ITALIAN RAREBIT.

January 13, 2012 by languagehat 157 Comments

Songdog sent me a link to this comic, knowing I would be struck by Granpa Joe’s archaic linguistic usages, especially “Italian rarebit.” Frankly, I assumed it was made up, but Professor Google found a cite (with recipe!) from 1915:

(It doesn’t seem to have originally been identical with pizza, which is how it’s defined here.) Are any of my readers familiar with this (presumably long-vanished) term?

Comments

Mike S says

January 13, 2012 at 3:21 pm

I’ve never heard of it before, but I was stuck by the fact that if the green peppers in question are actually spicy, what you’d have is essentially Rotel dip.
Holly says

January 13, 2012 at 3:26 pm

The introduction of pizza to Britain as pizza is discussed in one of the sections of “The Supersizers Eat: the 1950s.” I don’t remember which segment, but I remember the mention of both the old name of Italian rarebit and the new name of pizza. http://youtu.be/bTdRLPN3ZGY
Z. D. Smith says

January 13, 2012 at 3:27 pm

Presumably it’s an elaboration on the better-known Welsh Rarebit (a corruption of Welsh Rabbit)—the ‘Welsh’ version lends itself very readily to gussying up, and if you took the Anglo-American conception of classically Italian ingredients and tossed them into a Welsh Rarebit, that’s what you’d get.
Z. D. Smith says

January 13, 2012 at 3:51 pm

That is to say, it looks Italian in exactly the same way Hawaiian pizza is Hawaiian.
Adeline Wilcox says

January 13, 2012 at 4:38 pm

My mother served something she called Welsh rarebit. Cheesy, without as many spicy ingredients
as the Italian rarebit recipe.
languagehat says

January 13, 2012 at 5:39 pm

Yes, Welsh rarebit (originally rabbit) is well known, and this is obviously a variant of it.
languagehat says

January 13, 2012 at 5:41 pm

Er, I mean the name is a variant of the name, not the dish of the dish. I have no opinion on the dish.
dearieme says

January 13, 2012 at 5:51 pm

We always make our Welsh rarebit with goat’s cheese. That may testify to the influence of A J P Goat.
John Allison says

January 14, 2012 at 4:28 am

To the best of my understanding, British soldiers discovered pizza when stationed in Italy during WW2. When they came home, they asked for this dish and the slightly corrupted result was then sold to the public as “Italian rarebit”, as the average British citizen of the late 40s/early 50s would have had no notion of what “pizza” was, but was familiar with the traditional dish of welsh rabbit.
(The origin of Italian Rarebit is similar to one of the (many) posited origins of spaghetti carbonara, a dish (supposedly) created when US servicemen stationed in Italy in 1944 requested “ham and eggs”).
It is interesting that green peppers are mentioned upthread. It’s unlikely a British housewife had even seen a green pepper before the mid seventies.
mab says

January 14, 2012 at 4:48 am

It’s unlikely a British housewife had even seen a green pepper before the mid seventies
Really? Huh? Are you joshing?
dearieme says

January 14, 2012 at 5:51 am

“It’s unlikely a British housewife had even seen a green pepper before the mid seventies”: I hadn’t seen one until I went to university in the mid 60s, when I saw plenty. But then I was a country boy.
dearieme says

January 14, 2012 at 5:51 am

“It’s unlikely a British housewife had even seen a green pepper before the mid seventies”: I hadn’t seen one until I went to university in the mid 60s, when I saw plenty. But then I was a country boy.
languagehat says

January 14, 2012 at 8:33 am

It’s unlikely a British housewife had even seen a green pepper before the mid seventies.
The recipe I quote and link to in my post is from 1915.
AJP Crown says

January 14, 2012 at 9:03 am

It’s true that in Britain they sold olive oil at chemists rather than at grocers up until about the 1960s. If the Sicilian mafia had emigrated to London rather than New York, they could have bought Boots and consolidated the pharmaceuticals with the olive oil.
chris y says

January 14, 2012 at 10:02 am

British cooking, except at the top end, went into sharp decline in the first half of the 20th century, largely as a consequence of the country (a densely populated island) surviving two prolonged sieges in that period, during which it was difficult to import food. It didn’t begin to recover until the 60s and it was generally dull and unappetising until the 80s.
But the upper middle class traveled, at least to France, Italy and Germany before the Great War, and would have been generally familiar with Mediterranean vegetables.
Ø says

January 14, 2012 at 10:33 am

In 1987 I met Armand Borel, a very distinguished elderly Swiss-French academic, at a conference in France. When I mentioned that I had just spent half a year in Edinburgh, he groaned and said “How can you stand the food?!” In 1958 he had attended the International Congress of Mathematicians there, and it seemed that he retained horribly vivid memories of the experience.
I suspect that Borel was choosier than I would be about food, but I also think that some time between 1958 and 1987 the Scots started importing lots of fresh fruits and vegetables from all over the hemisphere.
AJP Crown says

January 14, 2012 at 10:41 am

Chris, do you 100% know that the decline was caused by the wars, or are you guessing? I remember reading Gandhi’s complaints about the overcooked vegetarian food in London when he was studying law there in the 1880s.
Geraint Jennings says

January 14, 2012 at 12:24 pm

The recipe cited appears to be from a book published in New York.
If we’re talking about British housewives, it’s hardly the upper middle classes who are representative. Your typical housewife (overwhelmingly working class) might well have seen exotic vegetables like peppers, or as they were called: pimentos, in markets in large cities, but I doubt many peppers were making their way onto dinner tables in the provincial UK before the 1970s.
A quick trawl through my collection of vintage British cookbooks throws up evidence that, even for the gastronomically-inclined, peppers were far from a staple:
From “Robin McDouall’s cookery book for the greedy” (Penguin Books, 1963 edition):
“Pimentos (Piments)
Except as a major ingredient in ratatouille…, peppers do not usually appear cooked other than as stuffed peppers.”
But by 1974 “The Evening Standard Cookbook” by Delia Smith, contained, besides stuffed peppers, a number of other recipes (but originally published for a cosmopolitan London newspaper readership).
dearieme says

January 14, 2012 at 1:16 pm

The lack of aubergines might be worth bemoaning, but the lack of green peppers surely isn’t: they’re pretty dismal things anyway. A stranger business is that shop-bought tomatoes in Britain have always been awful, save for a brief period when “vine tomatoes” first appeared. Mind you, when I first went to the US I was appalled by their tomatoes too. (My standard of comparison is the crop my father grew in his greenhouse.)
What I hadn’t bargained for was the discovery that Americans had perfected the art of growing tasteless apples and strawberries. This was back in ’66. The cheap franks and burgers were super, though. I liked the rye bread too, which I’d otherwise only had in Germany. Strangest of all, I had a wonderful Chinese meal in SF, but was the only round-eye in the restaurant.
languagehat says

January 14, 2012 at 1:57 pm

Strangest of all, I had a wonderful Chinese meal in SF
Why is that strange? Doesn’t SF have one of the oldest Chinese communities in America?
AJP Crown says

January 14, 2012 at 1:58 pm

And then there’s Scottish food. But MacDonald’s is everywhere nowadays.
John Allison says

January 14, 2012 at 2:26 pm

I never thought my green peppers comment would have stirred such controversy! You mention 1974 Delia Smith’s Evening Standard cookbook, I’ve seen contemporaneous TV footage of Delia telling viewers where to hunt down green bell peppers. While they were probably available from better metropolitan greengrocers, I don’t think they were the a staple of the average British table until much later. But I’d love someone to tell me the facts if they know differently!
wilko says

January 14, 2012 at 2:30 pm

From Lucky Jim, published 1954:
This Michel, as indefatigably Gallic as his mother, had been cooking for himself in his small London flat, and had in the last few days made himself ill by stuffing himself with filthy foreign food of his own preparation, in particular, Dixon gathered, spaghetti and dishes cooked in olive oil. This seemed fit punishment for one so devoted to coagulated flour and water and peasants’ butter substitute, washed down, no doubt, by ‘real’ black coffee of high viscosity
xyzzyva says

January 14, 2012 at 2:42 pm

One should note that bell peppers are called by their genus name capsicum by our antipodean friends. Not sure what happened there…
peasants’ butter substitute
I will have to find occasion to use this.
J.W. Brewer says

January 14, 2012 at 3:19 pm

Indeed, not only is LH’s recipe from an American book, but from one with an entire section on “Macaroni, Rarebits, and Souffles.” I assume the presence of cheese is the organizing theme there? Italian rarebit is followed by “bean rarebit,” which is described as a “good way to use up a few cold baked beans.”
When I was a boy, my mother (of the generational cohort of WASP housewives who were no more culinarily adventurous than British housewives of the same epoch) would from time to time make Welsh rabbit (as we pronounced it and I at least would have spelled it). Her recipe involved beer, but the beer was supposed to be flat (to keep the cheese from getting fuzzy? I dunno), so if I came home from school some afternoon circa 1972 and saw a glass measuring cup half-full with beer sitting on the kitchen counter getting flat, I knew what was for dinner.
dearieme says

January 14, 2012 at 3:23 pm

“Why is that strange?” Because the only non-Chinese there to eat it was a wandering Scots undergraduate. Where were the Yanks?
Ø says

January 14, 2012 at 3:31 pm

Amis hyphenated it: peasants’ butter-substitute. I keep this phrase in the same mental attic as somebody’s line about how the French cook with butter, the Italians cook with olive oil, the English cook with water.
Ø says

January 14, 2012 at 3:37 pm

In our family we consume plenty of red, orange and yellow peppers of that same general mild type, cooked in various ways or not, but we mostly give the green ones a miss.
As for what people call them: I believe that in Germany the word “pepperoni” (or possibly “peperoni”?) is used; which leads to perplexity and disappointment when a visitor from the US orders a pepperoni pizza and receives something that shows not a trace of that small hard spicy greasy sausage that is an essential pizza topping at home.
AJP Crown says

January 14, 2012 at 6:20 pm

Germans and Norwegians are quite keen on so-called Hawaiian pizza – I’ve noticed this because I loathe pineapple.
JW, my mother (who for what it’s worth had a café in Portobello Road in London) always says “rabbit” and spells it that way. I never knew about the flat beer.
mollymooly says

January 14, 2012 at 6:21 pm

From the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1849, the UK had a policy of importing cheap food for the urban poor. Tinned Fray Bentos beef, salted New Zealand butter, wheat from Canada and Russia. Fresh vegetables, not so much. Joining the EEC in 1973 changed the politics and the economics of food.
Geraint Jennings says

January 14, 2012 at 6:47 pm

From “The Penguin Dictionary of Cookery” (1966):
“Capsicum:…the sweet pepper, the large green or red variety known as bell peppers (sometimes called pimentos), which are now common in the shops…”
Ø says

January 14, 2012 at 7:06 pm

I think that I first encountered pineapple on pizza in Germany. It had both pineapple and some form of ham, and it was called Hawaii-pizza. I like pineapple just fine, but I don’t like to find on pizza.
J.W. Brewer says

January 14, 2012 at 10:06 pm

According to an internet rumor I have not independently confirmed: “a pub near the University of Sussex serves an open-face grilled ham, cheese, and pineapple sandwich and calls it ‘Hawaiian rarebit.'” In my experience with “Hawaiian” pizza in multiple regions of the US, it must have not only pineapple but some pork-related topping, although I think I’ve seen both regular bacon and Canadian bacon as alternatives to ham.
John Cowan says

January 15, 2012 at 12:25 am

Empty: “All Gaul is divided into three parts: the part that cooks with lard and goose fat, the part that cooks with olive oil, and the part that cooks with butter.” —David Chessler
Dearieme: The U.S. is an awfully big country, with very varied geography. Consequently, flavor (alas!) has historically been subordinated to ease of transport. As for your Chinese restaurant, the clientele in such restaurants varies smoothly from 0% Chinese to 100% Chinese, depending on location and menu.
Bathrobe says

January 15, 2012 at 12:29 am

To break up a good thread: What is the problem with flick knife?
AJP Crown says

January 15, 2012 at 5:39 am

“Waiter, there’s a hair in my rarebit.”
Zythophile says

January 15, 2012 at 5:48 am

What is the problem with flick knife?
They’ve been banned in the UK for more than 50 years (the Restriction of Offensive Weapons Act 1959), so I’d think it highly likely that today few Britons under 40 will have heard of them
It’s unlikely a British housewife had even seen a green pepper before the mid seventies.
I went to university some years after Dearieme (1971), and that was the first time I saw green peppers: they were being chopped up in the kitchens of the halls of residence by the nice middle-class doctors’ daughters from Surrey. A few months after that, I ate my first ever pizza, in Al Forno’s in Brighton.
Talking of similar dishes, I remember my disappointment at ordering a Croque Monsieur in France, having seen them mentioned as a typical French snack, and being disappointed to discover that it was really only a tarted-up ham and cheese toastie …
Geraint Jennings says

January 15, 2012 at 6:33 am

A couple of pieces of advice from “The Daily Telegraph Cook’s Book” (1964) by Fanny and Johnnie Craddock, “Television’s most famous cooks”:
“Egg plants (aubergines, Fr.): must be black-purple, very shiny and hard like policemen’s truncheons…
Pimentoes: must be crisp and snappy and look shiny like patent leather.”
Paul Ogden says

January 15, 2012 at 7:59 am

“All Gaul is divided into three parts”
It is Europe that is divided into three parts: There’s English-speaking Europe, wine-speaking Europe and beer-speaking Europe.
MMcM says

January 15, 2012 at 10:19 am

Where were the Yanks? … from 0% Chinese to 100% Chinese
And some portion of the Chinese were Yanks. Particularly worth keeping in mind since the Johnson administration would have just finally (1965) done away with the racial quotas in US immigration law aimed at matching the existing population.
MMcM says

January 15, 2012 at 10:33 am

few Britons under 40 will have heard of them
Well, there are movies.
dearieme says

January 15, 2012 at 10:58 am

My mother cooked usually with lard, sometimes with butter: olive oil was reserved for treating earache. Her cooking was good though her range was limited. She had the advantage of good ingredients. After 3 months in the US in ’66 I longed to eat a decent cheese again. It seemed all too possible that there was a better choice of cheese available in my favourite shop in Edinburgh than in the whole of the USA.
But for a wonderful feeling of plenty on the food front, I’d seen nothing like the US. And my one fine meal outside SF was tip top: lobster in New England. It was reminiscent of British grub – get a high-quality ingredient and don’t give it a fancy-dan treatment. The other favourable impression I got in the general area of sluicing and browsing arose when in Sausalito I sampled some Californian wines: even in my state of youthful ignorance I could detect that these were good stuff.
Grumbly Stu says

January 15, 2012 at 12:58 pm

I believe that in Germany the word “pepperoni” (or possibly “peperoni”?) is used
In the Rheinland they’re called only Paprikaschoten or just Paprika. The first sentence in the WiPe article ends with auch als Chili, Peperoni oder Pfefferoni bezeichnet – maybe that is the case in south Germany or another similarly exotic location.
Grumbly Stu says

January 15, 2012 at 1:23 pm

The next time you’re in the Rheinland, you might want to order a peperoni pizza from Pizza Peperoni in Cologne. You can see dem little red debbils in the picture at the top, as well as insipid slices of green Paprika (listed among the ingredients of Pizza Vegetable further down).
Peperoni sausage is pretty much unknown as a pizza topping – I’ve never encountered it. What you get is slices of “salami”. To tide you over until your return to the States, the Turks here do a garlic lamb sausage of varying degrees of spicyness. Of course expensive Italian sausage is available that you wouldn’t want to ruin in a pizza oven.
minus273 says

January 15, 2012 at 1:24 pm

Peperoni oder Pfefferoni! Grimm’s law in action!
Grumbly Stu says

January 15, 2012 at 2:02 pm

Roughly, what are the differences between “salami” and “sausage” in USA/GB usage ? I think of “salami” as having finely ground ingredients, while “sausage” has recognizable bits.
dearieme says

January 15, 2012 at 5:43 pm

Salami has donkey in it.
J.W. Brewer says

January 15, 2012 at 6:49 pm

@zythophile: what do the Kids Today in the U.K. call the implement once known as a flick knife? Or has prohibition been so successful that (unlike other sorts of contraband items like drugs which I expect modern British 13 year olds have the lexical resources to discuss . . .) they don’t need a name for it? Fwiw, the “British English” subset of the google n gram viewer shows flick knife holding somewhat steady over the decades, but generally not as common as the AmEng “switchblade.”
While I was initially horrified at zythophile’s tale that he never tasted pizza until he’d gone off to university, perhaps I can respond in kind by admitting that it was a ways into my own undergraduate years before I ever tasted a properly British style of beer. I was reminded of this by this very thread, because the establishment where I crossed that particular sensory/cultural threshold (Mory’s in New Haven, which had Bass Ale on tap) was also probably the only place post-childhood where I frequently ate Welsh rarebit, it being one of the safer items on a menu which reflected the Anglophiliac tendencies of the old (and by then noticeably declining) WASP elite by featuring so-bland-that-it-might-as-well-be-English food.
John Cowan says

January 15, 2012 at 8:52 pm

Grumbly: The point of salami is that it’s raw but cured; the exact ingredients vary. When pushed, an American will concede that salami is sausage, but most sausage is cooked before eating.
Bathrobe says

January 16, 2012 at 4:11 am

I think I first heard of pizza through Dennis the Menace comics. I’m not sure when I first ate the real thing, but I suspect it was at university.
AJP Kkrown says

January 16, 2012 at 4:48 am

Flickknife ought to be one word by now, it’s a missed opportunity for consecutive Ks. I remember when they (flickknives) were banned in England, I was about seven. I always wanted one after that.
J.W. Brewer says

January 16, 2012 at 9:30 am

AJPKk: There’s the U.K. indie label Flicknife Records, but they eliminated one of the k’s when tightening up to a single word. I couldn’t say whether that was to make the spelling deliberately idiosyncratic (which people sometimes do for trade names to make them more distinctive and/or easier to protect legally) or whether it reflected a view, conscious or not, that consecutive k’s ought to be eliminated if possible.
AJP Crown says

January 16, 2012 at 11:31 am

They should have gone with Switchblade Records.
Leslie says

January 16, 2012 at 11:28 pm

dearieme – “Round-eye” strikes me as either a cut of beef, or a rather rude way of expressing things.
John Cowan says

January 16, 2012 at 11:54 pm

Bathrobe: I take it you mean the American rather than the English Dennis the Menace? Two different difficult little boys in two different comic strips conceived of and written independently and founded within a few days of each other.
Bathrobe says

January 17, 2012 at 9:03 am

American.
Jim says

January 17, 2012 at 12:52 pm

@ dearieme
“The lack of aubergines might be worth bemoaning, but the lack of green peppers surely isn’t: they’re pretty dismal things anyway.”
I agree. The green ones give me indigestion. Why can’t they just let them ripen? On the other hand jalapenos and pasillas are green peppers too and it’s pretty hard to get by without them.
“A stranger business is that shop-bought tomatoes in Britain have always been awful, save for a brief period when “vine tomatoes” first appeared. Mind you, when I first went to the US I was appalled by their tomatoes too. (My standard of comparison is the crop my father grew in his greenhouse.)”
Amen. “Shop-bought” is the operative word. Good tomatoes don’t travel and they are only really good in the peak season, however long that happens to be in your particular locality. And every minute they are off the vine they lose more and more of that tobaccy tomato vine stink that mkes them so good.
“What I hadn’t bargained for was the discovery that Americans had perfected the art of growing tasteless apples and strawberries”
That’s a function of raising fruit that can be shipped 3,000 miles. You come up with some pretty horrible varieties. BTW those varieties of apples are no longer available in Washington State; no market for them at all. I don’t see them in California either.
“”Why is that strange?” Because the only non-Chinese there to eat it was a wandering Scots undergraduate. Where were the Yanks?”
Yanks? In SF? All the “Yanks” were 3,000 miles to the east. Calling generic Americans “Yanks” is about like calling generic Europeans “Jerries”. It tends to hack the English off, among others.
Ø says

January 17, 2012 at 1:29 pm

“Yankee” is a relative term. This has been covered here before.
J.W. Brewer says

January 17, 2012 at 3:48 pm

“Yankee” may be a relative term, but I’m not sure that the clipped form “Yank” (as a noun, as distinguished from the unrelated verb) is in any sort of regular intra-American use at all (except maybe for sports headlinese?), unless you were talking to foreigners or something. So I could see semi-jocularly using “Yank” to mean American if one were talking to a visiting Scot and trying to meet him (lexically speaking) halfway, but I can’t see using “Yank” to mean Northerner or New Englander or Vermonter or Vermonter who likes cheddar cheese on his apple pie (to take one conventional set of narrowing circles of reference).
Grumbly Stu says

January 17, 2012 at 4:21 pm

Jim: The green ones give me indigestion. Why can’t they just let them ripen? On the other hand jalapenos and pasillas are green peppers too and it’s pretty hard to get by without them.
Green bell peppers are not “ripe” ? I don’t know what “ripe” means here – possibly that you can’t grow new plants from them ? After all, as you say, jalapeños and pasillas are necessary to life as we know it. To hell with reproductive bliss for jalapeños.
Many people in Germany eat and like green bell peppers, whether raw or cooked. I have to admit, though, that I have rather gone off them in their uncooked form. It hadn’t occurred to me that they might be giving me indigestion.
The main use I have for them nowadays is in very thin slices that I fry in olive oil along with garlic, with the goal of dumping it over thin spaghetti and then scarfing the lot.
Ø says

January 17, 2012 at 4:27 pm

True. I take it back.
Now what’s all this about hacking off the Brits by misusing the word “Yank”?
j. del col says

January 18, 2012 at 8:32 am

All capsicum peppers were developed from hot varieties that originated in S. America. All peppers will ripen to colors other than green, including red, yellow, purple and brown. I used to grow numerous varieties of hot and sweet peppers, until the local whitetail deer herd became too numerous.
In S. Africa, IIRC, sweet peppers are, or were, called mangoes. I have no idea why.
AJP Crown says

January 18, 2012 at 9:33 am

What do they call mangoes?
j. del col says

January 18, 2012 at 11:31 am

The mango/sweet pepper ID seems to still be current in the US South. Here’s a link on the subject.
http://www.waywordradio.org/when-is-a-bell-pepper-a-mango-minicast/
GMB says

January 19, 2012 at 3:44 pm

I’m from Vermont and the Cheddar cheese does not go on the pie, it goes next to it. A fellow Vermonter and I used to live in San Francisco and one night at dinner he ordered apple pie for dessert and asked if they could serve it with a piece of Cheddar. The server looked at him like he’d asked for it to be served with a strangled mouse on the plate but said he’d see what they could do. The pie arrived a few minutes later with a slab of Cheddar melted all over the slice of pie. I burst out laughing, laughed at least 5 minutes at the look on my friend’s face as he tried to choke it down, and I still laugh about it from time to time. Like now.
AJP Aud the Deep-thinker, daughter of Ketil Flatnose says

January 20, 2012 at 2:05 am

the Cheddar cheese does not go on the pie
Something I’ve just noticed but’s probably been going on for many years is that USians (NY Times), in addition to the place names, spell food & drink words like Cheddar and Champagne with a capital, whereas other English speakers don’t (cheddar & champagne).
AJP Aud the Deep-Minded says

January 20, 2012 at 2:10 am

Deep-minded, whatever. I become deeper minded after lunchtime.
Grumbly Stu says

January 20, 2012 at 5:04 am

Crown: as Ludwik Fleck relates, many learned German speakers even into the 19th century would write (“had the view”) that a hungry person “is heavier” before he eats than afterwards (provided he doesn’t overeat). This doesn’t come across in English as it does in German: schwerer, weil es ihm schwer ist, sich zu bewegen [heavier, because he finds it difficult to move].
For hundreds of years (if not much longer) one finds a belief that a person was “lighter” when living than when dead – the soul acting as a balloon, you see. I’m quite willing to believe that you are deeper-minded after lunch – but are you also then more light-headed ?
The context of what Fleck is saying is that the notion of Schwere (heaviness/weight) covered a slew of things that today are conceptually and verbally separated out, as having nothing “essentially” to do with each other. That is, we choose for various reasons to think this way, it is the scientific Denkstil of the day.
While writing this little info-comment for you, I became aware that Fleck (who wrote in Polish and German) seems to be making a point that would apply only to German and Polish speakers. I need to look into this matter more closely – in particular whether the corresponding Latin expressions are similarly portmanteauish (four vowels in a row !).
AJP Auðr the Deep-Minded after lunch says

January 20, 2012 at 5:45 am

After lunch, bin ich immer schwer auf Draht. I think the champagne helps.
Grumbly Stu says

January 20, 2012 at 5:51 am

Your German is getting really zingy, not to mention colloquial and with-it. That too may be due to the bubbly.
Ø says

January 20, 2012 at 6:46 am

– the soul acting as a balloon, you see
I myself am generally more dirigible after a meal.
languagehat says

January 20, 2012 at 9:23 am

USians (NY Times), in addition to the place names, spell food & drink words like Cheddar and Champagne with a capital
That’s the NY Times, which has a number of peculiar usages. I, like most Americans, write cheddar and champagne.
AJP Flatnose says

January 20, 2012 at 11:03 am

Another theory goes out the window, up the spout, down the tubes and into the garbage.
J.W. Brewer says

January 20, 2012 at 11:13 am

Hey, I lowercased cheddar and am just as Amurrican as GMB (although not a Vermonter, so I will certainly defer to him for having misphrased the stereotypical pie/cheese relationship). Perhaps there is no One Right Way. I haven’t investigated which online corpora enable one to do reliable case-sensitive searches (although even then you have to back out sentence-initial uses and other things where capitalization will be context-specific).
AJP Nose says

January 20, 2012 at 12:45 pm

JW, I was basing my entire theory on GMB’s Cheddar and a couple of NY Times’ “Champagnes”, so except when I’m in Vermont I’ll defer to you & Language.
John Cowan says

January 20, 2012 at 12:54 pm

Most cheeses are capitalized because they’re named after places, including Cheddar when it comes from Somerset, but when it comes from somewhere else (which is most of the time, cheddaring being a generic process), I make it cheddar. Ditto with swiss cheese, which is a generic form of Emmenthaler — per contra, Swiss cheese would be any cheese from Switzerland. Same story with champagne.
AJP says

January 20, 2012 at 2:01 pm

But that doesn’t work with cognac. I use lower case for food and drinks and upper for places.
Trond Engen says

January 20, 2012 at 2:05 pm

I use upper case for drink to keep it out of reach for my children.
Grumbly Stu says

January 20, 2012 at 2:41 pm

Cheddar when it comes from Somerset, but when it comes from somewhere else (which is most of the time, cheddaring being a generic process), I make it cheddar. Ditto with swiss cheese, which is a generic form of Emmenthaler — per contra, Swiss cheese would be any cheese from Switzerland.
I didn’t know that – as I take you to be saying – “swiss cheese” in America (possibly in GB too ?) denotes a generic form of Emmenthaler. Capitalizing “Swiss cheese”, though, is not really comparable to capitalizing “Cheddar”, because there is only one Cheddar from Somerset, but there is no one “Swiss cheese” from Switzerland, but at least 13 different, well-known kinds: Emmenthaler, Gruyère, Tête de Moine, Raclette, Sbrinz, Appenzeller etc.
Capitalizing or not may help to make clear what is meant in America, where food industries are obsessed with uniformization. In Europe, though, consumers are simply familiar with the wide variety of cheeses made in various countries. Germans would find ridiculous any attempt to brand one particular kind of German cheese as “German cheese”, one particular kind of French cheese as “French cheese” and so on.
Germany is the land of standards, but not of uniforms (not any more, that is).
John Cowan says

January 20, 2012 at 4:09 pm

Well, sure. But the Champagne wine industry continues to be annoyed with the U.S. insistence than any bubbly wine may be labeled champagne, even if it isn’t even made from Vitis vinifera grapes.
Grumbly Stu says

January 20, 2012 at 4:32 pm

the U.S. insistence than any bubbly wine may be labeled champagne
I don’t understand the “but” in “but the Champagne wine industry continues to be annoyed …”. Of course it is annoyed, precisely because U.S. industries try to uniformize designations. They do this in order to narcotize expectation, and delay discrimination until after you’ve already bought the stuff.
J.W. Brewer says

January 20, 2012 at 4:57 pm

Well, no. The Champagne industry is annoyed because they prefer a state of the world in which even lousy and overpriced sparkling wine can be marketed as “champagne” if it is produced in a specific part of French but excellent yet lower-priced sparkling wine in the same style cannot legally be marketed as “champagne” if it is produced elsewhere. They make more money that way. Whether a particular product-descriptive word refers to geographical origin or style (perhaps originating in one part of the world but able to be practiced elsewhere) is not a question with a uniform answer because typically the lawyers and/or legislators eventually get involved if there’s money at stake and the evolution of usage/meaning then becomes constrained based on what can and can’t be said without getting sued, but with different stopping places in different jurisdictions. Even in the U.S. it varies from tipple to tipple: wine descriptors typically are not geographically restricted – you can call something produced from California grapes “burgundy” if you want, but you can’t call whisk(ey) “Scotch” in the U.S. if it was distilled outside Scotland even if it tastes just like scotch.
JJP Oud says

January 20, 2012 at 5:10 pm

the Champagne wine industry
I understand that you’re trying to prove a point, but that’s the most contrived piece of labeling I’ve ever heard, John!
Ø says

January 20, 2012 at 5:23 pm

JJP Oud, you appear to lead a very sheltered life.
Ø says

January 20, 2012 at 6:29 pm

To be sold as “bourbon”, sour mash whiskey must be made in the Kentucky county of that name.
(The reason for that piece of slightly contrived labeling was that I couldn’t decide whether to capitalize the middle word in “Bourbon County, Kentucky”.)
Did the NYT capitalize the first word in “French fries” when writing about the “freedom fries” movement?
Do USians typically think that cheese made in Switzerland always has holes in it?
Certainly many think that the principal kind of chocolate cake in Germany is what we call “German chocolate cake”. (As I’ve mentioned before, it was named after a Mr. German, an employee of a US chocolate company.)
John Cowan says

January 20, 2012 at 9:41 pm

Oud: I meant, of course, that portion of the wine industry that is in Champany, viz. the districts of Aube, Côte des Blancs, Côte de Sézanne, Montagne de Reims, and Vallée de la Marne.
Empty: I can only give vague answers, as I personally know too much about the subject. I suspect that ordinary Americans don’t even notice whether cheese is imported or not, unless they are the sort who go to specialty cheese stores or patronize the imported-cheese section of their supermarkets. I do know that most people here do not know the name Emmenthaler, as I have had to translate between Merkins and Furriners on this point:
“What does he mean, Swiss cheese?”
“He means Emmenthaler.”
“Oh. Why didn’t he say so?”
Grumbly Stu says

January 21, 2012 at 12:22 am

I can only give vague answers, as I personally know too much about the subject.
That’s a wonderful line, I’m going to steal it ! It has the quality of a sound bite from Thank You For Smoking, or from a Michael Moore film.
Grumbly Stu says

January 21, 2012 at 12:42 am

J.W.: The Champagne industry is annoyed because they prefer a state of the world in which even lousy and overpriced sparkling wine can be marketed as “champagne” if it is produced in a specific part of French
Whereas in America, even lousy and overpriced sparkling wine can be marketed as “champagne” if it is not produced in a specific part of France.
When I ended my comment with “delay descrimination until after you’ve already bought the stuff”, I meant discrimination in the low-heel sense of “recognize differences between”. I did not mean the high-heel sense of “exercise superior, discriminating taste”. When I buy Freedom fries, I expect them to be made in America, but “Freedom” tells me only that they are ideologically sound, not that they taste better than French fries.
J.W. Brewer says

January 21, 2012 at 2:48 pm

GS: maybe it’s better to think of it merely linguistically. For whatever set of historical reasons, by some relevant point in time at which the law began to focus on the issue, “champagne” in AmEng had taken on a generic meaning referring to style of production rather than specific geographical origin. American law quite sensibly recognizes that and refuses to give French producers the right to ban people from selling a product in America using the common name (from an AmEng perspective) descriptive of that product. By contrast, “cognac” in AmEng never really lost its geographical connotations, so it is presently illegal to sell stuff as “cognac” in the U.S. if it’s not from the relevant part of France. (This of course now freezes usage and precludes further evolution, but the general concept is for the law to be as discriminating-or-not as the natural-language lexicon.) Sometimes, of course, popular usage can drift narrower than the legal definition. Jack Daniels meets the definition of “bourbon” as a legal matter but that gives its makers the right but not the duty to so label it and they have chosen instead to market it as “Tennessee whiskey” as if that were a different thing altogether – presumably some consumers buy into the distinction and others consider it a subset of bourbon. (empty is repeating a well-established but inaccurate myth: not only can “bourbon” be made outside Kentucky, although in practice only a small percentage of total national production is, none of Kentucky’s bourbon production actually presently occurs in Bourbon Co. But Kentucky itself has enough positive consumer associations that, e.g., the bottle of Evan Williams sitting on my kitchen counter with a few fingers’ worth left in the bottom describes its contents nonredundantly as “Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey.” It would probably be illegal to put that description on a product distilled outside Kentucky although by contrast, again because of actual usage as perceived by the relevant regulators, it’s legal in the U.S. to describe booze as “London dry gin” even if it was not produced within the boundaries of Greater London or even in England.)
Grumbly Stu says

January 21, 2012 at 3:24 pm

Thanks for your explanation, J.W. After the first few sentences, I realized that I had been thinking of this business as being like the tussles that take place here, for instance whether “feta cheese” has to be produced in Greece (it doesn’t, and now can even be made from cow’s milk).
In other words, I was thinking of the USA and France as I would think of France and Greece. Heh, little rusty there on the ol’ sovereignty.
jamessal says

January 21, 2012 at 5:37 pm

J.W. Brewer: Have you ever had the luck to buy a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle 15yr? I love all the Van Winkles — we had the 23 at our wedding — but for the money you can’t beat the 15. Money aside, I might even prefer it to the 20.
Bathrobe says

January 21, 2012 at 7:24 pm

I think it is a good thing that the French got thingy about names. It seems to me that by forcing people to stop producing generic clarets and burgundies, they helped induce the revolution in varietal wines, which has had some wonderful results.
Regarding champagne, the Spanish have cava, the Italians have spumantes, and the Germans have Sekt, but Australians and Americans have to do with ‘sparkling wine’. They need a better marketing term.
The whole issue is, of course, rather more technical since there are several different methods of making sparkling wine. At one site on French bottle labelling I found this:
Crémant: Traditionally a Champagne with a low-pressure and a soft, creamy mousse, [the term is] now phased out in Champagne as part of the bargain struck with other French sparkling wines that have agreed to drop the term méthode champenoise. In return they have been exclusively permitted to use this old Champagne term to create their own appellations, such as Crémant de Bourgogne, Crémant d’Alsace, etc.
J.W. Brewer says

January 21, 2012 at 8:41 pm

jamessal, no but I will certainly keep an eye out. My consumption of higher-end bourbon has been reasonably spotty and often depended on the whim of people giving me things as gifts. (One of the things I like about bourbon, actually, is the democratic quality where it actually gets pretty good at a pretty modest price point, so I will from time to time buy and enjoy a bottle of e.g. Heaven Hill or Old Crow when I would generally shy away from the scotch or gin or rum or whatnot available at an equivalent price point.) This year’s as-yet-unopened Christmas bottle, however, isn’t any kind of bourbon, but rather a single-barrel high end Demerara rum. But I do have a bottle in the house (and was just inspired to pour some as a reward to myself for shoveling out the driveway earlier) of Old Potrero 18th Century Style Whiskey, which is an interesting attempt by the Anchor Distillery people in San Francisco to recreate the colonial American mode of doing things: 100% rye malt mash run through a small copper pot still, aged not all that long in new barrels where the oak is “toasted” but not charred, and then bottled at barrel strength (a rather bracing 127 proof that is undrinkable w/o some further dilution).
John Cowan says

January 21, 2012 at 10:10 pm

Grumbly: It does sound entertainingly paradoxical, doesn’t it? Of course, I meant simply “I can only give vague answers about what uniformed people think, because I am myself informed (and therefore cannot consult myself as a source), nor do I have anyone who is uninformed handy to poll.”
Ø says

January 21, 2012 at 10:44 pm

Well, I wasn’t really asking for an answer. Just musing on the idea that people — maybe especially Americans, but probably not — are easily misled by the names of things.
Ø says

January 21, 2012 at 10:48 pm

Well, I wasn’t really asking for an answer. Just musing on the idea that people — maybe especially Americans, but probably not — are easily misled by the names of things.
Grumbly Stu says

January 22, 2012 at 1:43 am

Plato claimed that most people tend to confuse things with the names of those things, so most people should vote for him to arbitrate on what the differences are.
jamessal says

January 22, 2012 at 7:48 am

One of the things I like about bourbon, actually, is the democratic quality where it actually gets pretty good at a pretty modest price point, so I will from time to time buy and enjoy a bottle of e.g. Heaven Hill or Old Crow when I would generally shy away from the scotch or gin or rum or whatnot available at an equivalent price point.)
I agree completely. The Pappy 15 is about fifty bucks, or should be at the right store: some jack up the price on these allocated bottles, including one around here that put a hundred-dollar price tag on a bottle of rare beer (yes, beer), the Founders Canadian Breakfast Stout, until hordes of beer geeks — some of whom had followed the trucks delivering the stuff, freaking out more than a few drivers — boycotted the store, at which point the price soon dropped to fifty dollars — and then, like Keyser Soze, it was gone. The Pappy 23 we had at our wedding was fantastic, as Hat will attest (if he can remember), although I wouldn’t spend that much money — $225 (!) — for bourbon again, any bourbon. If I plan to dish out three digits, it’s gonna be scotch, and probably an Ardbeg.
The Old Potrero sounds fascinating; I’m gonna send your description of it to a friend who recently moved to Richmond to run the bar of a fancy restaurant with a nice supply of rare liquor. He’ll likely know it, and if it not will try desperately to acquaint himself. I’ll mention the Demerara, too, since this friend introduced me to high-end rums.
jamessal says

January 22, 2012 at 8:23 am

a rather bracing 127 proof that is undrinkable w/o some further dilution
Yeah, that’s just about the point at which any liquor needs a little something. My favorite scotch to date (my last bottle of which I’ve saved maybe five, six fingers) — Ardbeg’s Corryvreckan — was 114 proof, and not only could it be drunk neat, I think it should be. That extra seven percent alcohol makes all the difference, though; I’m not sure any wood, or skill on the part of the distiller, could tame that enough.
AJP Crown says

January 22, 2012 at 8:53 am

Is it possible to drink straight alcohol without dying, or is 114 proof about the limit?
jamessal says

January 22, 2012 at 9:54 am

Oh no, you can do it. It’s just not tasty to anyone but hardcore alcoholics, I think.
Grumbly Stu says

January 22, 2012 at 11:37 am

When 16, I and some friends were in Nuevo Laredo on a Saturday drinking 180 proof vodka that tasted like oranges. I spent much of the evening crawling through the streets, trying to get from A to B.
AJP Crown says

January 22, 2012 at 1:58 pm

But… so you could in theory just drink a little sip of the orange-flavored 180 proof and save a lot of time, and money on beer and wine etc. I guess the point of drinking anything with less than the maximum amount of alcohol is that you enjoy the taste of what you’re drinking or you prefer the buzz.
I’m quite old to be working this out for the first time, I know.
languagehat says

January 22, 2012 at 2:15 pm

You should read Venedikt Erofeev’s Moskva-Petushki (the translations I’m aware of are called Moscow Circles and Moscow to the End of the Line); it’s a discussion of the theory and practice of alcoholism of the Russian school (which is to say, graduate-level), with analysis of various strengths and flavorings and their effect on the drinker.
AJP Crown says

January 22, 2012 at 2:39 pm

Oh, I remember that Moscow To the End of the Line! I’ll get it. I wanted to read it a while ago and then forgot. Believe it or not I actually wrote about him, & it, a couple of years ago here. Small world, Russia.
John Cowan says

February 4, 2015 at 5:21 pm

Arrrgh. Three years and I didn’ t notice that I wrote “uniformed people” instead of “uninformed people”. Arrrrrgh, with five r’s.
David Marjanović says

February 8, 2015 at 7:23 pm

Is it possible to drink straight alcohol without dying

The lethal dose is said to be 140 ml.
Lars Mathiesen says

February 9, 2020 at 6:29 pm

Spirits shall be deemed to be at proof if the volume of the ethyl alcohol contained therein made up to the volume of the spirits with distilled water has a weight equal to that of twelve-thirteenths of a volume of distilled water equal to the volume of the spirits, the volume of each liquid being computed as at fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit.

Impressive in its impenetrability, that should cover all bases. Note that you can’t just plug in specific densities and solve to get the ABV because the density of a water and ethyl alcohol mixture is not linear in the weights of the substances.
John Cowan says

August 13, 2022 at 2:47 pm

I have recently learned that the Jack Daniels factory is in a dry county (that is, one in which the retail sale of alcohol is forbidden by law), notwithstanding which you can buy the product at the factory itself.
Brett says

August 13, 2022 at 9:34 pm

I had a friend who grew up near the Jack Daniels factory, in that dry county (or maybe a nearby one). Apparently, there were “bootleggers” who peddled the standard factory-made and -bottled bourbon (and other liquors, in smaller quantities) right up to the doors of their regular customers.
David Marjanović says

August 14, 2022 at 4:30 am

Long, long ago…

one of the (many) posited origins of spaghetti carbonara, a dish (supposedly) created when US servicemen stationed in Italy in 1944 requested “ham and eggs”

Ben trovato.

It is Europe that is divided into three parts: There’s English-speaking Europe, wine-speaking Europe and beer-speaking Europe.

That misses the cider regions, for a wide definition of “cider”. Outside the forests, half the trees in and around Upper Austria bear tiny apples or tiny pears; most of them land on the street and become stinky mush, but the rest is harvested and fermented to non-sparkling, weakly alcoholic, very acidic Most ( < vinum mustum) that people drink with their dinner. There are other places like this; one somewhere around Frankfurt has unshifted, gonsonant-weagened Ebbelwooi (*Äpfelwein).

Peperoni oder Pfefferoni! Grimm’s law in action!

Etymological nativization. 🙂 Helped of course by recognizing the pepper in it, but yes, /p/ remains… “marked” south of the White-Sausage Equator.

I suspect they’re actually peperoncini in Italian, though. Bell peppers remain sharply distinguished as Paprika (sg = pl, initial stress because Hungarian).

Roughly, what are the differences between “salami” and “sausage” in USA/GB usage ? I think of “salami” as having finely ground ingredients, while “sausage” has recognizable bits.

That’s amazing. I’d never have guessed.
Vanya says

August 14, 2022 at 6:40 am

You wouldn’t have guessed because it’s not entirely true. Cowan was more on the mark. Salami is cured and eaten raw, it’s a subspecies of “cold cuts”. Sausage in American usage has to be cooked before consumption. Bologna is finely ground but is not “salami” but it is also a “cold cut“. Then again hot dogs are finely ground but most Americans would not think of them as “sausage”, so I guess Stu did have a point about texture.
David Marjanović says

August 14, 2022 at 9:14 am

Well, I wouldn’t have guessed any of that either. 🙂 Wurst, you see, is a shape first and foremost*, so it’s a superset to which salami and hot dogs obviously belong. Most kinds are cut into slices and eaten on bread, including Salami, a Hungarian stick of salted, peppered and dried ground pork that you can hang in the kitchen for two years if you don’t eat it faster. (…It does get stressed on the second syllable like in Italian. But all three vowels are short in Austria, which would come out if you left the accent off in Hungarian. Hm.) Extrawurst is completely homogeneous.

* ♪ Alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurscht hat zwei… ♫
January First-of-May says

August 14, 2022 at 9:50 am

Russian has колбаса (inherited Slavic, further etymology uncertain) vs. сосиска (from French with an added diminutive suffix). I’m not actually sure what the difference is; I’d say that probably the former is eaten raw and the latter is supposed to be cooked, but the prototypical сосиска is thin, so the thicker variants get called сарделька (apparently from Italian for “sardine” via Polish?) and/or колбаска, even if they have to be cooked.

As for hot dogs, the fancy places that actually claim to sell hot dogs tend to call it колбаска, and the unfancy places would call what they sell a сосиска в тесте “sausage in dough” – which I think is technically a slightly different dish, but looks very similar.
Trond Engen says

August 14, 2022 at 10:48 am

Norw. pølse is also a shape (or a topology). Whether the stuffing is raw, cured or cooked, coarse in texture or finely grained, or made from meat, fish or even vegetables is a subortinate issue.
Hans says

August 14, 2022 at 1:15 pm

The form meaning is so predominant in German that Wurst is used for items that aren’t sausages at all, like Erbstwurst, a form of ready-made pea soup (just add hot water).
David Marjanović says

August 14, 2022 at 3:44 pm

Erbswurst; гороховая колбаса.
Hans says

August 14, 2022 at 6:17 pm

Oh, I see I put the wrong link in my comment; I had wanted to link to the WP article DM referred to. Must be the heat…
Vanya says

August 14, 2022 at 10:33 pm

The form meaning is so predominant in German that Wurst is used for items that aren’t sausages at all

Whereas in America breakfast “sausage” is often a patty of seasoned ground pork that would probably be called a Frikadelle in German. But as Stu said, the patties have recognizeable bits.
Alex K. says

August 15, 2022 at 3:33 am

@Vanya: “Whereas in America breakfast “sausage” is often a patty of seasoned ground pork that would probably be called a Frikadelle in German.”

In Lynchburg, TN, where Jack Daniels is distilled, it could look like this. Sold frozen, IIRC – otherwise, how would you cut this stuff?

In Russian usage, фрикаделька only applies to a meatball in a soup.
Ben Tolley says

August 15, 2022 at 4:28 am

I think shape is an important element in British English as well*: an American hot dog is definitely a sausage to British eyes, salami is less of a prototypical sausage, but still a sausage. On the other hand, I don’t think most Brits would call black pudding a sausage, and I’m not sure what it is that takes it out of the sausage category.

*With a notable exception in Scotland.
Hans says

August 15, 2022 at 4:43 am

Frikadelle is the official word for meatballs, but there are many regional ones (Klops is the word l grew up with, in Berlin it’s Bulette, in Bavaria Pflanzerl etc.) These words are not normally used for the patties used in Hamburgers; those are called Bratling.
David Marjanović says

August 15, 2022 at 5:07 am

There is no official word. Frikadelle is probably the most widespread one, that’s all. I don’t think it’s understood everywhere.

I know two words in use in Austria (they’re both not the Bavarian one), and at least one of them is also used for hamburger patties.
AntC says

August 15, 2022 at 5:08 am

I don’t think most Brits would call black pudding a sausage

Eh? This (ex-)Brit calls Black Pudding a sausage. ‘sausage’ appears within the first dozen words for the wiki on Black Pudding. Perhaps you’ve only ever seen it sliced, rather than in its full sausageness?

I would recommend the Black Pudding from Scott’s butchers in York, near the Minster — except they went out of business 2008, I’ve just found out. (I lived in York for about 10 years in the ’80’s.)
PlasticPaddy says

August 15, 2022 at 5:13 am

@bt
I believe puddings were traditionally cooked by seething (maybe simmering is more correct, the point is that the water is not actively boiling) or steaming, rather than grilling or frying, and they tend to crumble (or flow) when removed from their casing. Somehow for me this places them outside the sausage category. After reading what AntC wrote, I am less sure about whether I group xmas pudding and black/white pudding acc. to consistency and cooking method or sausages and black/white pudding acc. to ingredients and use in savoury dishes or”fryups”.
Jen in Edinburgh says

August 15, 2022 at 5:44 am

I once walked into the common room at my old work to overhear an indignant statement:
‘In Italy, sausages are not classfied by geometry!’

But haggis is definitely not a sausage, and black pudding is a cousin of a haggis…
Lars Mathiesen says

August 15, 2022 at 5:55 am

Da pølse is sausage, or anything shaped like that, including what toddlers leave in the potty. Black pudding is blodpølse.

In Swedish, however, sausage is korv (blodkorv). I’ve seen tinned sausage meat sold as pölsa, however — I don’t think it was intended for filling into casings, but as the meat part of a simple dinner. (Fried and served with potatoes and ketchup, probably).

Which reminds me that what is sold as chorizo in Mexico is not intended for cooking whole, you turn out the filling and fry it. (That’s what I was taught to do, at least. Also the casing is inedible plastic). In Spain it’s usually in gut casings and cured so no heating is needed. (As indeed some Danish pølse is, but then heavily salted and nitrated [spegepølse]).

I’m not sure a Christmas Pudding fits in any category known to the Danish language. No meat, so not a pølse, no gelatin or egg for setting so not a budding. Principle of least surprise would indicate it’s a cake, but there’s no flour either.
Ben Tolley says

August 15, 2022 at 6:28 am

@AntC
I did qualify it with ‘I don’t think’ for a reason – it was an impression rather than the result of a survey, and I could well be wrong. That said, I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard it referred to as a sausage by a British person before. I had actually looked at Wikipedia before first, and while ‘sausage’ is there, it’s in the phrase ‘blood sausage’, which I’m pretty confident I’ve only ever encountered used by Americans (and then usually in tones of horror). The fact it’s usually served and eaten in slices probably does reduce its sausageosity, but then there are other things I would call sausage that that’s true of as well.
Hans says

August 15, 2022 at 6:38 am

There is no official word. Frikadelle is probably the most widespread one, that’s all. I don’t think it’s understood everywhere.
Yes, I should be more careful with that. It’s the only synonym that is not defined by naming a specific region in Duden. For me, it’s the “official” word because it’s (1) widely used and (2) not the word of my idiolect, but that’s indeed not the same thing.
including what toddlers leave in the potty
In German, Wurst is used for that as well.
Black pudding is blodpølse
German Blutwurst, regionally Rotwurst, Flönz. Normally sold in sausage-like form with natural or plastic casings and rarely so crumbly that they don’t keep their form when the casing is removed.
Lars Mathiesen says

August 15, 2022 at 6:48 am

I’ll just mention that I’ve actually seen slightly meat-flavoured barley porridge in a plastic tube marketed as “haggis”. This was on the breakfast table at a B&B cum sheep farm south of Oban twentysome years ago. I think it would be fried in slices for the kids, I didn’t partake.

(A previous evening we had “steak Mountbatten” at a nice restaurant in Oban itself. A very good steak served with a layer of hot haggis filling on top. [I don’t know how old-school the haggis filling was, i.e., if it had lungs and lights and all that, but it tasted good]),
David Eddyshaw says

August 15, 2022 at 7:18 am

I agree with AntC about the unimpeachable salsicity of black pudding.

Possibly the ultimate sausage, apart from andouillette, the Food of the Gods. (A waiter in France once assumed I was from Lyon on account of my ordering andouillette.)
Stu Clayton says

August 15, 2022 at 7:46 am

In Cologne there are many different kinds of Flönz. Some are served cold, having been gelatinified so that they can be sliced and eaten that way.

Others are simmered and served with further cooked and fried “hearty” items in meatspace. Put them all together on a plate, and you have a Schlachtplatte .

Still other kinds are made to be fried, so that they get crumbly. Himmel un Äd is ditto with mashed potatoes. My favorite kind.

I remember a cosmopolitan moment in Edinburgh – getting (fried) black pudding and chips from a street stand. The pudding was porous-to-crumbly yet maintained its shape just long enough for me to notice before scarfing it down
Y says

August 15, 2022 at 9:52 am

I’d say in AmE sausage is generally a mass noun. The patty shape is convenient but not essential. The butcher sections of the supermarket might have behind the glass bins of unformed sausage meat marked as ‘sausage’.
Brett says

August 15, 2022 at 6:42 pm

I remember a recipe, which I very much liked, which called for Italian sausage meat. The oddity was that it assumed the sausage would be acquired in links and gave instructions for removing the meat from the casings.
John Cowan says

August 15, 2022 at 7:39 pm

Seems sensible. When I am making a pasta-and-Italian-sausage dish, I buy them as links and either slice them or turn out the contents, depending on how tough the casing is. I don’t eat peppers of any sort, so I look for either mild (no basil) or sweet (with basil) varieties.
David Marjanović says

August 16, 2022 at 3:17 am

In German, Wurst is used for that as well.

…rarely. We don’t often think of crap in terms of countable turds.

Flönz

Oh, that’s interesting. The dialect word I’m used to is… let’s spell it Blunzn, which is suspiciously similar, but the initial consonants don’t correspond (and who knows about the vowel).

(Also used to be used for “stupid woman” because it’s feminine; the syllabic -/n/ corresponds to Standard -e.)

I don’t eat peppers of any sort

*high five*
Hans says

August 16, 2022 at 3:45 am

We don’t often think of crap in terms of countable turds.
You obviously discuss these things with different people than I do 😉
But do a combined Google search for “Kacke” and “Wurst”, the result might surprise you.
Among other things, you will find this gem of children’s literature .
David Marjanović says

August 16, 2022 at 4:21 am

Ah, Kacke isn’t the regional word where I’m from, so maybe it’s part of a system. 🙂
Lars Mathiesen says

August 16, 2022 at 5:09 am

Frikadelle: Also the word for fried meat balls in Danish. (Boiled ones are kødboller; Sw has köttbullar for the fried ones, cf IKEA, and I was never embedded deeply enough to discover if they did the boiled thing).

(There are recurrent discussions about where the word comes from, and they never mention German. Usually French fricandeau is adduced, but that’s more a fricassée).

So now I checked DWDS, and it says it might be from It frittatella and influenced by fricandeau which again is based on a backformation from fricasser. frittatella seems to mean ‘crêpe’ but you can’t have it all innit. I’ve never seen frittatella mentioned in the Danish discussions, though, so that was my new fact for today.
Hans says

August 16, 2022 at 5:34 am

Frikadelle: Also the word for fried meat balls in Danish.
AFAIK, German Fikadellen (Klopse, Buletten, etc.) are always fried, too, and then eaten hot or cold; smaller meatballs that you would find boiled as part of a soup are Fleischbällchen / Fleischklößchen. At least, that’s what my cook books call them.
January First-of-May says

August 16, 2022 at 5:47 am

and I was never embedded deeply enough to discover if they did the boiled thing

I know that the Russian translators of Karlsson-of-the-Roof referred to the meatballs as тефтели (“tefteli” – a Turkic loan, I think?), but I keep forgetting that this does not have to be the Swedish term.
Vaguely recall that I’ve looked up the actual Swedish term once and it was in fact köttbullar; but if that was posted on LH (which my memory tells me it was), Google doesn’t find it.

Russian has both тефтели and фрикадельки and I don’t actually know the difference between the two offhand. (I think maybe the latter are supposed to be boiled? Not entirely sure that there’s a difference at all, to be honest, they might just be different words for the same thing.)
Vanya says

August 16, 2022 at 6:52 am

McDonalds in Poland sells American style Sausage McMuffins with seasoned ground pork patties. I was curious how the Poles translate that American application of “sausage” into a Polish world view – apparently McDonalds decided to simply call the patties “wieprzowina”, i.e “pork”.
V says

August 16, 2022 at 8:20 am

I was astounded when I watched an episode of QI and the contestants didn’t know that a green pepper turns red when ripened: they thought they were different sorts of peppers!

Stephen Fry was hosting and I think Jo Brand, Phill Jupitus and Bill Bailey were the contestants.
languagehat says

August 16, 2022 at 8:29 am

Vaguely recall that I’ve looked up the actual Swedish term once and it was in fact köttbullar; but if that was posted on LH (which my memory tells me it was), Google doesn’t find it.

I came seeking only gravy, and yet they offered me also meatballs (“köttbullar”).

Köttbullar! I’ll probably eat some tomorrow. ^_^
January First-of-May says

August 16, 2022 at 8:37 am

I did find that thread [the “eat some tomorrow” one, where it came up in a discussion of the Swedish Chef], but it doesn’t actually mention Karlsson or tefteli [and I never posted in it, though of course I could have been recalling a conversation that didn’t involve me], so I assumed it wasn’t what I remembered.

(There are no Google results on LH for фрикадельки as I write this, and only one for тефтели, in a thread about obscure standard pronunciations.)
Lars Mathiesen says

August 16, 2022 at 12:38 pm

@Hans, the little ones for soup is one thing (meat and flour, separate kinds in a proportion to please your heart). I’m talking about heftier fare. (Most often served in a bright yellow curry Béchamel sauce with rice, I chose the version with creamed celeriac instead). These dishes are simply known as boller i karry and boller i selleri — a bolle can be a breakfast roll as well, but you wouldn’t put those in a sauce so saying kødboller would be a redundant pleonasm.

Also, McD in Sweden also had buns with a fried egg and a sausage meat patty. “McMuffin® Sausage & egg” according to their online menu.
January First-of-May says

August 16, 2022 at 12:55 pm

Also, McD in Sweden also had buns with a fried egg and a sausage meat patty. “McMuffin® Sausage & egg” according to their online menu.

МакМаффин с яйцом и свиной котлетой (dropping the Мак now that Russian McD have to pretend not to be McD any more) – it’s a breakfast menu item (only until 10 AM, or “real early in the morning” by my night owl standards), but it exists.
I think in Russia(n) a correspondingly shaped patty is called котлета (and/or котлетка) almost regardless of its contents (there are many vegetable versions) – it seems to be another shape-based term. AFAIK the word is cognate to English cutlet, but has gone through a bunch of semantic change, and now means approximately anything but a solid piece of meat.
languagehat says

August 16, 2022 at 1:01 pm

Yes, that’s a common faux ami; I always have to think when I run across the Russian word.
Brett says

August 16, 2022 at 1:27 pm

@V: Store-bought green peppers are generally a specific cultivar that is meant to be harvested when it’s green. If one is left on the vine, will turn reddish as it ripens, but it tends to be a splotchy red, with some purple mixed in. The bell peppers that are sold as yellow, orange, or red are slightly different cultivars that are meant to harvested at different points in their development.
AntC says

August 16, 2022 at 5:44 pm

I was astounded when I watched an episode of QI …

I would take your peppers — and pretty much everything else on QI — with large pinches of salt. Whenever they have a q on a topic which I know something about, they get it wrong/inaccurate. There’s even episodes where they directly contradict something claimed in an earlier episode (and Fry even admits to that sometimes).

The contestants are there for their entertainment value, not their expertise. (Except I can’t figure why Alan Davies is there: fart noises cease to be entertaining pretty quickly.)
Hans says

August 16, 2022 at 5:59 pm

I’m talking about heftier fare.
That reminded me of Königsberger Klopse, and I must admit I was wrong and misremembered – these at least are cooked in broth and not fried, and still get called Klops. I don’t know whether anyone would call them Frikadelle or Bulette, though.
Stu Clayton says

August 16, 2022 at 7:05 pm

Königsberger Buletten mit Schwarzwurzeln. These are fried, so they’re not Königsberger Klopse.

Königsberger Frikadellen. These are fried, so they’re not Königsberger Klopse.

Ziemliche Klopse for Klops devotees. Those poor little capers in hot oil !
Lars Mathiesen says

August 17, 2022 at 2:33 am

@Hans, that’s the luxury version, the basic Danish version just cooks the meat balls in water and uses the resulting broth for the sauce. No cream or egg yolk either. And capers and sardine paste? Is the queen coming for dinner?

(But then nobody would serve boller i karry/selleri for guests, it’s strictly hungry family fare. For when you’ve had too much frikadeller with potatoes and gravy).
Hans says

August 17, 2022 at 5:29 am

This thread makes me hungry 🙂
David Marjanović says

August 17, 2022 at 6:20 am

Not sardines – “Sardelle” is anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus). And I would never have guessed that people put it in the same meatballs or -loaves as ground meat, especially ground veal!
Lars Mathiesen says

August 17, 2022 at 7:48 am

ansjoser, ok. But Danes are generally confused about them, they are all traded as sardiner and you’d normally feel safe to substitute anchovies for sardines in a recipe.
Brett says

August 18, 2022 at 12:24 am

Sardines have much more prominent spinal columns.

ITALIAN RAREBIT.

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