Another fantastic post from Dan at The Language of Food; he takes us from “a dish of sweet and sour stewed beef called sikbāj, from sik, Persian for ‘vinegar’, and bā ‘broth’,” which “must have been amazingly delicious, because it was a favorite of kings and concubines for at least 300 years” (I want some!), through escabeche—and the perhaps cognate ceviche—and the Sephardim, who brought their pescado frito with them when they returned to England after a centuries-long ban, to the English adoption of “Fried Fish, Jewish Fashion” and the fish and chips we know today. A great read, and I love his conclusion:
I’d like to think that the lesson here is that we are all immigrants, that no culture is an island, that beauty is created at the confusing and painful boundaries between cultures and peoples and religions… I guess we can only look forward to the day when the battles we fight are about nothing more significant than where to go for tacos.
Amen!
Buell and Anderson’s A Soup for the Qan describes the international cuisine of the Mongol Emperors. I’ve only glanced at it but it’s a fascinating book. ~$350, alas.
Vinegar is, it goes without saying, not delicious. The best thing to make of beef is Tafelspitz.
However, at least the basic idea was right: beef must be cooked, not fried.
Bacon doughnuts? Fixed-gear bicycles? What is a fixed-gear bicycle? That’s a blog worth following.
Austrians are damn good in the kitchen and so I respect your judgment, Daff, but malt vinegar on chips is by far the best way.
Our man neglects escoveitched fish of Jamaica, so I will mention it, along with the Jamaican restaurant around the corner which closed a few months back, where I used to get the ackee & codfish a couple times a week until the alarming failure of the ackee crop one year (1999?). I assume the ackee crop has recovered, but I stopped eating Jamaican food for no clear reason.
Their escoveitched fish was pdgood.
I love the guy’s attitude towards the internet from his course syllabus:
I may be dating myself here, but some of our professors talked overhead projectors and freaked out a little when we wanted to do our presentations in powerpoint from a flash drive.
I notice “homeworks” here appears to be a count noun; do I detect a Britishism?
sikbāj is actually one of my favorite dishes!
The history of sikbaj is fascinating — glittering Oriental color, vast sweeps of history, etc. I’ve always loved it.
But I’m skeptical of the ability of (e)scabeche to turn into ceviche. In his Diccionario Critico y Etimologico de la Lengua Castellana, Juan Corominas connects ceviche with cebo “bait, chum.” (I’m not quite convinced by that etymology either. Is there a Spanish suffix -iche?)
Corominas also observes that Castillian must have borrowed escabeche from the Catalan escabeig and not directly from the Arabic sikbaj, or it would have ended up something like escabej. The Catalan connection explains how the word got to Sicily and Provence (and later the Caribbean, where the Jamaicans pronounce it scovetch; “Spanish” settlers in the New World were mostly Catalans and Basques).
BTW, it’s nice to see myself being cited as an authority in a post that LH links to.
John, right now Buell and Anderson are preparing a new edition of A Soup for the Qan. Supposedly it’s going to be cheaper (if the new publisher expects to sell a single copy).
I notice “homeworks” here appears to be a count noun; do I detect a Britishism?
My money is on nonce countification, given the laid-back context. It sure isn’t an Irishism. In my day we called homework “ekka”, from “exercises”. We were cool, we were.
beef must be cooked, not fried
DM: Let’s explore that statement.
In my dialect, the verb “cook” has a broad range of meaning: any kind of food preparation by heating. So frying counts as cooking.
I’m guessing that by “cooked” you mean cooked in water: stewed or boiled. But that’s just a guess, and if it’s right it leaves out some other standard options: roasted in an oven, grilled on a rack over an open flame. If I cook a steak on a hot skillet with no added fat, do you call that fried?
I have the impression that, as “cook” is the broadest term of this kind in English, maybe “braten” is the broadest in German, but not as broad. “Kochen” seems to refer specifically to watery cooking. I’ve been a bit hazy on what “braten” can cover.
It’s a commonplace that fish’n’chips has been displaced as the British national dish by chicken tikka masala. This was even stated in the “facts about the UK” booklet the Foreign Office recently withdrew as being outdated.
Most of the chippers in Dublin are run by Italians. (Few of the Italian restaurants are.)
Vinegar is, it goes without saying, not delicious.
Not on fish, I would agree, but vinegarized is the only way to eat chips. You know what they put on chips in America instead of vinegar? Ketchup. I seen em do it man.
Ketchup has vinegar in it.
So, I just popped over to the WiPe article on french fries in an idle quest for some info about sauce preferences around the world. Boy, does this article need editing.
The first sentence of the Etymology section reads:
The phrase means potatoes fried in the French sense of the verb “to cook”, which can mean either sautéing or deep-grease frying.
But what really intrigued me was this:
Professor Paul Ilegems, curator of the Friet-museum in Antwerp, Belgium, believes that Saint Teresa of Ávila fried the first chips
Vinegar is not only delicious, it’s a required addition to any Chinese dumpling. And what about balsamic vinegar? That’s great too.
no culture is an island
If you can’t step in the same river twice, you can’t step in it once.
The Language of Food blog has a history of ketchup.
“I notice “homeworks” here appears to be a count noun; do I detect a Britishism?” Not in my experience – homework was one and indivisible. Many of my father’s generation, however, called it “prep”.
What about the virtues of chips with mayonnaise, a la Benelux ? Best chips I ever ate, ever, were from a fryer in Haarlem, near the Groote Kerk.
Perhaps the teacher was Chinese and was overcorrecting for the Chinese lack of plurals. I have known a fair number of Chinese who do the opposite, refuse to bother with the English plurals, rtc., and I’ve come to agree with them. I’ve even applied their method to my study of German.
How often do you need to know whether a noun is plural, anyway? Usually the context tells you, or in the case of the subject of the sentence, the verb. When you do, you can just look up the noun and find the plural form.
Dearie,
Was he at prep school?
Because I thought I had learnt that “prep” was the preferred term for work to be done outside of classroom hours for those who don’t actually go home – children boarding at their schools. Have I got that wrong? In David Lodge’s “Home Truths” the fact that a woman refers to “prep” is evidence that she did not attend a state school. I think.
The best chips are deep-fried in lard, or beef dripping: I believe (but I’m prepared to be corrected) that this is because you can achieve a higher temperature, and get better Maillard reactions.
As for homework: it’s a mass noun in all the varieties of BritEng I know. My (1960s) grammar school (that is, state-run selective school) liked to call it “prep”, but that was because it fancied itself: it also had a Latin grace before school lunch. So it’s not 100 per cent true to say that state schools did not talk about “prep”.
There’s a Sicilian preparation of chopped stewed onions to which are added vinegar (sometimes mixed with wine and/or vincotto), raisins or currants, toasted pine nuts, cinnamon, and cloves; this is used as a dressing for grilled sardines or other cooked food (e.g. fried slices of butternut squash.) The resulting dishes, served at room temperature, are said to be “in saor.” Is there a sikbaj connection here?
Not this American. What belongs on potatoes is salt, period, and plenty of it. None of this vinegar, ketchup, butter, sour cream, or other contaminants.
And only sissies cook them.
i also eat fried potatoes with salt and black pepper only
And only sissies cook them.
No, but only sissies peel them.
not that plenty, i just dip them into salt and black pepper on the plate, so overall amount i believe is not that much
but if it’s boiled or baked in the ashes potatoes, i peel them and eat with butter or salt or mayo
the best of course is just home made fried potatoes, fried not in the hot oil, but on the frying pan with little oil or butter with onions and meat
Lots of butter, salt and better. The butter is to preclude accusations of dieting, an ever-present threat these days.
JE: for “better” read “butter” again?
Onions are good with potatoes, but I don’t consider them a condiment, rather an equal participant in a more complex dish of potatoes-and-onions.
“Pepper”. My fingers transform words on their own. “*e**er”.
read, try fried potatoes – or baked, boiled (only), or mashed – with sour cream.
sour cream or zöökhii is practically our national food, so, of course, i’ve tried potatoes with sour cream too, just prefer sour cream more with pancakes and blueberries
i was so hungry i’ve made fried potatoes with white fish and some salsa and am eating it
cooking is happening for the second time since august though
Yes, vinegar is delicious. Try Japanese tako-su (octopus in vinegar) — wonderful! Vinegar is an indispensible element in northwest Chinese cookery. Pour a little in your (northwestern style) noodles to add that je ne sais quoi. Yes, vinegar is one of the underrated condiments.
It pains me to learn that fish & chips is a Jewish innovation; I feel like I can’t complain as bitterly when my shop is stunk up with them.
Anyway, everybody knows that the proper thing to put on potatoes is gravy. I’ll put vinegar in my soup or my salad, but my potatoes have no need for them because they are gravied.
To contribute linguistic interest to this, here’s all Raphael Finkel’s entries for ‘gravy’:
sos
brotyoykh (roast-broth)
zuze
zhuzhe
I asked my Yiddish teacher which one he liked best, and he gave me a blank look. Surely not ‘sos’, though.
What kind of shop, Z.D.?
In the UK ‘Prep’ is associated with private schools (or public schools as we call them) in two ways.
A ‘prep’ (or, more properly, ‘preparatory’) school ‘prepared’ you for your senior school. It gave you ‘prep’ (homework)to do out of school hours as ‘preparation’ for lessons.
“Perp” on the other hand is one who (in police parlance) perpetrates a crime.
What kind of shop, Z.D.?
A computer repair shop. No place for the stink of fish, however Ashkenazic.
@Catanea: yup.
A computer repair shop. No place for the stink of fish, however Ashkenazic.
Plenty of chips, though (boom-tish!)
Do you use Kosher chips?
I don’t see what’s so funny about quality computer repair, delivered in a timely fashion, in a religiously neutral environment!
in a religiously neutral environment
So, pareve then?
Wow, I handed that one up on a silver platter.
Now ask me if the platter was fleyshik or milkhik.
(Insert the joke about the Jewish Native Americans who have to call off their buffalo hunt because the chief has forgotten the milkhedike tomahak here, because I can’t tell it in full.)
(Insert the joke about the Jewish Native Americans who have to call off their buffalo hunt because the chief has forgotten the milkhedike tomahak here, because I can’t tell it in full.)
Kosher chips
And wash them down with Gatorade brewed from the alligator clips (or as they say in Oz, croc clips).
Curious that so many computer/techie types come around here.
You know, I heard that ‘tomahawk’ was an old corruption of Yiddish tomer hakn “in case of chopping” but I never gave it much credence… until now.
I don’t see what’s so funny about quality computer repair, delivered in a timely fashion, in a religiously neutral environment!
With all due respect, without divine intervention the “timely” rings false.
I feel like we are all about one collective Red Bull away from some really bad sketch comedy.
“Corominas also observes that Castillian must have borrowed escabeche from the Catalan escabeig and not directly from the Arabic sikbaj, or it would have ended up something like escabej.”
No. Different kind of Arabic, one that had g for the j in sikbaj, probably.
Vinegar or the equivalent goes naturally with beef. Steak sauces all have some sour element, whether vinegar or citrus or just the fermentation of the ingredients, even a Sauce Bearnaise with a grilled steak, just about my favorite.
Come to think of it, the sour element is the reason for pairing applesauce or horseradish with roast pork or chops, or suaerkraut for that matter. Sorry to be so literal.
This topic seems to be drifting foodward.
So you encourage me to ask two questions (I don’t live among people I can ask):
What, if anything, is the [chemical?] difference between roast potatoes and chips. I’ve got goose and duck fat. Enough dripping hasn’t come my way yet. But chemically, thick chips done on the hob “versus” roast potatoes in the oven? How are they different from “chips”? @Codfish? have you an answer?
And: second, A friend of mine has occasionally offered us “balsamic vinegar” which was really more like a kind of savoury chocolate syrup with the chocolate element toned far back. Does anybody know what this is? Is it what any of you commenters mean by “balsamic vinegar” which could completely change the interpretation of your comments…
???
Catanea, Balsamic Vinegar is indeed a reduction of cooked grape juice and thus, depending on many factors, can be quite syrupy, somewhat chocolatey, or both. Chocolate is a flavor one can find cropping up in many aged grape juice products.
And chips are fried, of course, rather than roasted, which is to say the surface of them becomes infused with hot fat, vs the dry airborne heat of roasting. Hot fat can be much hotter than air or water (and a liquid can more efficiently transfer heat), so it crisps and caramelizes the starches in the potatoes in a way you can’t get with roasting. Plus, it makes them fattier themselves, and that is tasty.
And dare I ask you, what land do you live in that has either balsamic nor french fries?
American chips are completely different from British chips, which are what we call French fries. They are deep fried in oil. The fish and chips I had in London came in a paper bag with dark (oily) stains evident on the bag even before the vinegar went on. You can buy fish and chips in the states even with vinegar, but afaik if you want good fish and chips with yummy vinegar, you have to go to England. And yes we eat fries with ketchup.
Not quite sure how something is “done on the hob.”
goose and duck fat–I suspect these might be solid at room temperature, and therefore “saturated” fat and not the healthiest thing in the world to use for frying, not that frying is intrinsically healthy.
Balsamic vinegar is aged in wooden casts. The longer it is aged, the more syrupy it gets. Just a few years old is fine for a salad dressing with more flavor than wine or cider vinegars. More than 12 years (tradizionale) and you’d expect to use it almost as as glaze, on grilled veggies, say. More than 25 years (extra vecchio) is more for fresh strawberries or gelato. And more than 100 years (grande vecchio) is robust enough to be an apéritif all by itself, either by the spoonful or in sparkling mineral water.
Oops. casks.
M: you’d expect to use it almost as as glaze, on grilled veggies, say
What, straight? Or diluted with something?
At a restaurant in Germany I once got Gänseschmalz instead of butter to put on the bread. It was really good and I hope I never get offered it again (poor goose, poor arteries).
Just last night I had butter tea for the first time! (Speaking of the arteries) I had to have seconds. It was tremendously fortifying.
Round here there are a handful of friet vans run by a nominally Belgian family, and the sauce of the discerning is oorlog (“war”), consisting of pretend-mayonaise, peanut sauce and finely chopped onions.
It is very good, but it doesn’t change the fact that proper fish and chips with malt vinegar is one of very few foodstuffs I miss from Blighty. (Most of the others are salt and vinegar crisps. Why will Johnny Foreigner not accept that this is the canonical flavour? Lord knows I’ve explained it slowly and loudly enough!)
Corona: My German mother talked a lot (in English) about “goose grease”, but she never fed it to us. Probably a good thing.
Z.D.: I suppose I should have written tomehak, then. More seriously, the OED says tomahawk is a borrowing from Powhatan (Virginia Algonquian, now extinct), a nominalization of the verb ‘cut’, something like ‘what is used for cutting’. Unfortunately, the -hawk part is the nominalizer.
I haven’t had Tibetan butter tea, with salt and barley, but I think I’d like it.
Having now seen ZD’s very interesting blog, it seems Z.D. Smith and John Cowan live within shouting distance of one another.
I don’t see what leads you to that conclusion. I’ve been shouting a lot recently, sometimes in Yiddish even, and I’ve never met the man once.
And you have a common interest in computers.
Perhaps a shout therapist should be consulted. People believe that shouting “just comes naturally”, but in fact for most of the population the capacity for shouting has been severely impaired.
It’s true. Today I tried to moo as loudly as I could in a shed full of cows, but I couldn’t get close to the volume each of the cows themselves produce. I don’t think it’s just because of their much greater size; I’ve tried baaing with sheep, without much success. The sheep have much deeper voices than I do. Maybe a professional singer could do it.
I couldn’t get close to the volume
This is what distinguishes you from the heard.
Z.D., I would be interested in meeting you. I just posted a comment on your blog, so you have my email address (not that it’s any secret) and everybody knows my real name. If you’re interested, let me know where your shop is, and tell me when I ought to drop by.
So I had a very nice Blunzngröstl in Vienna yesterday (Pulkautaler Weinhaus close to the Stadthalle). So what’s that got to do with vinegar? It was served with the best Sauerkraut I’ve ever had.
2009:
Yes. Classic false friend: kochen means “boil”.
No, there really is no broad term. Beyond “I have to go cook” (for which kochen is indeed used), you have to be specific.
(Also, what’s up with vinegar is that I don’t like acid in the first place. I tolerate it in tea, but that’s pretty much it.)
So tom- is “cut”? That’s stunningly Indo-European.
2025:
“blood sausage”; also “astonishingly stupid woman” because grammatically feminine.
Danish has lave mad as the (unmarked) most generic term. Jeg skal lave mad nu is a good excuse for getting off the phone.
Koge, like kochen and E cook (noun and verb) is ultimately from L coquere/coquus. The occupational Koch seems obsolete in German, except as a surname, but it’s very much alive in Danish (and continental North Germanic in general).
Gänseschmalz: Put it on the first (end) slice of a freshly baked black rye bread, and the angels will sing for you. Your cardiologist may not thank you, but if you only bake black rye every second weekend like I used to do, the risk is down there with walking on the street.
Blunzn: Does that somehow contain the morpheme Blut?
@lars
Dwds has
Blunze f. obd. ‘plumpe, dicke Person, Blutwurst’ (16. Jh.), zu spätmhd. blunsen ‘aufblähen, aufblasen’, blunst ‘Blähung, Aufgeblasenheit’. Weiteres unbekannt.
So more from blow/bloat then blood.
Gänseschmalz: Put it on the first (end) slice of a freshly baked black rye bread, and the angels will sing for you.
Works quite well with shmalts (chicken fat) and any kind of freshly baked non-sweet bread, not that I bake bread or render chicken fat any more. I’ve never had goose fat.
I find chicken fat to be unpleasant compared to duck or goose. I can’t pinpoint what my reaction is caused by unless it’s got something to do with a lower melting point and a runnier texture, or maybe getting it from a roast bird involves means burning it slightly. But then I’m not from a food culture that saves chicken fat for other uses, it usually ends up in a shortened gravy with the bird. (And store bought duck/goose fat tastes slightly metallic for me, as if it’s been rendered at a high temperature to get a better yield. They don’t carry chicken fat).
My heritage Sunday dinner is one oven-roasted farm chicken with boiled potatoes and gravy (and lettuce, cucumber, tomato salad with a double cream, sugar, lemon juice dressing), and a mousse au citron for pudding. Haven’t had it properly though since my grandmother had to move to the care home in like 1990. I should practice making citronfromage before it’s too late. (It’s a crème bavaroise on lemon juice and zest, just a question of doing it).
No, it’s not obsolete at all.
@Lars
In North America lemon curd is made of sugar, egg yolks, butter, and lemon juice and zest, which doesn’t sound too similar.
I didn’t say lemon curd. We get that, or a British version which seems very similar, but only recently as an import, but it doesn’t really come over as a mousse.
“fromage” is a Danish word stolen from French, but in Danish it very specifically means a crème bavaroise(*): Creme anglaise with added gelatin (husblas) and turned with whipped cream before it stiffens.
________________________
* And it never means cheese.
Fromage means Bavarian cream in Danish? That is a good cross linguistic false friend.
And in Norwegian, naturally. I remember the French word for cheese blowing the collective mind of 15 year olds in French class.
I find chicken fat to be unpleasant compared to duck or goose. I can’t pinpoint what my reaction is caused by unless it’s got something to do with a lower melting point and a runnier texture, or maybe getting it from a roast bird involves means burning it slightly
Mom made shmalts, and I’ve made it, by chopping up the fat and skin of a chicken and cooking on medium-low heat. Add minced onions after about 20 minutes.
My heritage Sunday dinner is one oven-roasted farm chicken with boiled potatoes and gravy (and lettuce, cucumber, tomato salad with a double cream, sugar, lemon juice dressing), and a mousse au citron for pudding
Sounds good. Can I replace the cream and sugar with olive oil or tahini or both, or just skip the dressing?
I don’t usually comment on people’s English here, but since you’re interested in cooking, maybe you won’t mind some cooking terminology.
“Shortened gravy” (with quotation marks) gets on three Google hits. In my American experience, “short” meaning “containing a lot of fat” is used only in baking, and survives mostly in “shortening”, “shortbread”, and “shortcake”. People who know more about the technical side of cooking may use it more widely, but not, as I said, for gravy.
I don’t know what you mean by “crème bavaroise on lemon juice and zest”. On top of? Based on in some way? I might say “flavored with”.
As far as I know, we “fold” whipped cream or beaten egg whites into things, trying not to lose too much air.
P.S. Mom skinned the chicken to make soup for Friday night. She called the cracklings left over from making shmalts “greevens” or “grivenes”, and Dad called them “cracklin’s”. Good, and so good for you.
Gribenes (perhaps related to English greaves ‘the unmeltable residue left after animal fat has been rendered’).
Which Wiktionary says is related to “grove”, though the path from “roughage, brushwood, kindling” to cracklings is not obvious to me. Maybe if people cooked the fat till the cracklings were too hard to eat?
“Fromage means Bavarian cream in Danish? That is a good cross linguistic false friend.”
I think I’ve mentioned this before here, but “kebap” means a kind of stew in Bulgarian and has at least since the mid-19th century. The earliest internet-available citation I have is a recipe book from the 1920s, though.
That seems impossible. However:
this would have to have happened way farther north, in (western?) Central German. Up South, /ns/ and /nt͡ːs/ are very well distinguished (…from each other and even from /nd͡s/).
Northern German Grieben (pl.), southern Grammeln. Or southeastern in any case.
There’s also a Swabian recipe that seems pretty close but not quite from its current iteration. Rostbraten. It’s from the same Bulgarian cookbook from the 1920’s.
In my American experience, “short” meaning “containing a lot of fat” is used only in baking, and survives mostly in “shortening”, “shortbread”, and “shortcake”.
That “short” means “crumbly or tender”: previous Languagehat discussion of “eat short”. Of course, to make baked goods tender you have to put in a lot of fat. But, as noted in the previous discussion, fruit and meat can also be short according to the OED — the entry is from 1914, and that usage is probably obsolete by now, or at least I’ve never heard of it.
I don’t know what “shortened gravy” is.
Bulgarian cookbook writers were already using shortening in their recipes, expecting their readers to know what they were referring for in the early ’20s already. К, they called it шортингъ. And like my grandmother called olive oil, they call it like she called it. That’s what I would have called what youngsters would Crisco also.
@ktschwarz: Thanks, I didn’t know that. I see the OED suggests, “Probably connected with branch I through the notion ‘having little length of fibre’: cf. sense A.I.3.]” This may be unsuitable for a thread about food, but sense A.I.3 is
1618–
short dung, manure, muck: manure containing short straw and in an advanced state of fermentation. (Cf. branch A.IV)
the cracklings left over from making shmalts “greevens” or “grivenes”
i’d bet that’ll be yiddish גריװן | grivn / גריבן | gribn – “rendered chicken fat” (as refoyl puts it) – which gets used, either as a mass noun or as a plural in ־עס | -es, for the cracklings you can strain (or just fork) out of the shmalts. i’ve also run into “gribenits”, which i think is just that “-es” plural ending, reinterpreted at some point along the way.
refoyl has “gribenkes” for “pieces of grivn”, which i’ve never encountered – but also implies that for him the cracklings are a similarly (or more) central meaning than the rendered fat itself.
The recipes for “Kebap” and “Rostbraten” are very similar, in the 1920s Bulgarian cookbook that I have.
@rozele: I’m not taking that bet. I feel sure that the word I spelled “greevens” is Mom’s (and Grandma’s?) anglicization of grivenes.
“Rendered chicken fat” is exactly the phrase I’ve used to define shmalts, for instance when talking about the origin of “schmaltzy”.
@JF: that makes total sense to me as an englishing or yinglishing! i wasn’t trying to say that you were misinterpreting, just guessing that the underlying word is the yiddish (as opposed to the cognate german), pluralized in an english way or with its plural normalized to a more usual english model.
Shortening: Brain fart on my side. Danish has jævning (n) and jævne (v) as a cover term for anything that thickens a sauce, stew or soup, and I so wanted English to have an equivalent cover term that I pulled in the (to me) illogical shortening. (How does margarine make anything “short”?)
But TIL I learned that it just isn’t so, and using a roux or adding flour/cornstarch/potato starch don’t seem to have a common term. (Much less if you use egg yolk, alone or with a roux, which is also legere in Danish, ultimately from L ligare; F lier is not a direct ancestor, but seems to have a broader meaning, as does G legieren).
Danish has fedtegrever for pork cracklings, from MLG it says. Of course it doesn’t mean that in Yiddish, but Denmark is a pig country; chickens were for eggs, and the occasional Sunday roast, but that was a luxury so the byproducts never figured large and didn’t have well defined names. Fried chicken skin has been a thing the last 20 years, maybe.
I wouldn’t even know where the bits of a chicken that can be rendered for fat are, apart from the skin; the usual way to deal with a chicken when not roasted, is cooking it for soup and reserving the meat for a stew the next day [usually with carrot, peas and asparagus]. I don’t remember what usually happens to the skin)..
(After the edit window: I did follow the link to where short ~ crumbly was set out, so forget I asked. Cakes with lots of shortening do tend to be crumbly, as opposed to bread).
So chicken soup in Denmark will have some chicken fat on floating on top, but not in amounts where its taste is noticeable. If it’s allowed to cool (in the fridge) before reheating, you can pick off a lot of the congealed fat. I think that in my family, that was usually discarded along with the boiled skin which is not very attractive, while there was always a tub of pork fat with cracklings at lunch to spread on the bread with specific meats like pickled herring and liver paté. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.
Shortening: Brain fart on my side. Danish has jævning (n) and jævne (v) as a cover term for anything that thickens a sauce, stew or soup, and I so wanted English to have an equivalent cover term that I pulled in the (to me) illogical shortening. […]
But TIL I learned that it just isn’t so, and using a roux or adding flour/cornstarch/potato starch don’t seem to have a common term. (Much less if you use egg yolk, alone or with a roux, which is also legere in Danish, ultimately from L ligare; F lier is not a direct ancestor, but seems to have a broader meaning, as does G legieren).
I’d say “thickened” would work.
I was going to say that “thickened gravy” is redundant, but I remembered that Mom used to put the unmodified juice from roast beef into a gravy boat, and we called it gravy. That might be unusual. I think most Americans would call it “juice” or something. On lower-end restaurant menus, it can be called “au jus”, a noun phrase, as in “roast beef with au jus”, and maybe some people call it that in their homes.
That’s what my mother called it (pronounced “oh zhoos”).
Also I missed the objection to mormordressing* (the one with lemon juice and double cream). It works. And WIWAL, we didn’t really have olive oil. (When my mother was a girl, you had to go to the pharmacy for fancy things like that. Even in the 70s, ground anise seeds were only available there, I remember wanting to try a specific spice mix and having to get it there, and sesame seeds I don’t know if I’d even heard of, much less tahine. There was 1 [one] specialist shop in Copenhagen [tellingly named Specialkøbmanden] that might carry exotic stuff that people had never heard of, though I think it was well known but still exotic stuff I got there on occasion. [Like sandalwood or Japanese plum wine, which your garden variety grocer didn’t carry]). In this age of web shops, they closed.
________
(*) Note the name which clearly marks it as heritage and old fashioned (“grandma’s dressing”). Tahine and tradition don’t go together here.
Danish and Norwegian borrowed French juice (without the particle) as a homonym of sky “cloud”. Danish spells it the same way too, while Norwegian goes for sjy.
@rozele: I didn’t think you were misinterpreting, which is why I said I wouldn’t bet against you. I should have said to begin with that “grivenes” was my attempt at YIVO spelling.
And unthickened meat juice is skysovs. It went through German (High, for once) where the French voiced palatal had become unvoiced, and nativization did the rest. (Schuh:sko::Schü:sky). Swedish has it too, but they spell it jus to hide the fact.
Pretentiouser places will serve you entrecote i egen sky or even au jus. But there seems to be a general awareness that au is already a preposition, i don’t remember seeing i au jus or med au jus.
G legieren means “create an alloy”; I’m not even aware of any metaphorical meanings (like the ones E unalloyed has).
Jus is used and so spelled in the university-and-hospital cafeteria system in Berlin. Back home we have Saft and Sauce*, and that’s it.
* One syllable, so spelling it Soße would be misleading.
Re “greaves”: Joyce uses it to mean “pork cracklings,” presumably an Irishism of his day. One textbook I taught from glossed it hilariously as “shin guards.”
No, they were refering to actual Crisco, I think. The recipe goes “use lard, butter, or шортингъ”. In the ’20s shorting was not only Crisco, but close enough. Crisco had been introduced twenty-one years before the cookbook was published.
Source? “Shin guards” is the gloss given by Don Gifford’s “Joyce Annotated” and Jeri Johnson’s OWC edition and Seamus Deane’s Penguin Classics edition. So it’s not just “one textbook”, but several respected Joyce scholars.
Also I missed the objection to mormordressing* (the one with lemon juice and double cream). It works
I don’t object to it in general; I just don’t think I’d like it. I don’t object to other people’s food. (Except hot dogs. And… I guess there are a few.)
Re “greaves”: Joyce uses it to mean “pork cracklings,” presumably an Irishism of his day. One textbook I taught from glossed it hilariously as “shin guards.”
I tried and failed to think of a sentence where there might be doubt. OK, it’s from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as here:
Perfect. Neither one makes sense, to this non-Irish person.
It’s not just Irish, it’s Irish schoolboy slang (from the perspective of a six year old). So it’s only natural that it makes no sense to outsiders (“number” apparently stands for locker).
As the jocular saying has it, the difference between sauce [sɔːs] and sovs [soʊ̯?s] is that the latter sticks to the potatoes. (kødsaft is juice from raw meat, recommended daily intake zero).
Wiktionary, DWDS, Duden also have “thicken” for G legieren. (eindicken [Kochkunst]).
Pretentiouser places will serve you entrecote i egen sky or even au jus. But there seems to be a general awareness that au is already a preposition, i don’t remember seeing i au jus or med au jus.
In the US, au jus is served in humble diners and in expensive steakhouses. It is used everywhere indifferently as a adverb (on the menu, in the dish name) or as a noun, including “with au jus”, “with rich au jus”, whatever.
Yes, “with a cup of au jus” is common when describing a “French dip” sandwich.
“Pass the au jus.” Oh zhoo, even oh juice.
Ja, jeg siger ikke noget. (See an earlier thread).
Rumor has it that some Swedish restaurant staff hear /entrekåt/, think it’s spelled entrecot or the like in French and hypercorrect to /entrekå/ to be snobbier than οἱ πολλοί. (Not saying it doesn’t happen in Denmark, but the guy I saw making fun of it was Swedish).
Back home we have Saft and Sauce*, and that’s it.
Same here (but we actually write and say Soße). Jus is used only by eateries or cooking aficionados trying to be fancy.
Rumor has it that some Swedish restaurant staff hear /entrekåt/, think it’s spelled entrecot or the like in French and hypercorrect to /entrekå/ to be snobbier than οἱ πολλοί
One of the DJs on my local classical station carefully pronounces “repertoire” without the final /r/. And, back on food, I’ve heard Americans say “coup de grâce” as if it were “coup de gras”.
I’ve heard Americans say “coup de grâce” as if it were “coup de gras”.
That’s quite common; Wiktionary chastises it thus:
I’ve heard Americans say “coup de grâce” as if it were “coup de gras”.
I’ve never heard Americans pronounce it otherwise.
Americans rendering French as non-rhotic is surprisingly common. I think it’s a way of dealing with [ʀ ~ ʁ], perhaps combined with the idea that fancy French words are best rendered in the fanciest possible English, i.e. that of Hollywood villains.
In the US, some dishes are served with au jus, others with con queso cheese.
In Norwegian, entrecôte med béarnaise og pommes frites is invariably* [antrə’ko: me bɛr’ne: o pɔm’fri:]. It’s not associated with snobbery. Insistence on the final consonant is.
*well, no. The phonetic tranlscription is too narrow to catch different degrees of phonological nativization and different dialects.
It’s not non-rhoticity in general, I think. Just -oir(e), pronounced with an exaggeratedly long [ɑ], backed as far as possible.
Previous generations knew how to pronounce coup de grâce correctly, apparently (archive.org borrow).
There’s a Tom & Jerry episode that ends in “C’est la guerre !”, with [ɛɐ̯] at the end.
Re “greaves”: Joyce uses it to mean “pork cracklings,” presumably an Irishism of his day.
Is there a difference between greaves and cracklings? Some sources say greaves is a type of cracklings, some say they’re similar but not the same, some think they’re just different words for the same thing. From a previous discussion here:
And it doesn’t seem to be an Irishism, just an English word that’s not common but does exist in a lot of places, including the US: it’s in Merriam-Webster (Unabridged only, not Collegiate), AHD, and Random House.
There’s a Tom & Jerry episode that ends in “C’est la guerre !”, with [ɛɐ̯] at the end.
Hm. That could just be nativized into English. Is the rest of it in non-rhotic English? I haven’t watched Tom and Jerry in a while.
I think that in AmE-nativized French, Pinot noir would be pronounced with a [nwʌɹ] if you’re rhotic, maybe [nwaː] if you’re Bostonian (did I get that right?), but in snobbish Foe-French it would be [nwɑ̠ː] or [nwɒ̠ː] (in any case, it is der rigerr to have a distinct initial stress on Pinot.)
There’s no speaking at all in the whole rest of the episode. In most episodes there isn’t any whatsoever.
Nonrhotic pronunciation of “memoir” by otherwise rhotic Americans is disturbingly common.
DM: Americans rendering French as non-rhotic is surprisingly common.
KI: Nonrhotic pronunciation of “memoir” by otherwise rhotic Americans is disturbingly common.
I don’t remember hearing it in “memoir” (or “reservoir”), but I have in “au ‘voir”
I don’t think I’ve heard non-rhotic pronunciations of “Frère Jacques, dormez-vous?” or “Parlez-vous” or “Pierre” or “amour”. I remember hearing nonzetatic (?) pronunciations of “Marseillaise” but not nonrhotic. I think this is about false beliefs regarding final consonants in French, not nonrhoticism.
Re “greaves”: I recall now that another textbook with the same Portrait selection glossed it bizarrely as “congealed grease,” presumably from a misunderstanding of a dictionary definition on the part of someone unfamiliar with chicharrones. (Which is what they’re usually called in the US these days, though my family still uses the Appalachian “pork skins.”)
@ulr: Thanks for “locker”. So it makes sense either way, though wouldn’t lots of boys keep shin guards in their lockers, if they play some kind of football at this school? But I can’t argue with the Joyce experts on either side of the scrum.
@Jerry Friedman: I’m not a Joyce expert, but I’m pretty sure my reaction when I first read the book was that it was an odd but quite comprehensible way to say “shin guards in his locker.”
@Trond Engen, Lars Mathiesen: It seems fitting that Scandinavians should use a word for “cloud” to mean a secondary meat product. After all, the Vikings supposedly believed clouds were made of brains.
Good point, @Brett. But the two Danish sky words are homonyms, and not thought of as “the same” word. I can’t speak for the Norwegian contingent, though.
@Trond, so Danes are more fancy than you mountain trolls? [ɑŋ?.tʰʁɛ.kʰɐt me.bɛɐ?.nɛ:.sɔ pɔm.fʁit] and I’ve never heard [pɔm.fʁi]. There’s a protagonist in a children’s book called Pomfrit.
I told the story before, but once in a baker shop I saw a Sarah Bernhard cake spelled as sabena. Which is a plausible spelling for the French pronunciation, but going the other way will give you the wrong /a/s and the wrong stress by default so it took me a minute to parse. (Default second syllable stress because foreign, like the (defunct) Belgian national airline; the French /a/s do occur as allophones of a in Danish, but not in that context).
non-rhotic pronunciations of… “Parlez-vous”
if memory serves, “polly-voo” had its day – though i think that may be because of actual non-rhoticism, rather than any attempt at Authenteek Franch, because i definitely agree that the things under discussion are
about false beliefs regarding final consonants in French, not nonrhoticism.
Good question. If we can believe Wikipedia’s sources, “Sam Weller Widdowson is credited for bringing shin guards to [football] in 1874. … Widdowson cut down a pair of cricket shin pads … Other players ridiculed him initially, but shin guards eventually caught on as players saw the practical use of protecting their shins.” The scene in Portrait can be assumed to take place in 1888, when James Joyce started school. So perhaps shin guards were still a new fashion, especially if we’re talking about schoolboys rather than pros, so that only the coolest/richest boys had them.
@rozele: Huck Finn’s non-rhotic dialogue includes:
AmE is never as thorough about eradicating syllable-final r’s as is Haitian — Americans still pronounce the r’s in derrière, Haitian dèyè. Even kònfleks and seyfing.
In my experience, flæskesvær is from the skin of the pig, and so are the Spanish brand sold in the fancy supermarket (Tocifritos brand chicharrones). Pork rinds?. While (fedte-)grever =? greaves are from various bits of connective tissue that come along when rendering pork fat from other bits of the pig.
(The pork rinds are fried in some of the fat that attaches to the pork skin, but a lot of that fat can still be on the Danish version. Not so much the Spanish ones).
My dietician will not allow further research into this subject. Too much salt.
@ktschwarz: Thanks. But what kind of football were they playing? It looks to me a bit more like rugby or Gaelic football than soccer. If so, shin guards might have come in earlier or later. Anyway, I see there was also cricket at Stephen’s school, so if the greaves were shin guards rather than cracklings, they might have been the longer-used ones for cricket. But in any case, it’s possible that only richer or cooler kids had them.
There are no shin guards in soccer.
David, I deduce you’re not a soccer player and haven’t clicked on the Wikipedia link above or typed “soccer shin guards” into Google ;). They’re worn underneath socks, so if you just occasionally see pictures or TV, you might not realize they’re there. They’re officially required, although some pros flout the rules or try to get away with tiny ones.
When I played in the league for 8-9-year-olds, there certainly were shin guards. We wanted shin guards like the pros. Of course, this was back when the pros played on potato fields and everyone knew that a good sliding tackle was performed with the body rigid as an iron rod ramming right into the opponent’s ankle (or above).
Asportual male. Of course we played in school, often the entire two hours of sports per week was nothing but playing soccer, but never in proper attire.
We played basketball and football in primary school. There were football competitions, but not basketball ones. There was also handball. Early ’90s, Bulgaria. I won a football game between two schools (13 year olds?) by scoring a penalty. In high school Volleyball was a much bigger thing. I played a receiver.
When I played youth soccer, around forty years ago, shin guards were mandatory. However, there were two kinds of shin guards allowed. Mine were what I would think of as “greaves.” They were hard plastic with a padded backing, worn under our high socks and also held in place with velcro straps. The other style were wraparound sleeves with dense foam padding on the fronts. They were probably more comfortable. However, to me they looked a lot less protective, and I actually saw a teammate injured while wearing them, thanks to hard kick that tore right through the padding.
Brett: They were hard plastic with a padded backing, worn under our high socks and also held in place with velcro straps.
Those are the ones we used, held in place by bandage tape wound around on the outside of the socks. I don’t remember why, maybe it looked more rugged that way, or maybe we didn’t want to rip off the tape after the match. Either way, it didn’t keep the shin guards in place on the shin of an 8 year old.
Brett: When the guy dunks to you, it fucking hurts.
…for the boys. The girls mostly played the abovementioned volleyball.
We did play basketball and hockey on rare occasions. That’s pretty much it in the last 6 or more years of school. Handball maybe once.
David, being on the receiving end of a forceful servis, when you are the dedicateted receiver is not something I would… Just hold your hands together… It hurts quite a lot.
I don’t think we ever played soccer in school sports lessons; I guess the program assumed that we would play that anyway, and we did, in the school yard on Wednesdays when the Catholic pupils had mass (because that meant the Protestant boys and irreligious boys like me had time to kill). We did play lots of volleyball (which was one of the few sports I didn’t totally suck at) and even more basketball (which I hated, because I am relatively small), mostly due to the fact that we had three tall guys in our class who played basketball in a club and the teachers liked to have such good players to work with. (Out of ball games, I remember that we also had baseball for a couple of weeks, which we all found boring.)
Oh, I did once take a ball on the chin; my jaw joints hurt for days. Similar and probably worse things happened to other people.
Occasionally, the girls played soccer, too. One occasion on a wet lawn is memorable because one girl slipped and suddenly found herself doing splits on the ground, legs 180° apart. That hurt. It’s one reason I’m glad I can only do 90°.
Soccer indoors gave us what should be the example sentence for Viennese mesolect: the teacher saying up close “And you guys go into the big [hall], grab a ball and kick.” Spaces for dramatic pauses:
[ˌʔunˑˈd̥iːɐ̯ ˌg̊eˑts͡iŋˈg̊ʀoːsːn̩ ˌnemt͡sɶ̭çɛ̬nɛmˈb̥aˑlˑ ˌʔund̥ːut͡sˈg̊ig̊ːŋ̩]
Giggen is good 😊.
David : We never played soccer indoors — we played on concrete, like hard pre-pubescent persons. The gym was for volleyball, handball and (sometimes) basketball. The only time I’ve played soccer on grass in an official match is when I was trying for the youth team of Vihren Sandanski, who are currently in Second League.
EDIT: The very idea of me being a professional athlete seems absurd to me, but it was a thing you got pressured into.
What does Vihren mean?
Edit: Never mind.
I’ve climbed Vihren a lot of times, the last time it took sixteen hours, through спано поле, and the cow lakes.
When you’re hiking you should be careful about where you pitch your tent. If you pitch your tent at the wrong place, you might have a problem. Don’t pitch it at a place where boar might go around rooting for tubers. If you’re in a place where there are boar, obviously. Be aware of somewhat marshy environments.
also watch out for snowstorms! though maybe climate change means they’re less likely in july these days, which is when i caught one in that part of the pirin about 20 years ago. (the treckers’ hut where we stayed that night was warm and lovely, and the informal harmony singing that night was transcendent)
John Emerson : Max Miller of Tasting History also recently (as in a few weeks ago) mentioned “A Soup for the Qan”, but your comment (the first one on this post) is from 2009, where you say it costs ~$350 — there’s a paperback for ~$60 now, and the original hardcover goes for ~$196. Still a bit too expensive for me, even the paperback.