Fabian, an Australian living in Berlin, writes about the difficulties of not knowing the culinary code in a foreign land:
Ordering a bagel in NYC is like cracking a code. What kinds of bagel are there? Do you call it a bagel or a sandwich? Is it wrong to put egg and cheese on a Cinnamon-Raisin bagel (I hope so)? You’re somehow expected to just know, and if you don’t, then you’re clearly new to the city. And that’s not a terrible thing – people are mostly tolerant – but it’s a little embarrassing, so you’re motivated to overcome it pretty quickly.
I remember experiencing this when I moved to Berlin, and was completely unsure of how Döner worked, but now it just kinda mumbles out of my mouth automatically and it has such a rhythm and inertia to it that I don’t think I could change the order even if I wanted to:
“Ein Döner bitte, Soße Scharf Kräuter, Salat komplett mit allem“
(One Döner please, sauce spicy / herbs, salad complete / with everything)
There’s a Döner shop in the DeKalb food court in Brooklyn, and aside from the obvious heresy that a Döner is $12.75 (plus tax!!), I think if I tried ordering like this I’d just get a lot of confused looks. I don’t even know what they call their sauces; I’m sure it’s not a literal translation from the German.
Back home, in Berlin, tourists turn up at Döner stalls and get everyone confused because they don’t know the system. The Dönermann asks “Sauce?” and the tourists don’t know the Three Blessèd Options (Chili / Garlic / Herb Yoghurt), and the people running the Döner shops are often first-generation Turkish migrants who haven’t always learned enough English to make it work. Nor should they; they all paid their penance when they arrived by learning German.
The whole thing is excellent (and don’t skip the footnotes); I love the guy who says sympathetically “Ich hasse Englisch.” I think the “Bagel code” angst is overblown (there are labels right next to the different kinds of bagels, you don’t have to guess, and in what context would you call it a sandwich?), but as a New Yorker (in spirit if no longer in body), I would, wouldn’t I?
could you imagine the loss of security that comes from watching the language of a city change underneath you?
I often think of this as I watch German slowly fade into the background in Vienna.
“Also, it turns out everything bagels have garlic on them?” What part of “everything” did the writer not understand?
Well, “everything” doesn’t include cinnamon or blueberries, for example, but maybe such abominations aren’t options in NYC. As someone who’s not a bagel connoisseur, the only variation in “everything” I’ve noticed is whether it includes caraway seeds.
@jwb
My impression is that garlic is something of a guilty pleasure in Germany, unlike wholesome pursuits like BDSM, FKK and wearing sandals with socks.
Wiki informs me that”gyro” is the Greek doner and shawarma the Arabic doner, and that the doner came to Vietnam via Germany. I very thorough presentation.
There is no topic too trivial for Wiki, which has no space limitations, not even sandwich history. My favorite is their very thorough list of the family names of the Swedish aristocracy, sorted into historical categories. There aren’t more than a couple dozen Jonssons, Anderssons, Larssons, etc. among the hundreds of names.
And also that gyro is a translation of the Turkish word, which also means “turn”, and is cognate with “gyre”.
The “culinary code” thing that struck me, living in NYC in the early 80s, was that coffee “regular” meant with milk and sugar. Who would know?
The gyros that I could get in Stockholm was pork, and if it was ever sat on a vertical spit for roasting that was not evident by the time the guy in the Greek food stand was pan-frying the little bits of meat from a freezer bag. Being Danish I like pork better than beef, or perhaps it was the greater greasiness and the different spices in the yoghurt sauce.
(There is not much of a Greek diaspora in Copenhagen, and the Greek restaurants try to match what Danish tourists know from Chania and Korfu which is why my experience is from the stall on Medis).
Anyway, nobody serves döner here, the meat in a bread pocket thing is always shawarma variously spelled though the meat is kebab in other dishes. Lots of dürüm going down, though.
Our innovative economy makes the “everything” available separately w/o requiring the simultaneous purchase of a bagel (includes garlic, onion, salt, poppy seeds, and sesame seeds, but no blueberries or cinnamon): https://www.traderjoes.com/home/products/pdp/everything-but-the-bagel-sesame-seasoning-blend-059137
Cinnamon raisin bagels are an abomination no matter what you put on them.
The “culinary code” thing that struck me, living in NYC in the early 80s, was that coffee “regular” meant with milk and sugar. Who would know?
This enraged me when I moved to NYC from New Haven, where “regular” meant (if I recall correctly — this is over four decades ago now) “black, no sugar.”
Cinnamon raisin bagels are an abomination no matter what you put on them.
Quite so.
My impression is that garlic is something of a guilty pleasure in Germany, unlike wholesome pursuits like BDSM, FKK and wearing sandals with socks.
Our correspondant in Cologne writes: that used to be very true here. Now soft-spoken, global-loveydovey young things with plenty of money have taken over parts of the city.
That’s the kind that insist on using chopsticks to eat their exotic restaurant food. They wouldn’t blink an eye at a cinnamon raisin garlic bagel, if it were touted as a traditional Afghan hors-d’oeuvre.
There are things much like doners here called “saj”, which the google tells me is the Lebanese name of the flatbread and of the device it’s cooked on. I’ve seen “Turkish doner saj” advertised but the place I go to is Egyptian and just calls it saj.
Somewhat confusingly, in Paris we would call döner “grec”. Supposedly they were introduced by Greeks.
Oh, and a popular sauce option is sauce samouraï, i.e. samurai sauce.
Quite so — don’t tell that to the Swedes, they will put cinnamon in everything. Except the stuff with saffron. That said, cinnamon (and raisins) belong to the sugar side of things, and bagels (and garlic) to the salt. Mixing them is rarely felicitous, though Indian recipes tend to get away with it.
My last visit to Köln was a 20 minute interchange between EuroStar and an ICE. I just had time to procure some Döner, IIRC. And I may not, that was before the plague. Maybe it was Chinese in a cardboard box, with a plastic fork and no chopsticks. I did go out on the square to see the Dom, though, I am not totally bereft of culture.
the nyc street-food variation from the doner family goes by many names, but “doner” isn’t generally one of them – sometimes “shwarma”, sometimes “gyro”, often just “from the halal cart”, often “chicken & rice”*. but the sauce terminology is universal and key: it’s strictly “white sauce” and “hot sauce” (and sometimes “barbecue sauce”, but really why would you?). you’ll be asked about both once your meat’s done on the grill. if you want anything besides lettuce/tomato/cucumber/maybe-red-onion salad, you have to be loud and quick to speak, though (and how wide the options for pickled things are is how you tell if a spot’s good).
on the history (not necessarily to be 100% relied on): a compilation of testimonies.
.
* chicken is the paradigm; it’s sometimes grilled in chunks, sometimes sliced off an upright roasting skewer. some carts have (mutton-dressed-as-)lamb on a roaster, but that’s more the province of felafel shops and deli counters (and more often advertised as “gyro” or “shwarma”).
@Lars Mathiesen: In America, at least, I have never suffered the misfortune of being served a gyros with any meat other than lamb.
samurai sauce
Where do they get the samurais in Paris?
On a more serious note, although I like Turkish cooking, when it comes to sliced meet, I prefer gyros. Döner meat often has a strange taste I don’t like.
“Samurai sauce (French: Sauce samouraï) is a Belgian condiment prepared from mayonnaise, ketchup, and harissa or Sambal Oelek commonly served with french fries.” I had not known about this condiment; the article does not explain the name.
“gyro” is the Greek doner and shawarma the Arabic doner
And al pastor is the Mexican döner derivative (made with pork), going back to a Lebanese immigrant in Oaxaca in the early 20th century, or so I’ve heard.
Cinnamon raisin bagels don’t bother me, once I’ve seen chocolate chip bagels and bacon bagels. There are probably cinnamon chocolate bacon ones somewhere, too. Gluten-free.
Cinnamon raisin bagels are a fine thing, contra the above Hattics, but I agree that neither cinnamon nor raisins have a place on an everything bagel, whose seasonings are always savory.
I believe that regular coffee in Boston is sweet but dark, thus giving the term a third sense. Gale’s coffee is very far from regular: it is “coffee with half and half, about one-third half and half, with two Equals.” But she avoids drinking it anywhere but at home, where it can be microwaved back to hotness.
Sweet v. salty: my memory is that this disjunction was not honored in Taiwan 40 years ago. The only thing I remember was a salted dried plum, but there were others.
Also, one of my few successful healthy cooking experiments was low sodium mashed potatoes without salt or gravy, just unsalted butter. The potatoes themselves are slightly sweet and quite pleasant tasting.
@Brett, of course lamb is superior, but the “tastes of wool” thing has made it rare up here. Even the best shawarma places have maybe 1 part lamb to 2 parts old cow. (Price may of course be a factor too).
I’ll be in Berlin this summer, I’ll make sure to get better stuff. How is Vienna on that, once the Knödel and Leberkas are out of the way? (Actually I can’t handle wheat based food any more, but potato Knödeln are a thing I’m told).
@LH: Thanks for explaining Samurai sauce. I’m a bit disappointed – next thing people will tell me that Jägersauce doesn’t contain hunters…
“Ich hasse Englisch.”
could you imagine the loss of security that comes from watching the language of a city change underneath you?
Not just a European anxiety—hatred for the Syrian refugees and the Arabic language is infecting Turkish politics more and more, as you can read here and here, for instance. Turkey has accommodated over three million Syrian refugees, and many cities in the west of Turkey now have neighborhoods that are outwardly majority-Syrian and Arabophone. In truth, I always go to Syrian shawarma shops for fast food in Turkey nowadays, if I have a choice, especially for chicken shawarma over rice with garlic sauce. (In cities in the east like Mardin and Siirt having ancient Arabophone populations speaking Upper Mesopotamian Neo-Arabic Arabic varieties rather than Levantine Neo-Arabic varieties, I have generally found the two Arabophone populations, local and refugee, get along well. My landlord is a wealthy Mardini Arab landowner and has built several apartment buildings that he rents out to refugee families for reasonable rents.)
It’s einen, but that tends to be pronounced the same as ein in Berlin (and plenty of other places hereabouts).
It remains the common language of the Turks and Serbs and Bosnians and Syrians and multifarious Afghans.
Quite so. When you’ve eaten garlic, you’ll inconvenience other people – they can look away from the socks in your sandals, but they can’t smell away from your breath.
(Me, I like cooking and eating garlic soup – that’s garlic used as a vegetable rather than a spice. But I don’t get out much.)
I guess you have to be courageous like a samurai to eat it.
Yes. Practice your Homeric drooling.
It remains the common language of the Turks and Serbs and Bosnians and Syrians and multifarious Afghans.
Yes, it is the professional classes that are increasingly Anglophone (and mostly due to immigration of educated professionals from other parts of Europe, who refuse, and can afford to refuse, to learn German). In the “Nobelbezirke” it often seems that anyone with small children in tow is speaking English (or Russian, but less so recently).
I did not know the term “Nobelbezirk[e],” but am I suppose pleased to be better-informed. I guess to be fair the only idiomatic X-bezirk compound I actually knew was “Sperrbezirk,” as a result of teenage exposure to the Spider Murphy Gang’s wunderbar 1981-ish hit (in German-speaking markets) “Skandal im Sperrbezirk,” complete with extremely “period” synthesizer break in the middle.
“Skandal im Sperrbezirk,”
That came up on my walking playlist a couple of days ago. Brought back nice memories.
It’s einen, but that tends to be pronounced the same as ein in Berlin (and plenty of other places hereabouts).
Naa, ein Döner is totally correct Imbiss-Deutsch. The original blog post has a major transgression in using a literary dative mit allem; the idiomatic form is, of course, mit alles. For other peculiarities, see this educational video.
@Lars Mathiesen: I am afraid I need a bit more explanation of
Regular coffee here is just not noticeably small or large. As opposed to ordinary tea, which is just… ordinary.
It’s another Moscow-St.Petersburg isogloss.
Shaverma (SPb) vs. Shaoorma (Msc.)
Maybe it was a generational thing, but large parts of my family refused to eat lamb dishes because they claimed it tasted like wool to them. (There is a certain taste to the fat in lamb, but I don’t think it’s lanolin). It’s reputedly much stronger in older animals–I wouldn’t know where to get mutton (as opposed to lamb) these days, but my parents’ generation may have had the experience.
That may be specific to my family, of course, but the fact remains that lamb dishes are not very common here and shawarma is mostly beef. Saag gosth is the solution.
A Jamaican place serving curry goat (but not cow’s foot) opened near me last fall, but sadly the rest of the neighbourhood are philistines and they had to close again. They are still listed on the delivery sites, though, probably out of the owner’s mom’s kitchen, so I may have to overcome my resistance to the enterprise 2.0 concept and order that way.
Maybe it was a generational thing, but large parts of my family refused to eat lamb dishes because they claimed it tasted like wool to them. (There is a certain taste to the fat in lamb, but I don’t think it’s lanolin). It’s reputedly much stronger in older animals
I don’t know about it tasting like wool, but a lot of Germans claim not to like the taste of lamb and mutton, and most German butchers and meat counters don’t have it at all or only a limited selection, except seasonally at times when eating lamb is traditional, like Easter. If you want a good selection of lamb or mutton cuts, you go to a Turkish butcher.
Yeah, a “normal” supermarket or high street butcher won’t sell you fresh lamb mince for gode ord eller betaling, as the phrase goes. (But lamb chops and lamb rack, yes, at the butcher. And jince that was frozen in NZ). But the butcher at the Bazar (so-named) 30 minutes walk away will. And cheap. Also about 1000 varieties of sweet cakes, white cheeses and fermented milk products in the main store, each nation to their taste. (From the Balkans to India, that is).
a lot of Germans claim not to like the taste of lamb and mutton
So strange! Mutton I can’t speak to, but few things are tastier than a lamb chop.
I know. And I think it’s getting better among younger people, who have been exposed to more international and exotic food.
Keen’s steakhouse on W. 36th St. in Manhattan tries to give the impression that neither the decor nor the menu have changed all that much since it first opened in 1885. (They supposedly did let women in as early as 1905, after Lillie Langtry forced the issue.) They were well-known for their mutton chops back in the day (when many chophouses served them), and they continue to serve them unto this present day as part of their niche brand identity. I’m not aware of another restaurant in NYC that still does (which doesn’t mean there isn’t one), but they’re very good and distinctive. If you go at lunchtime they will sell you a less behemoth-sized portion of mutton for a more modest price.
If I were still in NYC I would hie me there!
I would say that, in Ireland’s eateries, above a certain price point, lamb becomes more likely to be on the menu than pigmeat, at least for the main course. Well below beef and chicken, though.
Lamb/mouton is where switching from Russian to English to some other lnaguages is always difficult for me.
It is sold here as “баранина” and I only know which of two it was when someone bought a whole body part and cooked it in my presence…
Duckduckgo offers a receipe of “Keens Steakhouse’s Mutton Chop” as its third link (right after “What is a Mutton Chop?” and “10 Rebel Mutton Chop Beard Styles That Look So Cool”).
No mutton chops here, just баранина inside sam[o]sa, in pilaf… or a leg baked in your owen (in foil and with garlic or otherwise)
The Whole Body Part Experience: a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.
Funny video about mit allem v. mit alles here.
I enjoyed that!
В Рязани пироги с глазами: их ядять, а они глядять…
Great sketch. It’s not just funny, it’s realistic.
Agreed.
@drasvi: actually, I never understood what that saying refers to. I first saw it in one of Aksyonov’s stories in На полпути к луне.
I heard somewhere that halal (and also presumably kosher) lamb has a milder taste than standard occidental lamb, by virtue of the blood being completely drained out of the carcass immediately after butchering.
@Y: That sounds like a reasonable possibility, although I can’t say that I have ever noticed a difference myself.
@Lars Mathiesen: Ironically, I just had takeout goat curry for dinner last night. The Caribbean restaurant* and market that serves it has clearly had hard times during the pandemic, but they seem to be surviving.
There certainly are things that make lamb fat different from other kinds of meat fats. The two obvious ones are that the fat is very gamey and that it has a different texture from other mammalian (or avian) fats. The right way to cook a leg of lamb is generally to remove all the fat you can find on the exterior and near the surface; there will be plenty left to maintain the distinctive ovine flavor. However, removing some of the less accessible fat pads can be an unpleasant task, because the residue that the fat leaves on your hands is remarkably hard to wash off. It is conceivable that some of the phospholipids that make lamb fat so strongly favored and sticky are the same ones found in lanolin, although I have never had the personal impression that was the case. It is also highly plausible that those gamey flavors might accumulate over time, accounting for why mutton** is considered less palatable than lamb.
* One of their other specialties is oxtail dishes, but I find oxtail to be simply too fatty to be palatable, however it is cooked. Some people obviously like that, but I have personally never been able to finish an oxtail dish.
** I remember that one of the oddities of The Twenty-One Balloons was that they did not distinguish between mutton and lamb in their restaurant-based system of goverment.
One of their other specialties is oxtail dishes, but I find oxtail to be simply too fatty to be palatable, however it is cooked.
Rabo de vaca! True, it’s fatty, and I can’t eat a lot of it, but I enjoyed it in a sauce over rice at the Cuban joints I favored in NYC. But then I’m a fat-lover — my wife cuts off the fatty parts of her pork chops and passes them to me, and I devour them. I imagine I’d like salo if I had occasion to eat it.
However, removing some of the less accessible fat pads can be an unpleasant task, because the residue that the fat leaves on your hands is remarkably hard to wash off.
Oh man, that brings back memories. You’re right, I’d forgotten that aspect of making leg o’ lamb. (Anybody remember Legolam the elf from Bored of the Rings?)
So they basically speak Ukrainian there?
I wouldn’t know where to get mutton (as opposed to lamb) these days
i don’t know whether this applies outside the u.s., but i’m fairly sure that what’s vanished from the shelves here is the label “mutton”, and that much of what’s sold as lamb is not very young (with any taste/texture issues being solved with the usual factory-farming methods, and some kind of optimization of poundage vs. age vs. qualities determining age at slaughter).
i don’t know whether this applies outside the u.s., but i’m fairly sure that what’s vanished from the shelves here is the label “mutton”, and that much of what’s sold as lamb is not very young
I don’t think I buy that. There’s a standard age at which lambs are slaughtered, 6-8 months, and mutton chops are considerably larger than lamb chops. Although my local supermarkets offer a wider array of lamb cuts than they did 10 years ago, my impression is that it remains a niche product in most of the U.S. so there’d be little incentive to try to pass off mutton as lamb at the local butcher’s. (The spit-roasted “lamb” used for döner, on the other hand, is probably another matter.) I’ve had a good deal of mutton in the Middle East and the flavor is stronger, the meat tougher.
I’ll also note that I find cinnamon raisin bagels entirely unobjectionable. I mean, you wouldn’t want to put lox or any other savory topping on one, but otherwise it’s just cinnamon raisin bread. They’re fine with plain cream cheese.
Josep Pla, in his outstanding and outstandingly dyspeptic book on Catalan food habits, El que hem menjat, has a chapter on lamb that I’m too lazy to quote in its entirety, but which covers many of the points raised here, and language too.
More or less, albeit doing injustice to one of the finest Catalan prosaists ever:
otherwise it’s just cinnamon raisin bread.
I don’t like that either. I suppose if one likes that, one wouldn’t mind the bagel.
The spit-roasted “lamb” used for döner
As everyone in Germany has learnt by now, the meat for Döner comes from the Dönertier.
Shawarma appeared here in 90 and won both popularity and mistrust. Usually it is chicken.
The joke is, first you try to sell chicken, then a the time passes it starts looking bad enough and no one will buy it. You give it to “куры гриль” (whole grilled chicken – also appeared in 90s) guy and he tries to sell it as grilled chicken. Then when no one buys it and it starts looking bad, he gives it to his shawarma colleague.
@Hans, DM is right: it is a nonsense phrase that imitates local accent.
Specifically, realization of unstressed -е/-я in едят and глядят as what others hear as я.
Pronounced more or less:
(thoughtful) В ряазани пироги с глаазами – (loud quick and proud) их я дять, а они гля дять.
Note the accumulation of я’s, stressed (едЯт, глядЯт) and unstressed (ря[зань], гля[дят]).
Thanks! I knew about yakanye, I just thought all that time that there was some mysterious sense to the saying that eluded me. Thanks for clearing that up!
As a foreign intern at Siemens, I remember my amazement at how the monthly menu at the company Kaserne had each meal marked as to whether it had been “mit Knoblauch vorbereitet”.
@Hans, I cant be sure that there is no mysterious sense, but given how it is pronounced (it takes extra effort to say ядять clearly… not much, but still) I interpret it so.
Cf. also the finch finching on an aspen oak and kogurking “tkau! tkau!” (from some old collection of sayings about people of different localities) mentioned in another thread. I guess the story is about strange speech habits of people in Kaluga.
I’ll let miscegenation go as far as putting butter on a raisin bun, but cheese is stretching it. (Teboller like your aunt would server. Not unlike scones, but softer). Cinnamon is, as ever, a Swedish habit except in wienerbrød. They even use cardamom, though not with raisins IIRC.
I baked rye bread a few times with (crushed) cardamom seeds instead of caraway seeds. It’s different, but just as good a combination. I should do it more often.
I bet that was zubereitet; vorbereitet implies “prepared at some earlier point” so strongly it isn’t used for making food.
I imagine I’d like salo if I had occasion to eat it.
What about horse fat? When I buy a qazı sausage, I choose one that has about one-third fat in it.
https://www.fergananews.com/articles/4004
нарын
Man, it’s ages since I last had qazy or naryn… or a samsa fresh from the oven…
Danish the same: tilberedt for food, forberedt for anything prepared, even of people being prepared for something. Of course you can prepare ingredients like soup stock or meal balls: X kan forberedes dagen inden retten tilberedes, but that implies you don’t have to, it’s just to save time on the day, otherwise it would say skal tilberedes dagen inden.
Oh, yes, that works in German as well.