Memory is a strange thing. I was looking at a loaf of bread when my mind suddenly tossed up a word I hadn’t thought of in decades: skalk. This is what we called the heel (the end slice) in my family when I was growing up, and since once I left home and went off to college I never heard anyone else use it, I must have let it slip to the deepest recesses of my wordhoard… but now there it was, so I googled, and found Maryn Liles’ webpage What Do You Call the End of a Loaf of Bread? Sure enough, after a few paragraphs we get:
The word “skalk” was popular among users from Norway. However, it seemed that this term could be seen as dated, as responders said that skalk was a term their grandparents used.
My mother was Norwegian-American, so that explains that. And Wiktionary has skalk ‘rind, crust,’ though oddly they only have it for Swedish and don’t give an etymology beyond “Doublet of skal and skilja,” which isn’t really satisfactory — it’s a Norwegian word in good standing, and the Norske Akademis ordbok suggests it may be from a Middle Low German word meaning ‘small piece.’
In Modern Hebrew it’s a kiss, נשיקה neshika, which I wager is borrowed from Eastern European languages, but for some odd reason I knew it growing up as leshika, which has no attested root and might just have been born as a corruption of the former?
An interesting word, and yes, your form looks like a variant of the official term.
They really ought to give the form of that purported Middle Low German word. There’s a homographic word skalk, which is the one that I know from Danish, which means servant (see Modern High German Schalk, Dutch schalk). You can get to that from the NAOB page if you click “Likt stavede oppslagsord”. It also says that there’s a third meaning “piece of a beam that holds the eaves of a roof” which would seem related to the bread thing.
Oh, and the Danish word for the last slice of a loaf is simply “endeskive”.
Yuval: at home we called it לֶחִי lekhi ‘cheek’, but later I heard neshika as well.
My favorite AmE term for it is “booty”.
We called the end slice the crust — which doesn’t really make sense, but I didn’t figure that out for quite a number of years. I don’t remember learning ‘heel’ until I came to the US.
Gorbushka is my canonical exmaple of what some call de-diminutive.
A child will say about a large gorbushka: “it is not gorbushka, it is a whole gorbukha!”
gorb “hunch” so gorbushka is “hunch-ette”.
gorbyl’ a similar part of a wooden log.
skalka is a rolling pin.
Rosenthal’s מילון הסלנג המקיף (‘Comprehensive Slang Dictionary’) has both leshika (‘old fashioned’) and neshika. Under neshika he explains that ‘kiss’ refers to the spot where loaves touch each other in the oven. Under leshika, he mentions Polish całusek, ‘kiss; heel of bread’ (misspelled with an l). The implication is that it’s a calque, plus phonological contamination from the source.
The Academy follows the same explanation, and also quotes the Mishna (Tevul Yom 1,1), ‘loaves bite each other’, meaning stuck together, so that they pull off a piece when separated.
my mind suddenly tossed up a word I hadn’t thought of in decades: skalk. This is what we called the heel (the end slice)
But we had ‘skalken’/ ‘heel’ of a loaf and related words on a thread only a week (or two?) ago — of course on a random topic.
Or 2011 or last year.
Ah, Trond’s “skalken” obviously slipped right by me.
Or! It may have lodged in my subconscious and popped out a week later.
On the TV show Succession the British mum at one point pulls a bag of frozen “knobbies” out of the freezer. Her husband doesn’t like the ends of the loaf she explains, and she saves them. The show runner/head writer is British so I assume “knobbies” must be current some where in the UK.
Were there other Norwegian-origin loanwords current in the household but not generally in adjacent AmEng-speaking households? Was your mother’s assimilation such that there was nothing in the pronunciation of “skalk” that marked it out separately from any other AmEng word in her lexicon?
I’ve never encountered skalk, but I’m wondering if skerrick – of obscure etymology, dialectal, and current across Australia – came through the centuries in parallel with it. OED’s first (obsolete) sense is “a halfpenny”: cited only as scurrick, in Grose’s Classical Dictionary of Vulgar Tongue (1823). The second (derivative?) sense is pretty much coeval:
Earliest citations:
OED also has an entry for scuddick, pretty much the same meanings and like skerrick first cited in 1823.
It’s cilcyn in Welsh, which looks almost as if it could be related, though it’s an illusion: per GPC, the cil bit, “corner, edge”, is cognate with Latin culus and the cyn is borrowed from cuneus: so “arsewedge.”* Makes sense …
By itself, it means “lump”, but cilcyn bara is “heel of a loaf of bread” and cilcyn caws is “cheese rind.”
* OK, “edgewedge”, if we’re going to get all family-friendly about it.
Were there other Norwegian-origin loanwords current in the household but not generally in adjacent AmEng-speaking households?
Oh, sure — komle, and uff da, and lefse, and doubtless others that aren’t springing to mind.
Was your mother’s assimilation such that there was nothing in the pronunciation of “skalk” that marked it out separately from any other AmEng word in her lexicon?
Actually, she said it more like “skulk,” which is how I used to think of it; I just pinned down the proper spelling while preparing this post.
In Ireland I’ve only heard “heel”. I was surprised when the question went viral a few years ago to find it less dominant elsewhere. “Heel” is an apter image for some shapes of loaf than for others, where “elbow” or “sole” might do better.
Some people apparently say “doorstop”, which is nice but clashes with “doorstep” for a particularly thick slice.
For a Sunday roast joint of beef or lamb, the “end piece” was so called by my mother. For my juvenile peer group, the last bit of a chocolate bar was the “ass”, also extended daringly to the last swig of a beverage can.
We always called it the “crust”. I had never heard of the “skalk”, or the “heel” for that matter.
Danish skalk was necromanced and used for early mediaeval servants in early 1800s romantic fiction/poetry. ON skalkr, OE scealc. If I’m reading the dictionary right, it also survived organically in a sense of “trickster.” Obviously that’s not the source of the Norwegian word, at least it would be a stretch to get from “trickster” to end slice. (Stretchy just so story: Matron (madmor) promises you a slice of her newly baked wheat bread, but you only get the tiny end slice so it “tricks” you. [Has to be a wheat loaf; black rye is baked in a form and is square throughout so the end slice is actually the best because more Maillard goodness)]). But nah, getting it from skal is more likely.
A really thick slice of black rye is a humpel or hestens fødselsdag = ‘the horse’s birthday’. I don’t know if people fed rye bread to their horses back when horses existed or if it’s a thing of riding stables. First attested 1945. Maybe it’s just disparaging as in “only a horse would be happy to eat that.”
Danish has a lot of allophony for /a/, for instance kat is almost identical to E cat while kap is very like E cup. (I guess the labial dissimilates). Skalk is even more front and +ATR than kat and would not be mistaken for E skulk. But if one thing is certain, it’s that things will be different in Norwegian, even Bokmål.
Hat: Actually, she said it more like “skulk,” which is how I used to think of it
I was going to ask about the vowel. Norw. skalk has a short a (rhyming with falk and kalk). In my Urban Eastern variety, the a is [ɑ]. In Hat’s ancestral Southwestern, it’s cardinal [a].
In Eastern the l is retroflex [ɭ], which I think here might sound like r to an American. In Southwestern it’s [l].
@Lars: The Southwestern varieties are phonologically more Danish-like than the Urban Eastern quasi-standard Bokmål. Modulo an uncountable number of Danish lenitions, obviously.
If to skulk was a strong verb, maybe it would come out as “skulk, skalk, has skilken”?
There’s a homographic word skalk, which is the one that I know from Danish, which means servant (see Modern High German Schalk, Dutch schalk).
I also immediately thought of the same Germanic word; it’s the shal in marshal, which originally meant “the servant in charge of the horses”.
“the servant in charge of the horses”
That’s what they want you to think.
But really, it means “back end of a horse.”
homographic — is this Lars the same as this Lars, because then I’m impressed with my ability to forget stuff overnight.
Danish does have at skulke, but it’s weak and related to E scowl, not to shells or marshals.
In Hat’s ancestral Southwestern, it’s cardinal [a].
She may well have said /skalk/, but my wee unlinguistified brain interpreted it as “skulk.”
Or! She didn’t speak Norwegian (though her parents tried to get her and her brothers to learn it), so her wee unlinguistified brain may have interpreted her parents’ word as “skulk.”
…but that’s only about… Toastbrot – brick-shaped things with square ends, so the end slices are identical to all other slices except they’ve got crust on a side. It’s not about actual loaves.
That’s the only kind of loaf most of us Yanks are familiar with.
…which is only a literary word meaning “jester” anymore.
So half of the words aren’t really semantically comparable. Much like words for vaguely breadroll-type things across German actually.
the shal in marshal, which originally meant “the servant in charge of the horses”
I learned this in a former age from Mario Pei, who gave the original as marah-skalk; I can see now that this is typical Pei carelessness for marh-skalk.
Bathrobe, if you called a heel of bread the “crust,” what did you call he whole exterior of the loaf?
I can’t speak for bathrobe, but as I said earlier, my family used crust for heel – and we also used crust to mean the crispy exterior of the whole loaf.
I don’t recall any confusion about what was meant, in practice. Somehow we managed despite our limited vocabulary.
The OED entry for crust is unrevised from 1893, so no help there.
Not necessarily. Old High German was full of optional epenthetic vowels. Apparently they’re an expected byproduct when a language in which the total length of the syllables in a word is more important than their number, and which is at the time undergoing vowel reduction, is written by people who aren’t familiar with writing that language (or at all): the writers are not sure which unstressed vowels are real enough to write down, and they speak the words slowly to themselves to imagine a written form for them because they’ve never seen one, so they err on the side of epenthesis. The same phenomenon is known from Runic Norse, where e.g. wulfa suddenly appears as wulafa sometimes.
I don’t recall any confusion about what was meant, in practice.
When I read in novels about a hungry person finding somewhere a “crust of bread” to eat, I assume they’ve found a heel. That’s what many people leave to the last, right ?
Why do they do that ? Because it won’t lie flat to be buttered, and It’s useful in keeping the inside of a loaf from drying out.
In fact the all-encompassing crust also keeps the inside from drying out.
When you say someone has a lot of crust, you imply that they are a heel.
It all fits together.
“knobbies”
this seems like it could be related to “knubl”, which is my family word for a loaf-end. i’ve always assumed it was somehow yiddish-derived (which for the relevant side of the family would mean from bukovine, so could be connected to ukrainian, romanian, or german), but i’ve never found a source. this is making me wonder whether it could actually be from the other part of that side, which is mostly original-settler english and dutch (i.e. 17thC emigrants). but my lack of knowledge of Succession is absolute, so i’ve got no idea whether to expect an echt-anglo term from the character/writer or a yiddish-derived one or what.
100 German words foran end of a bread loaf.
I know of no word for an end of a meatloaf. Probably because it’s not tapered. Despite that, there seems to be no risk that your mouth will slam shut.
Giggl is a giggle.
A laff of a loaf.
I read some Jespersen at an impressionable age, and I still remember the claim that ON hrafnr was *harabanar in Runic. Probably a claim about the spoken form, but I’ve mostly repressed the memory.
*lightbulb moment*
Knübbele is no. 93 in the amazing list Stu just posted. (Click on “reading mode” to escape the cookie notice.) For other vowels and/or another diminutive suffix (or none), see 12. Knapp, 13. Knäppchen = 58. Kneppche = 17. Knäppken, 59. Kneppel, 10. Knippchen, 20. Knüppchen.
(Also, finally I learn what einen Kanten Brot, common in old literature, means exactly.)
Knubbel has 2.32 megaghits; it doesn’t seem to have this specific meaning, but is broadly used in northern Germany for “small knot-like thickenings” as de:wiktionary puts it.
More likely about a written form. The last two vowels may still have been real depending on how old the inscription is exactly, and the first would be just such a case of epenthesis in very slow speaking.
I wouldn’t put it past Jespersen to assume all the vowels were real in 200CE. But I’m not looking it up, thank you.
I should probably just start using my full name. I think there are only the two of us.
In Dalmatia we said “kika”. It was my favourite part of a loaf.
As a kid, when I’d get sent to the bakery to pick up a loaf of bread for breakfast, the kika would not survive the walk home. I couldn’t resist the temptation of freshly baked bread, still warm, as I carried it home wrapped in paper.
When we came to Australia, there were no bakeries near our house. We had bread home delivered. It was different to Dalmatian bread. It was the sliced square loaf that comes in a plastic bag. The bread itself was soft and fluffy, but it had no hard crust. The ends of this bread were the worst part of it.
Even worse was when the Tip Top bakery stopped delivering bread: we’d do a weekly shop, buying 4-5 loaves. One would be left in the bread box and the others would go into the freezer. The ends of the thawed-out loaves were edible, but no one really wanted them.
I searched The English Dialect Dictionary for mentions of loaf. In addition to many, many kinds of loaves, I also found:
coffin, ‘A large hole in the crumb of a loaf, said to be an omen of death’; also grave.
cuckold’s slice, ‘The first or uppermost slice of a loaf of bread. Also called Loun’s-piece.’
duff, ‘The soft, spongy part of a loaf, new cheese, turnip, &c.’
gob, ‘The crumb or middle part of a loaf, from which the crust has been broken off.’
heel, ‘The bottom remaining crust of a loaf; the top crust of a loaf cut off’.
jave ‘The upper crust of a loaf of bread’ [“not known to our other correspondents.”]
kissing-crust, ‘That part of the crust of a loaf which has been joined to another when in the oven; the end crust of a loaf; rough, protuberant crust on a loaf.’
knave-shive, ‘The first cut of the loaf.’
knob, ‘A nub of a loaf, a crusty corner.’
knobble, ‘A piece from off a loaf; a crust, the ‘kissing-crust’ between two loaves.’
loon’s piece, ‘The uppermost slice of a loaf of bread.’
nob, ‘A nub of the loaf.’
noggin, ‘Corner crust of loaf.’
over-rind, ‘the top crust of a loaf.’
pax-wax, ‘Crusty corners of bread caused by the loaf-tins being filled too full, and so the contents falling over the side.’
fith, ‘The crumb of a loaf.’
scruff, ‘The crust of a loaf.’
selvedge, ‘The slight crust on the sides of a loaf of bread.’
skeel, ‘To strip the crust off a loaf.’
tinker’s-toast, ‘the crust at the side of a loaf which has been one of the outside loaves of a batch.’
cheek, ‘The side of a loaf of bread.’
I never knew a word for the interior of a loaf, other than crumb, and that only from recent writing about artisanal, foo-foo bread baking.
The first or uppermost slice of a loaf of bread
I assume “uppermost” here refers to the practice of holding a loaf vertically when slicing it with a knife, with one heel up and the other one down? My grandfather used to slice bread this way. In my parents’ home, we had a breadcutter in which you put the bread horizontally and cut it with a one-hinged cutter at the end. In our household, we just use a cutting board and a knife when we have unsliced bread (mostly if we buy baguettes), but generally we buy our bread sliced (they slice it for you freshly at the bakery; we normally only buy half-loafs that we eat in a couple of days)
I never knew a word for the interior of a loaf, other than crumb
TIL crumb, which like crust is annoyingly ambiguous. French distinguishes mie from miette; the former was one of my first French untranslatables. For white bread my family called the interior part the white, but that doesn’t generalise.
Along with “croûte” (the hard part outside a loaf of bread, i.e. crust), “mie” (the soft part inside a loaf of bread) and “miette” (crumb, historically though not synchronically* a diminutive form of the former word), in French the first slice of a loaf of bread is known as “entame” (feminine), derived from the verb “entamer”, “to begin, to undertake”: French has no word that I know of which specifically refers to the end slice of a loaf of bread.
What I find curious about this discussion is that there seems to be no other language mentioned so far which uses a derivative of “to begin” or the like to refer to the first slice (with crust on one side) of a loaf of bread: I would have assumed this to be -well, not universal, but at least widespread. Apparently not.
*In the odd though memorable 1995 movie LA CITÉ DES ENFANTS PERDUS one of the main characters (a little girl) is named “Miette”, but the name is consistenty realized by the other actors as a bisyllabic /mi(j)ɛt/, instead of monosyllabic /mjɛt/, which is the normal realization of the French noun, and I distinctly remember not parsing the character’s name as either the word for “crumb” or a diminutive of any kind before later seeing her name written out in a movie review (Having failed to see the connection, I imagined it would be spelled “millette” or the like).
Noms régionaux des bouts du pain
(at the end of the article)
#
Croûton, quignon, chrochon ou trognon
Le bout du pain – la partie terminale, souvent dure, de la croûte – fait l’objet de beaucoup d’appellations régionales, dont l’explication résulte souvent du dialecte de la région concernée. La plupart de ces termes commencent par la lettre « C », probablement en référence à la croûte. Ainsi, selon les régions, on parle de croûton, de chrochon, de croûtion, de chrotchon ou de cujignon. Mais il y a aussi d’autres noms, comme trognon, quignon, gousignon ou entamon. Beaucoup de gens associent le terme régional utilisé pour ce morceau à leur propre enfance. Ces appellations affectueuses indiquent que ce bout du pain, plutôt dur, devait être bien apprécié – surtout par les enfants. On donnait souvent ce bout à sucer aux jeunes enfants, entre autres pour soulager la douleur lors de la poussée des dents.
#
there seems to be no other language mentioned so far which uses a derivative of “to begin” or the like to refer to the first slice (with crust on one side) of a loaf of bread:
Well, das Brot anschneiden is close. However, you do it and that’s it. There is no particular idea involved of having taken the first step in an enterprise of bread slicing. Not infrequently you do continue slicing, but you are under no semantic, cognitive pressure to do so.
For a time I was annoyed that entamer does not mean “to tame” but always something else. After several decades I got over it.
@Étienne
re Miette, as a name it would seem to be diminutive of Marie, so something like Mariette > Miette, so it would keep the long vowel (compare Maria > Mia?).
— Hans: I wondered about the top/bottom thing too. Then I remembered my grandmother’s way of slicing bread, with the loaf and then the blade against her chest. It made me nervous.
At least in one case, over-rind, the reference is to the “hump” of the loaf. It’s also used to speak of that part when it has separated from the loaf, because of too much oven rise.
— It never occurred to me that there should be different words for the first heel and the last one, but it makes sense of course: one is choice (if you like crust), the other is often stale. How does the last heel work with the top/bottom orientation? You can’t slice the ends of a loaf vertically, the way you do with a whole one.
— mollymooly/Etienne: I don’t understand the difference between mie and miette.
mie is “the crumb” (the inside of the bread), miette is “a crumb”.
Here are the Dutch words, with nice maps: https://taalverhalen.be/minionderzoekje/uiteinde-brood-korst-kap-of-kont/. The Belgian and Frisian words are new to me. My parents always said kapje, so that’s what I also use.
Other Norwegian words:
skorpe “crust”. This is also what the prototypical poor old woman in the folktale will have left to eat.
smule “crumb”. Smulene fra de rikes bord “The crumbs from the rich man’s table” (Luke 16:31)
kavring “bread preserved by drying, or crumbs thereof”. This is skorpa in Swedish, and I suspect this was also the food of the poor old woman.
krutong (< French) “dried dice of bread”
I’m trying to remember if my grandmother had a special word for the soft part of the bread, but it’s blank. I think she just said brød. I’m certain she had no special word for the holes in the bread, since she used to tell that “in the old days we said that the baker is living in the holes”. I remember understanding the “living” = “income” = “profit” = “air sold as bread” metaphor before I was able to explain it.
When the starving eat “a crust f bread,” I picture the part that’s left after someone’s torn the soft part away from a whole loaf.
See, that’s bread.
Your comment is the first that introduces the concept of different terms for the first and the last “slice” to me. They’re identical!
♫ Alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei… ♩♩♩
I don’t have one either.
Y/OEDD: knave-shive ‘The first cut of the loaf.’
Interesting. Norw. (brød)skive “slice (of bread)”
I’ve heard stemorskive “stepmother slice” for a small slice from near the end of the loaf and stemorsida “the stepmother side” for (having butter/jam/cheese on) the smaller of the two sides of the slice.
I never knew a word for the interior of a loaf, other than crumb, and that only from recent writing about artisanal, foo-foo bread baking.
Thus in 1888:
Something like the opposite, but reportedly in less supervised times (my parents’ generation), kids would buy a loaf of bread and cut off the end to eat just the soft insides. And then “fill” the interior with butter before eating the crust. (I put scare quotes on “fill” because actually filling the loaf would be 1) expensive beyond the reach of kids, 2) nauseating. But spreading butter around the inside of the crust and then collapsing it into a giant “sandwich” sounds like something I’d have loved to do when I didn’t have to consider saturated fats and gluten).
Apropos of which, I heard an unsourced rumour that the “animal fats are bad for you” advice has been refined by actually controlling for the kind of fat, and milk fats should be at least partly exonerated.
I just put butter and honey on a skalk and had it for breakfast.
Butter, here, on the end skalk (I usually eat the first one plain, if I made the bread.)
Evidence for the ancient custom of buttering sandwiches:
https://allpoetry.com/The-King's-Breakfast
It may be that American exceptionalism here reflects their notorious republicanism.
My mother always gave me the heels, saying “they’ll make your hair curly.” I didn’t take this seriously within my memory, but I developed a taste for them. Now my wife always gives them to me when she bakes bread.
Evidence for the ancient custom of buttering sandwiches:
You must know (said the Judge) that Americans may put butter/margarine on sandwiches when there is no other ingredient on the bread or when they are sweet (as with marmalade). Our avoidance of butter has to do with savory (sliced meat, cheese, etc.) sandwiches only.
“they’ll make your hair curly.”
Yes, my mother used to say that, too. However, this proved to be untrue.
On the othet hand, my wife and daughter spend a lot of effort on making their hair uncurly. I suspect a feminist plot of some kind.
But Americans generally don’t have butter sandwiches or marmalade sandwiches (with or without butter). They put those things on single slices of bread or toast or rolls or biscuits, and would not call the result a sandwich.
Exactly. I can’t imagine calling a slice of buttered bread a sandwich.
Yes, Americans generally like to put butter on toasted bread, toasted bagels, toasted English muffins, etc. The common theme being bread that is warm enough to melt the (almost always refrigerated) butter.
I’m not sure I’ve had anything described as an “open-faced sandwich” since childhood meals of turkey on bread covered with gravy. Certainly avocado toast or bruschetta or smoked salmon on a bagel or a poached egg on toast would not be described that way. “Sandwich” very strongly implies two slices of bread around something else, and that’s essential to the figurative and verbal uses of “sandwich”.
Well, maybe smørrebrød/smörgås is one of those can’t-be-expressed-in-English concepts, then. I’ve always just accepted on face value that open-faced sandwich was a good way of denoting the things in English, despite knowing that sandwiches are supposed to have to pieces of bread. Are there really no culinary traditions in the US that puts cold cuts/cheese/whatever on a single piece of bread, so you could steal the name of that?
F tartine comes close, there is even a picture of Danish smørrebrød on the fr.wiki page. So for a frenchperson, a piece of smørrebrød seems to be une tartine and not un sandwich.
La bruschetta is also not a sandwich.
Are there really no culinary traditions in the US that puts cold cuts/cheese/whatever on a single piece of bread, so you could steal the name of that?
to me, at least, not with a distinct term. i’d say “bread & cheese”, “bread & jam”, “herring on rye bread”, or “a bagel with lox and cream cheese” (and acknowledge “a bagel and shmear”), but those are all nonce labels (even if i might say them fairly often). to me “open-faced sandwich” comes closest to an overall name, but it very much implies a reasonably elaborate multi-ingredient sandwich that’s missing one slice of bread, not just something eaten on a slice of bread.
Can confirm.
Then I remembered my grandmother’s way of slicing bread, with the loaf and then the blade against her chest. It made me nervous.
Yes, that’s how my grandfather did it, too. Never made me nervous because he always seemed to be totally in control of the process. And he was able to cut straight slices of even size that way…
On the other hand, my wife and daughter spend a lot of effort on making their hair uncurly.
It goes both ways, of course: the curly-haired uncurl their hair, and the not-curly-haired curl their hair.
I’m not sure I’ve had anything described as an “open-faced sandwich” since childhood meals of turkey on bread covered with gravy.
I’ve had open-faced pastrami reuben sandwiches on frequent occasions. (Note that there is no longer anything Russian about Russian dressing, as it has not contained caviar of any sort for the last seventy years or so.)
elaborate: Yes, very elaborate versions exist at the 10-15-20 USD(*) level in sit-down restaurants, but the things in people’s lunchboxes are not. Black rye, butter/margarine, and one slice of a cold cut or cheese or liver paté. If you don’t make them yourself, you can get slighty better versions for about 3 USD a piece in take-away delikatessens. (Which means slightly fancier garnishes; everybody has a jar of pickled beetroots). The more basic versions are often just called håndmadder ~ ‘hand foods’, but it’s all smørrebrød.
(And it’s the basic versions that I find dissonant with sandwich. Given that we now have burger restaurants that serve the burger with the top half of the bun on the side because the “contents” are piled so high that you have to use a knife and fork instead of your hands, and still having the top bun there would threaten immediate collapse — given that, I say, why not an elaborate sandwich without the essentially unnecessary top slice).
In other news, TIL that smørrebrød seems to have a secure etymology as a respelling of smør-og-brød (since the early 20th) reflecting the reduced value of og in speech.
______________
(*) We are talking about things like a steak minute or a good slice of calf’s liver with their garnishes, and a half slice of black rye hidden underneath as an excuse for calling it smørrebrød. No sauce, though. Most people will only need the one serving. (Spot the bread).
I’ve always just accepted on face value that open-faced sandwich was a good way of denoting the things in English, despite knowing that sandwiches are supposed to have two pieces of bread.
And so says my native-speaker Sprachgefühl as well. It is one of those adjective-noun compounds that extends rather than restricting the meaning of the underlying noun, just as stone lion (e.g. at the New York Public Library) is perfectly cromulent even though all referents of lion are made out of meat. But if I had an open-faced sandwich and and a two-slice one side by side, I would not hesitate to refer to them as these sandwiches; I might be a little more reluctant to speak of these lions if only one of them were stone.
we now have burger restaurants that serve the burger with the top half of the bun on the side because the “contents” are piled so high that you have to use a knife and fork instead of your hands, and still having the top bun there would threaten immediate collapse
It so happens that I had just such a burger for lunch. The hamburger meat, sauteed sliced mushrooms, and cheese were on one side: the lettuce, tomato, and mayo were on the other. I suppose this was done to facilitate reheating just the first set of ingredients with its half-bun, and then putting the other half on top of it, and that’s what I did. Since I’m alone, I didn’t bother with knife and fork: I just ate it barbecue-style and cleaned myself up with soap and water afterwards. I was still glad to have both half-buns to hold on to, however.
Etienne : “What I find curious about this discussion is that there seems to be no other language mentioned so far which uses a derivative of “to begin” or the like to refer to the first slice (with crust on one side) of a loaf of bread: I would have assumed this to be -well, not universal, but at least widespread. Apparently not.”
David Marjanović : “Your comment is the first that introduces the concept of different terms for the first and the last “slice” to me. They’re identical!”
Bulgarian has “крайник” for both ends of the loaf which is derived from “end” (same word as “limb”).
I took one for the team and invited my friend to lunch.
I got:
It wants me to log in with my Google account.
Bah, Google changed the default to “Anyone with access”. It’s now “anyone with the link” and the link is the same.
I got pictures of smørrebrød without having to “log in”. I don’t know why people complain about Danish being hard to understand. Who cares, when such smørrebrød are on your plate.
It lets me in now, but funnily enough “no preview is available”; I’ll download the pix some other time. 🙂
In the brisket with pickles and horseradish, I see meat, then some shredded white stuff, then some fresh small leaves. Are the leaves the horseradish?
The leaves are watercress, I left them out of the file name. The shredded white stuff is the horseradish, and yellow bits of pickles under that (which in this recension is mainly crunchy bits of carrot and cauliflower fermented with vinegar and mustard).
The bread was originally hidden under the meat; a pretty good gluten-free simulation of black rye, toasted and buttered. There was some under the cheese as well.
That’s a lot of horseradish!
@Lars Mathiesen: I had a sandwich with “pickled peppers” on it today, which was actually relatively lean on the jalapenos and heavier on the crunchy carrots and cauliflower. I consequently considered calling it “pickled peppers” dubious, but calling something like that “pickles” is impossible unless it is made overwhelmingly from cucumbers.
calling something like that “pickles” is impossible unless it is made overwhelmingly from cucumbers.
Mixed pickles
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In U.S. cuisine, a mixed pickle consists of vegetables typically including cucumbers, cauliflower, cut large onions, and bell peppers, as well as spices like garlic, dill, allspice, and chili peppers, suspended in vinegar.
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I’ve never seen the contents “suspended”, though. Aspic or a garter belt would be required for that. Maybe the author was thinking of suspended animation – indeed, the pieces do not move.
Pickles: This was probably the Danish commercial product branded as Piccalilly–possibly the only thing stocked by the supermarket that doesn’t have a use-by date (but 3 months refrigerated after opening). Which (of which?) I do happen to have a jar of in the fridge so I could check the ingredients: It does have cucumber (12%) but more cauliflower (38%); the WP article on UK Piccalilli seems to describe it pretty well.
(The word suspended has been in the article for Mixed pickles since it was created as a stub in 2004, but back then it applied to the Indian version. I didn’t track when it was copied into the section for Western mixed pickles, but maybe it was originally a specific Indian usage. Similar things, like a chutney, are often nearly as stiff as aspic).
Giardiniera, which Potbelly sandwich shops call “hot peppers”.
@Stu Clayton: I considered added that a combined relish like the giardiniera* on my sandwich could possibly called “a pickle.” The sense is like that in “a preserve,” referring to a prepared food by metonymy. The plural “pickles” would have to refer to different ensembles of pickled vegetables, as in different recipes or different batches; it cannot mean different individual vegetable pieces in the mix.
* Thanks to Kieth Ivey for the name. I had a niggling suspicion there was a quasi-specific term for that mixture, but I had no idea what it was.
In Germany, mixed pickles are sold using the English designation. When I was a boy, that was a source for juvenile amusement, because German Pickel means “pimple”.