Jude Stewart writes for LitHub about her relationship with German:
Nachträglichkeit (noun): “Afterwardness”
Every time I return to Berlin—and this is now 17 years’ worth of returning—I also return to speaking German. I’m always flooded with thoughts and observations about this return. Speaking German elicits big, inarticulate feelings: It’s good, it’s familiar, it’s awful, it’s tumultuous, it’s suddenly great again. But why?
German is the fourth foreign language I’ve studied, the others being French, Japanese and Spanish in that order. Since childhood I’ve wanted to become fluent in a foreign language—any language—and, before German, had only gotten maddeningly close. […]
Why did I stick with German so long? Why German? All of my answers feel like alibis, and maybe they are. Childhood ambitions don’t often play out precisely as envisioned; you feel lucky if they can play out at all. […]
Fließend (adjective): fluent
How fluent am I really? It’s a mysterious question. The answer isn’t stable or absolute. It depends on a million points of context. It reflects one’s lived experiences inside the language. I suppose I’m fluent in German, and yet I feel provisional saying that.
I usually return to Berlin rusty; because I have a monolingual child in tow, it’s difficult to find flow. Yet my vocabulary has steadily grown—17 years of magpie word collection will do that. Since I first learned German I’ve become a parent, acquiring the superpowers of split attention and automatic speech—both factors that strangely help my German. But the situation leaves me stuck with go-to phrases that bore me to tears; grammatical mistakes so long-codified in memory that I don’t recognize them as such; the conundrum of which language to speak with old friends I only see briefly.
Anger improves my fluency, as does problem-solving, tiredness, and drinks. Distraction helps, as do actual communicative stakes. When my son Lev broke their foot by “speed-walking” over a raised threshold in our apartment, I described the injury to the hospital staff. The word die Schwelle (threshold) bobbed into consciousness suddenly like a cork. Did I actually know this word? Where did I learn it? Meanwhile the nurse just waited, mildly impatient, for me to un-pause my recital. […]
Seufzen (verb): to sigh
In early 2021 when the vaccines had been heralded but not yet arrived, when my passport worked but not reliably, I took a Zoom conversational course in new German literature. It was laughing in the dark, cultivating foreign language skills that winter; it was something to do. But the space inside me reserved for German sprang back open, filled and stretched yet again.
From this class I learned all the alternatives to writing “he said” in literary reportage: er erwiderte (he replied), er zustimmte (he agreed), er hinfügte (he added), er seufzte (he sighed). I also started reading German for style, measuring word choices and sentence cadence. The language’s ceiling, its rhetorical possibilities, lifted so high that clouds drifted through. I had not realized how conversation—even quality conversation—constrains what you can experience of a language’s possible effects. New words, new cadences, new formulations: we don’t build or acquire complexities like these in speech. […]
German changes the reading game in fundamental ways. Grammar gets foregrounded, providing crucial hints to the lost. In diagramming syntax as a reader, you palpate which words relate to which, re-tracing the author’s own decisions. Sometimes the going was giddily fast, sometimes not. I learned to let it ride, not looking up every word, recognizing the mike-drop words whose meaning I needed to confirm to get the effect. But enforced slowness is inherently vivid. Difficulty always paid off in spades. My space was dark but lit by flashes of irregular lightning.
Fluency in another language, I’m realizing, might be a lot like adulthood: We don’t know what it’ll feel like until we’re well into it. By the time you stop faking parenthood, your kid has almost exited the house.
Nothing startlingly original, but I can’t resist these accounts of what it’s like to use another language, and a lot of it is (as the kids say) relatable. Thanks, Trevor!
Interesting gender choices in “When my son Lev broke their foot”.
Ooh, I’ve had this experience. Especially in French, which Iearned less systematically than English.
And just in case…
…Although I don’t think I’ve ever encountered this word, it doesn’t feel wrong; -keit is fully productive. But what an abstract verb formed from nachträglich* would actually mean – I’m not sure.
* “added to the submission subsequently”
No: stimmte […] zu, fügte […] hinzu. Stressed = separable prefixes, unlike er- in e.g. the correct erwiderte.
er zustimmte (he agreed), er hinfügte (he added),
Most decidedly not. Never. Basic fail. Exoticism.
It’s er stimmte zu, er fügte hinzu. Or er fügte an. Colloquially more often something like er sagte [dann] auch/noch.
German is just another language, dear. You’ve discovered cockroaches and seem to be unaware that they’re merely another type of bug.
A child discovers pink sparkly ponies and is excited. Childlike and forgivable. An adult does the same. Childish and unforgivable. Ponies are pink and sparkly only when painted and then sprayed with sequins.
As soon as the prozac cuts in, I’ll go on a tear about “Nachträglichkeit“. But don’t wait up, it’s midnight here already.
“Nachträglichkeit Although I don’t think I’ve ever encountered this word, it doesn’t feel wrong; -keit is fully productive. But what an abstract verb formed from nachträglich* would actually mean – I’m not sure.”
It’s a term in Freudian psychoanalysis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterwardsness
And as one can read there, Lacan is more to blame than Freud for this monstrosity of a word. I myself call it ‘backwardness”.
#
It was Lacan who brought the term back from obscurity after Freud’s death—his translation in the French language as the “après-coup” fits into the context of his “return to Freud” (“rapport de Rome”, 1953)—and certainly French psychoanalysis has since taken the lead in its explication. Lacan himself claimed in his Seminar that “the real implication of the nachträglich, for example, has been ignored, though it was there all the time and had only to be picked up,”[8] while writing in Ecrits of “‘deferred action’ (Nachtrag), to rescue another of these terms from the facility into which they have since fallen…they were unheard of at that time.”[9] #
“Fallen into the facility”, like allegories fallen into the Nile.
Next thing you know they’ll come up with “synchronicity”. Jung und dumm.
Nachtrag carries zero connotation of “deferred”. It means “addendum” – something added later.
A Nachschlag is a second helping, as of meatloaf. It does not suggest deferred meatloaf. It has other meanings too, in other contexts.
You might make a weak pun out of the word, to mean “a follow-up punch” to an initial Schlag ins Gesicht. A pun not really packing a punch, more like Schlagsahne.
Schlag nach! does not mean “have a second helping!”, but rather “look it up!”.
You just learn this stuff, or you don’t. No ponies were harmed.
Anger improves my fluency, as does problem-solving, tiredness, and drinks.
To wit, Julie Doucet’s English Lesson.
It was Lacan who brought the term back from obscurity after Freud’s death […\ and certainly French psychoanalysis has since taken the lead in its explication.
A French psychoanalyst is someone who makes up the meaning of words and then becomes the world expert on their meaning. Of course, anyone can do that without being French or a psychoanalyst.
Free for all.
“Second helping” I think remains a Southern-ish regionalism in AmEng* and it is sort of sweet that Stu retains it after all his many years away from the region in which he was raised. Is the “schlag” in “Nachschlag” the same one that makes the undiabetic glutton in Vienna ask for anything and everything to be served “mit Schlag”?
*I really cannot imagine myself uttering it, except in reference to the Lynyrd Skynyrd album thus titled. But I am for purposes of the subdivisions of AmEng a Yankee of Yankee parents and grandparents etc etc.
Is the “schlag” in “Nachschlag” the same one that makes the undiabetic glutton in Vienna ask for anything and everything to be served “mit Schlag”?.
No. The basic meaning of schlagen is something like”beat/hit”. Schlagsahne is *whipped* cream. I don’t know whether that Viennese Schlag means cream or whipped cream, or either depending on the context. One buys it here in cartons labelled Schlagsahne, but it’s liquid, not yet whipped. It is 32% fat, whereas Kochsahne is 15% and is good for other cooking purposes (it’s not “cooked by itself”).
Nachschlag was originally soldiers’ slang, says the DWDS. I envision a chow line where you hold up a plate or dish to get food *slapped* onto it with a ladle.
“Regionalism” ? How else to say second helping ?? Just “seconds” ?
Hmm. Now I’m wondering if (perhaps archaic?) AmEng “hit,” in contexts like taking a “hit” (=drag/puff/toke) off a joint comes out as “Schlag” in Deutsche dope-slang. And Stu may be in the right generational cohort to remember Quicksilver Messenger Service (that would all be a single word auf Deutsch, ja?) going on circa 1970 about “ooh, have another hit … of fresh air” uzw.
comes out as “Schlag” in Deutsche dope-slang.
I don’t think so. It’s just a Zug (“pull/drag”) as far as I remember.
I’ll ask Ralf tomorrow when he gets up. He’s got the Teufelswissen, I just take notes from time to time.
(that would all be a single word auf Deutsch, ja?)
Well, just written together as usual. It’s not “one word” in a conceptual sense. Quecksilberbotendienst .
Full disclosure: I refuse in advance to discuss what I mean by “not ‘one word’ in a conceptual sense”. I know what I mean, that’s good enough for me. I remember DM once made illuminating comments about this. You can’t expect clarity from a cracker like me.
Fair point. I was referring merely to standard German orthographic conventions rather than anything deeper and more ontological than that.
One buys it here in cartons labelled Schlagsahne, but it’s liquid, not yet whipped.
At that point it’s “whipping cream”, not whipped cream.
I’m with Stu in being surprised at seeing “second helping” described as a regionalism. It’s true I was born in North Carolina, but I haven’t lived in Southern-speaking area for decades (though admittedly DC isn’t the most non-Southern part of the US).
surprised at seeing “second helping” described as a regionalism.
I think it’s regional in UK (long time since I’ve lived there): effete/middle-class Southern, not Northern — they’d say ‘extras’.
(There are some book titles including “second helping” in a Northern/Yorkshire culinary context — I suspect that’s a (Southern) publishers’ influence.)
California born and bred, and “second helping” or “seconds” is certainly what I’d call them. In fact, no other colloquial way to refer to an additional portion of a dish even springs to mind.
I’m with laowai despite being from New Jersey / New York.
I am also a New Englander of New England stock and don’t perceive anything Southern about “second helping”. I would normally just say “seconds” but “second helping” would be fine if more context was required for some reason. “Second helping” sounds to me, if anything, like 1970s TV commercial English. “Would you like a second helping, dear?”says Betty White spooning out stuffing.
@stu
You have clearly failed to elucidate the meaning of Nachtrag. Just as a Vortrag is a monologue presented IN FRONT OF unwilling listeners (e.g., schoolchildren), a Nachtrag (also Hintertrag or Rücktrag) is a monologue presented FROM BEHIND these same (or other) listeners, perhaps as they attempt to flee or as a prelude by an Amokläufer to spraying the unwilling listeners with bullets…
“Second helping” sounds fine to this (not necessarily representative) Australian.
In Serbian, whipped cream is ‘šlag’ and a stroke is ‘šlog’ (both coming from essentially the same German source).
Seconds, on the other hand is ‘repete’.
a Nachtrag (also Hintertrag or Rücktrag) is a monologue presented FROM BEHIND these same (or other) listeners, perhaps as they attempt to flee or as a prelude by an Amokläufer to spraying the unwilling listeners with bullets…
Definitely. Fleeing from Lacanian lucubration, in this instance. Or lubrication ? Schmierentheater in any case.
The latter.
Of course it isn’t short for Schlagsahne, but for Schlagobers. :-þ And if Kaffee mit Schlag is too much for you, you can have your coffee with Kaffeeobers, a liquid with 10% fat.
Sahne is the basic ingredient in German cooking, and the reason why low-fat milk is 1) at all available and 2) cheaper than whole milk in the supermarkets here (in Austria it’s a curiosity). Obers doesn’t occur alone that often.
Usually in front of willing listeners, e.g. a public lecture or a conference presentation.
There are things to distinguish here: “phonological word” (what the sound system treats as a unit), “morphological word” (what grammar treats as a unit), “lexical word” (a “dictionary entry” with a not necessarily compositional meaning)…
The parts of German compounds remain separate phonological words; they retain their own stresses (as secondary stresses except for usually the first element) and their own unreduced vowels (unlike e.g. -man or -land in English). But when they’re used as parts of a larger morphological word, the ends of some get specially marked so you can tell where the next member begins, usually with -s, many with -n or -en, some with yet other things (e.g. their plural endings). There is such a thing in Botendienst from Bote + Dienst.
The parts of German compounds remain separate phonological words
But they can’t be separated by pauses, can they?
But [the parts of German compounds] can’t be separated by pauses, can they?
Sure, and they are in fact. Not noticeably different from those deployed when words are not written together, I bet, unless you’re using a speech analyzer oscilloscope (or whatever it’s called).
You don’t run out of breath when saying Quecksilberbotendienst. The suprasegmentality (prosody) doesn’t fly out the window. Of course furriners may have “issues” with the whole business, but since when did they call the shots ?
And as David said, “the ends of some get specially marked so you can tell where the next member begins”. The princess and her pea could hardly have asked for more.
Would you separate Quecksilberbotendienst into its components in slow, deliberate speech?
@Y
Such an extreme pronunciation would sound threatening to me, but maybe I am generalising from English, where “Get [Pause] out [Pause] of [Pause] here [Pause] now!” would convey a maximum level of threat.
Would you separate Quecksilberbotendienst into its components in slow, deliberate speech?
Yes and no. That is what you do in slow, deliberate speech. I will go further: in slow, deliberate speech I already separate the syllables with pauses, and as a formal consequence the components as well, since they are contiguous subsets of syllables. But the syllable-level pauses make the components hard to recognize. So I’m not “separating the components” after all.
It’s not slow and deliberate to rush though Quecksilber, then pause, then rush through boten, then pause, then rush through dienst.
But those would be exercises in marginality. Unless a person cannot speak any other way, they are not normal speech.
Letting “I” represent the slightest of pauses in normal speech: QuecksilberIbotendienst or QuecksilberbotenIdienst, depending on the reasons I have for saying it one way or the other. I might be parroting the way someone just said it, which is also a reason.
La razón produce razones.
What Stu and PlasticPaddy have said.
El sueño de la razón produce…
Sueños de la razón.
And if Kaffee mit Schlag is too much for you,
… you can order Kaffee mit ohne (Ohne?) instead.
It’s a spoken thing mostly, but Ohne written in caps would be funny. How did you know about that ? Didn’t it come up here long ago ?
Really? Here in Spain whipping cream is 38% and non-whipping is 30%. You can buy “cream” at lower fat percentages, but then the carton advertises quite openly a plural number of ingredients.
Didn’t it come up here long ago ?
What a memory! JC in 2012:
GS:
2012 was just yesterday.
Last week, last ice age…
Kaffee mit ohne ‘coffee with without’
The tradition in a Yorkshire fish&chip shop is to order ‘one of each’ — that is, one fish, one chips and one ‘scraps’ is understood. (‘Scraps’ being the stray bits of batter that have detached from the fish whilst frying.)
If you want fish no chips (but with scraps of course), that’s ‘one of each without the chips’ — which would be extremely strange. But plenty of times I’ve heard ‘one of each without the fish’.
[I’ve a feeling that story might also be in Hat’s copious archives.]
Yesterday, all our [present] troubles seemed so far away….
I actually did remember that we had discussed mit ohne before, but I didn’t feel like finding it and making a link.
kaffe med uden mælk works fine in Danish, but it’s marked as jocular — or maybe a disfluency if you change your mind mid-sentence. (I’ve heard it from kids as well, but I don’t remember what age. In that case I’m guessing at a misbracketing vil du have dine cornflakes med [mælk eller uden mælk].
We used to get cream in 38% for whipping, 18% for cooking, 13% for coffee and 9% for export (I don’t know whither). But now “they” are calling the 9% one kaffefløde, and nobody seems to be selling the 18% thing except with added wheat flour for thickening your sauce. Useless in coffee. Eheu.
(The adulterated 18% thing is relatively new, encyclopedias and sites for looking up nutrient content still list the unadulterated one)
Possibly “they” are screwing people over in some obscure way. It will all come out on the Day of Judgement, but by then we’ll be dead.
Weihenstephan: “Sahne zum Kochen”. The image doesn’t show percent fat value, but the same size Weihenstephan container in my fridge says “15%” on it.
Aldi: “Kochsahne”. Says “12%”.
All that counts is what you use it in. Gotta mix and match, or else buy a cow and roll your own.
>Kaffee mit ohne ‘coffee with without
If you want to ruin a hotdog in Chicago, you can order it with everything and ketchup.
The US Food and Drug Administration definitions say “heavy cream” or “heavy whipping cream” has at least 36% milkfat, “light whipping cream” or “whipping cream” at least 30%, “light cream” or “coffee cream” or “table cream” at least 18%, and “half-and-half” (which is what people generally use for coffee) at least 10.5%.
I’ve thought of going to some coffee place and ordering a half-caf, half-decaf capp with half non-fat, half half-and-half. I’d be murdered but it might be worth it.
The kremfløte “whipping cream” in my fridge has 37% fat. It’s also well past its use-by date, so I should probably make vafler out of it*. The matfløte “cooking cream” from the same producer (Tine) has 18% fat. Matfløte hasn’t been in trade for more than a decade or two, and I remember it as the first appearance in Norway of ultra-pasteurised dairy, which was one of the scaring prospects if we joined the EU and let foreign dairy into our market. I don’t use the even lighter grades of cream.
* It’s fastelavnssøndag today, the day of fastelavnsboller (home-made buns sliced in two and filled with whipped cream), but I don’t really like whipped cream with buns. And when the fresh cream has turned sour anyway, we’ll go for wafers.
one of each without the fish
K.O, M.O, M.K, hot works, and sweet works.
“half-and-half” (which is what people generally use for coffee)
Well. Plenty of people use milk (4% butterfat) or even skim(med) milk (0% butterfat).
I actually wrote mlik here before correcting it. It used to be a joke between Gale (or Glae) and me that people understood me better if I said /mɫ̩ɪk̚/ than if I said milk, approximately [mʷɫ̩k̚]. I clarify it now to a waiter by saying [ˈmɪɫ̩k̚] instead (two syllables).
Well. Plenty of people use milk (4% butterfat) or even skim(med) milk (0% butterfat).
In context, it seems clear to me that the reference was to additives heavier than milk; we were, after all, talking about weights of cream.
Kaffee mit ohne ‘coffee with without’
‘one of each without the fish’
another variation, in a way, is blitzstein’s “not coffee-and, andy, just coffee, andy” (translating to “i can’t afford the doughnut”).
heavier than milk
Higher in fat than milk, and thus less dense, but yes. My point was that the “coffee cream” was not the one most likely to be used for coffee, in my experience.
I shudder to imagine how much skim milk someone has to put into coffee to even get a significant color change. I don’t understand the motivation, though I don’t doubt some people do it. I think they can be discounted in determining what people “generally” do though.
Ooh, I just ran into a huge English noun pile with adjectives and an abbreviation in it:
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee Central Foreign Affairs Commission Office Director
Let’s try to render that in German from the end backwards (connecting elements bolded):
Bürodirektor
Kommissionsbürodirektor
Außenpolitikkommissionsbürodirektor
Then we hit a snag. One option is:
Zentral-Außenpolitik-Kommissionsbüro-Direktor
But that’s hardly comprehensible. It’s much better to shuffle things around:
Außenpolitikzentralkommissionsbürodirektor
…or to just give up and string a bunch of genitives together:
Direktor des Büros der zentralen Kommission für Außenpolitik
In the latter case we can go on:
des Zentralkomitees der Kommunistischen Partei Chinas (KPCh)
We can also dissolve Außenpolitik “foreign policy” into äußere Angelegenheiten “external/foreign affairs”; that’s a very formal register, but goes pretty well with all the genitives.
I think it is to have milk proteins interact with the alkaloids in some way or another while keeping everything fat-free. Maybe that manages to mask some of the taste. I haven’t tried (and don’t drink coffee every year).
Many places serving “espresso drinks” here do offer a low-fat option; usually what is called minimælk (.4-.5 percent) and not skummetmælk (0.1). It doesn’t seem to make much of a difference to the colour when milk is 90% of the product as in a latte.
In recent news here some university hospital has found out that coffee with milk can lower the risk of arteriosclerosis (I think it was) — something about a synergy between flavonoids in coffee and milk proteins. I didn’t register if this was original research or the usual “we need to replicate what the Swedes/Germans/Brits/Americans did before we believe it” attitude.
And yes, it does seem to me that any sort of milk will take some of the “edge” off the coffee taste. But full fat works better, and for less calories. (Lots of people don’t realize that milk sugars and proteins add up to half the calories in full fat milk so if you need twice as much skim milk to mask the bad taste, you are breaking even).
Anecdata: A former colleague didn’t stop at cream, he stirred butter into his coffee. But then he was not exactly skinny.
Tibet is famous for tea with butter…
I think they need it to break up the tea-bricks.
Maybe yak butter works better.
Not only butter if 19th century explorers are to be trusted. But yak indeed.
I drank tea with butter in Mongolia; it’s very salty. An acquired taste.
Coffee with salt sounds like something I’d have to get used to as well.
My colleague may have used non-salted butter, which is a thing here. He kept a screw-lid jar in the fridge with convenient cubes of butter which I assume he cut up himself — but I don’t remember seeing the wrappers from the original blocks.
My colleague may have used non-salted butter, which is a thing here.
It’s a thing here, too, and in fact we keep both kinds around at all times — my wife prefers salted, I like unsalted. It was convenient when my mother-in-law was alive (she made it to 102), because she also liked unsalted. (She was also a big fan of the way I make coffee and fondly remembered the Thibaud/Cortot/Casals trio, of which I have a couple of recordings, from her youth. I miss her.)
The wonders of refrigeration. I’m gradually cutting down on salt in general, but even more I’m cutting down on “fourlegged” fats, and so when I do indulge myself with butter, I go for the salted version. (On the other hand I pass on the various “gourmet” butters for sale here with 2% sea salt instead of 1.2% conventional; 30 years ago I would probably have thought it was a “lovely salted taste” as their marketing says, but now it’s too much).
(I’m aware that conventional wisdom on this is being challenged, and that lard and pork fat may end up on the bad side and milk fats as neutral or marginally good. Butter and cream will never be health foods, though).
Oh, interesting. The only salted butter here in Berlin is Irish, and in Austria it used to be pretty much entirely unknown; I don’t think most supermarkets have any.
France has long distinguished beurre doux, beurre demi-sel (like seawater) and beurre salé (demi-sel plus extra macroscopic salt crystals).
>France has long distinguished beurre doux, beurre demi-sel and beurre salé
Traditionally unsalted butter was known in English as sweet butter, whereas most butter, often labeled “butter,” was salted butter. But I had to go down a couple google pages to an outdated Encyclopedia Britannica link with that usage of sweet butter.
I think two things made the term sweet butter problematic. Buttery, sweet and salty are all seen as indulgent, and people (Americans) are increasingly self-indulgent, to the point that there are now recipes dominating the google search for Sweet Butter in which you make a sugar-added, sometimes spicy “buttery spread”. Meanwhile, people need to maintain a health-conscious, non-indulgent self-image, so unsalted butter is a more useful sales term than sweet butter for everyday butter. I had to explain to my wife, who began getting unsalted butter for the same reason she buys low-sodium canned beans, that salted butter is “normal butter”.
It’s also tough to know what to do about recipes that call for those canned beans. Most such recipes called for salt anyway, so the salt in the can was just contributing toward the end total. But now you have to allow for whether the recipe was written before the low-sodium fad, and either follow the recipe or double the salt accordingly.
The other fad that drives me crazy is sea salt. It’s all f***ing sea salt, folks. Just a question of how recently. I’m thinking of starting a company offering “cask-aged sea salt.” That is, salt that came from the sea millions of years ago, mined from a deposit the normal way, and then put in a container briefly to age it a bit more before selling it at 300% mark-up.
It’s all f***ing sea salt, folks
Most recipes I’ve happened to see in the last few years have pushed “kosher salt” as an ingredient. As far as I can find out, that’s just coarse (big-crystal) salt. But who knows ? Maybe it is collected at least 100 meters from any pig stall.
@Ryan: Don’t try that in Scotland. https://www.securingindustry.com/food-and-beverage/hebridean-sea-salt-company-folds-after-deception-probe/s104/a4554/
NB: the foregoing sentence should NOT be taken as affirmative advice (legal or otherwise) to go ahead and try it in the U.S.
They were engaged in deception, claiming a Hebridean origin for salt from other ancient seas. I would scrupulously source my salt from the Western Interior Sea.
“Cavern-aged sea salt” would be a better marketing tag. The aging happened underground over millennia and aeons, giving it that piquant mineral savor the cavern can only impart if given time. This is not one of those snap sea salts produced cheaply for the impatient modern person.
“We sell no salt before its time.”
I am still annoyed by food labelling that says “98% fat free”.
1. It is manifestly inaccurate. It implies that 98% of the stuff you ladle into your bowl has no fat in it while 2% is entirely fat — but how do you isolate the “fat-free” part?
2. It is trading on the earlier, partly out-of-date, trend to demonise fats, particularly animal fats. (It appears that polyunsaturated vegetable fats are actually harmful in a way that animal fats are not. Switching from butter to margarine, which was the trend decades ago, was actually a switch for the worse.*)
3. When you take fat out of food it frequently tastes insipid, to compensate for which large quantities of sugar are added — and sugar turns out to be an even nastier villain than fat.
* I was disgusted in hostels in Mongolia to be served dollops of margarine with breakfast when Mongolia is traditionally an animal-fat consuming country. The only explanation I can think of is that vegetable fats are cheaper. Maybe they are easier to preserve, too. But without the yellow colorants meant to imitate butter, margarine would look as ghastly as it tastes.
I once bought Lurpak “lightly-salted” butter in Mongolia and found it rather too salty to my taste. I didn’t try their fully salted butter.
I don’t think labellings like “98% fat free” and “no calories” when it’s actually 0.49kcal/100g have ever been legal here — or rather, by the time the fads they feed on arrived, it was already against labelling guidelines. Technical is the wrong kind of correct to be when dealing with the Consumer Protection Agency here. (Forbrugerstyrelsen = ‘The Consumer Authority’).
Yes, but rock salt precipitated so slowly it’s much, much purer than anything sold as sea salt. If you want a more complex (i.e. bitterer…) flavor, go for sea salt.
For the same reason, the crystals of rock salt are the familiar cubes, but those of sea salt are much flakier, so they dissolve more quickly and create the illusion of a more intense taste – a good idea if you want to cut down on sodium.
Polyunsaturated means oil. You make margarine out of oil by saturating the double bonds ( = adding hydrogen to turn them into single bonds). In the process, some of them flip around one double bond without saturating it, and that gives you the most dread trans fats.
* I was disgusted in hostels in Mongolia to be served dollops of margarine with breakfast when Mongolia is traditionally an animal-fat consuming country. The only explanation I can think of is that vegetable fats are cheaper.
The other explanation I can think of is that they think it’s “Western” and therefore fancy. Same like all over the former Soviet Union, an area where brewing tea is part of the culture, you nowadays frequently are served not tea brewed in a pot, but a cup of hot water and a tea bag.
There are genuinely different kinds of salt—in terms of what impurities they contain. I don’t think Ryan is going to get rich with casked-aged salt if it’s mined salt to start with. The reason that salt was a pricey (sometimes even luxury) good for so long was that mining salt could be expensive. On the other hand, extracting it from seawater, once the technology became available, was incredibly cheap—and so ordinary salt costs next to nothing and is cheap enough to be spread on roads.
How you go about evaporating the water and drying the salt can make a little difference in its composition, but the main difference is texture. Practically all salt sold in stores is extracted from seawater, but the stuff extraneously labeled as “sea salt” typically has larger flakes. Kosher[ing] salt is similar; it’s a large-grained salt used in traditional Jewish butchering and meat preparation practices. (Since blood as an ingredient is not kosher, there are rules for extracting excess blood from butchered meat using salt.) The rougher texture of these kinds of salt can make a difference in texture if the salt crystals remain whole, but recipes that call for dissolving kosher salt in water (like I’ve seen for making pasta) are just a waste of money.
The genuinely different kinds of salts are the ones that are still mined. (These kinds were one “sea salt,” but they no longer are.) The most common kind that one sees nowadays is Himalayan pink salt. As the color suggests, it has significant impurities that can affect the flavor, although not actually as much as you might expect. It’s mostly just a matter of looking different, although I can imagine certain dishes in which having regionally sourced mined salt might make a subtle but meaningful difference in the flavor of a dish.
>extracting it from seawater, once the technology became available, was incredibly cheap—and so ordinary salt costs next to nothing and is cheap enough to be spread on roads.
This isn’t accurate. If it were, wouldn’t we buy sea salt rather than rock salt for driveways? I do nothing of the sort, scoff haughtily at my neighbors who salt and will one day be the crank who calls the local road department to complain that their excessive use of salt is ruining pond and wetland ecosystems.
Morton Sea Salt costs twice what regular (mined) Morton Salt costs at Walmart. I know people are paying a premium for ridiculousness, but is the difference pure profit? I think mined salt is still cheaper.
This page agrees with me that road salt is only sea salt if you count my “cavern-aged sea salt.”
Also, the technology to extract salt from sea water has existed pretty much forever. You can find classical era salt pans around the Mediterranean. Relying on panning is the very reason it was expensive then. Letting seawater dry in the open air hasn’t gotten more efficient over the last two millennia. As land values rise, it costs more. Mining is what became more efficient.
The real moneymaking venture in salt would be road salt recycling – going around to the various points where the damn plows routinely drop 8-10 lbs in a pile while they wait at stoplights or idle with their engines running on their breaks, and the stations of commuter agencies that believe salt can be used in large quantities preemptively to ward off snowstorms, and sweeping it up and selling it back to them.
Not once you get east of France and north of Italy. It’s practically all mined here, these days by pumping water into the mines, pumping the saline back out and boiling it.
Practically all salt sold in stores is extracted from seawater
I guess that refers to the large salt evaporation ponds where salt is produced from brine by allowing the water to evaporate. There are places (desert areas in India, remote Australia, etc.) where land prices are not a problem.
I don’t think labellings like “98% fat free” and “no calories” when it’s actually 0.49kcal/100g have ever been legal here
You live in an enlightened country.
Sea salt, unlike mined salt, contains microplastics these days.
Most sea salt is used for the production of industrial chlorine and sodium. Salt for food is incidental.
“Himalayan salt” is better marketing than “Pakistani salt”, which it is.
I thought the point of using kosher salt in recipes (if one does not happen to be Jewish) is that it has no added potassium iodide or anti-caking agents, so it provides a purer flavor. (I use kosher salt when cooking myself, though I suspect one would have to have a very sensitive palate to really tell the difference in a typical finished dish.)
it’s not that the salt is itself kosher (the category doesn’t exactly apply – it just needs to be uncontaminated with anything treyf, if i remember right) – it’s that it’s salt of the texture that’s used for removing blood in the process of koshering meat. the only point of using it for cooking is the differences that the size of the grains makes; it’s not processed or sourced any differently from other salts.
@Ryan, up here the salt is generally spread from a sort of tender hitched to the plow, and the spreading mechanism is coupled to the wheels — no movement, no salt. (But there’s been like two mornings this winter where some sidewalks were salted out of an abundance of caution, it’s not really been cold enough to salt the roadways. You guys in the US got all the cold).