert name adds dòufu because the set block is cut like tofu in Chinese cookery. Japanese borrowed the dish name through Chinese cuisine, especially restaurant culture in treaty-port cities such as Yokohama, Kobe, and Nagasaki after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The Japanese reading アンニン uses Sino-Japanese sound values, not modern Mandarin xìngrén. It joined menu words such as チャーハン, シュウマイ, and マーボー豆腐, where Chinese written forms and Japanese readings often mix in restaurant Japanese. In present Japanese, 杏仁豆腐 is mainly a dessert: milk, agar or gelatin, sugar, and apricot-kernel or almond flavoring. English menus often say almond tofu, but traditional 杏仁 is apricot kernel, not the ordinary almond sold as a snack. It is also not soybean tofu. Convenience-store cups in the Heisei period, 1989-2019, made the dessert very familiar in supermarkets too. Example: 杏仁豆腐を一つください asks for one dessert cup or bowl.