methinks this fellow got his notes mixed up...?

http://cgi.ebay.com/Art-of-Chinese-Cooking...VQQcmdZViewItem

perhaps the poor seller heard one too many stories about balanchine's seeing himself as a chef who whipped up ballets for successive seasons as a way of feeding his dancers and his audiences, and decided that the artful man must have set down his culinary skills at some point, so why not via chinese cuisine.

I tried to decipher the author's and it did indeed appear to be "The Balanchine School of Peking." After all, many White Russians did indeed pass through Manchuria and northern China while escaping the Bolshevik Revolution. Maybe a relation? But, alas, it turns out to be the work of the "Benedictine Sisters of Peking."

A link to another source is here: http://www.geocities.com/lrampey/chinese/cookbook.htm

This includes rare illustrations of what may very well be the original production of Duck Lake, as well as the long lost Dance of the Shrimp and Little Pigs pas de trois from the first performances of The Nutcracker.

'They have bird's-nest soup, seaweed soup,
Noodle soup, poodle soup,
Talking crows with the croup,
Almost anything.

If you want to buy a saw
Or a fish delicious when it's raw
Or a pill to kill your moth'r-in-law
Or a bee without a sting,

Come to the supermarket,
If you come on a turtle, you can park it,
So come to the supermarket
If you come on a goose, you can park it,
So come to the supermarket
And see
Pe-
King!'

Cole Porter lyrics for Barbra Streisand's marvelous whooping and hollering of 'Come to the Supermarket in old Peking'. Maybe we'll arrive at some new old off-Broadway stuff a la Al Carmines if we make this a creative thread.

Oh, and the Benedictine Sisters won't leave this verse in, I bet:

'If you want a bust of jade
Or an egg that's more or less decayed
Or in case you care to meet a maid
For a nice but naughty fling,'

Oh, it is not fair to make me laugh this hard when my back hurts!

Good Grief---I never thought I would see my little Chinese Cookbook featured on Ballet Talk. This is the first Chinese cookbook I owned--it was given to me 40 years ago! Since then (and about a dozen Chinese cookbooks later) my skills are a bit more sophisticated. Also, acquiring a Chinese daughter-in-law helped.