I always enjoy Gary Shteyngart’s writing (e.g., 2004, 2011), and his latest New Yorker essay, “A Martini Tour of New York City” (archived), is no exception. The first paragraph:
Three years ago, as the pandemic was loosening its grip on the world, and as I started to recover from the aftereffects of a botched childhood circumcision that had returned to haunt me in middle age, I rediscovered the bottomless pleasure of a cold dry Martini. My emergence from both a global and personal health crisis plunged me into a daily Saturnalia. As restaurants reopened, I unhinged my jaw and left it open: suadero tacos dripping with lard; twisted knobs of dough crowning gigantic Georgian khinkali dumplings; the mutton chop at Keens Steakhouse that is made for sharing in theory, but not in practice—all fell victim to my appetites. And to help the food go down easy, I also consumed gallons of Willamette Valley pinot noir and hyper-local artisanal ales. Soon enough, my A1C levels were in the prediabetic range and I knew that action had to be taken.
From this I learned the word suadero ‘(cooking, Mexico) a thin cut of fried beef that is commonly used as a taco filling,’ “Possibly from sudadero,” and later on (“Matt and I followed up our drinks with some shishito peppers”) I learned shishito ‘A sweet Japanese pepper, a cultivar of the species Capsicum annuum,’ “Borrowed from Japanese 獅子唐 (shishitō).” I was familiar with khinkali dumplings (and have in fact eaten them), but looking up the Georgian word ხინკალი I learned that it is “ultimately borrowed from Avar хинкӏал (xinkʼal)” and that it gave rise to Armenian խինկալի (xinkali), which is “Folk-etymologically explained as խին (xin, ‘fat’) + -կալ (-kal, ‘to hold’) or as խինալի (xinali), խնալի (xnali, ‘full of fat’).” Elsewhere he uses the term fat-washed, which Google tells me is “a clever cocktail technique that adds savory flavor to spirits. To fat-wash your alcohol, you just add a liquid like sesame oil or melted butter to a spirit at room temperature.” And for a bit of synchronicitous lagniappe, I offer this sentence: “The bacon of the devils on horseback set off a long Proustian moment as we recalled the Martini-accompanying bar snacks of yore, the pigs in a blanket, for example, that went so well with the Polo Bar’s Gibsons.”
The mutton chop at Keen’s is NOT made for sharing in theory even though it may be shared in practice. This fellow has reality exactly backwards, and is thus not to be trusted.
To be fair, he was drunk at the time. But I envy you your hands-on experience with the mutton chop at Keens.
If you add fat to a spirit at room temperature and stop there, it’ll taste terrible. For fat-washing, you need to add the fat; chill; and then skim the (solidified) fat off.
Oddly, that sounds more like the UK version of pigs in blankets.
Let me know in advance if you’re ever gonna be in Manhattan at a time during which we are not enjoined by the Holy Tradition of the Holy Fathers to abstain from mutton, and I’ll take you to Keen’s and cover the check.
Are devils on horseback the same as angels ditto?
I’ll take you to Keen’s and cover the check.
You are a gentleman and a scholar, and you’ve certainly given me an inducement to visit at some non-fasting time.
Keens also offers charred shishito peppers as an appetizer.
On suadero as a colloquial form of sudadero ‘saddle blanket’ (the cut being named from its thinness and perhaps the color, before or after cooking?), note the delightful entry for suadero ‘saddle blanket’, in Shirley Lease Arora (1977), Proverbial Comparisons and Related Expressions in Spanish: Recorded in Los Angeles, visible here (I hope), page 433:
So could the semantic development of suadero be a bit like birria ‘garbage, worthless person or thing’ > ‘(delicious) stewed meat’? And note also the common alteration of suadero to suaperro, in joking reference to perro, the alleged source of street taco meat.
Having lived in Georgia for several years, khinkali are a personal favorite, so I’ve essayed making them. I’ve found the beau ideal of 19 pleats very difficult to achieve, though.
The authentic khinkali of old 1980s Tbilisi floated in my memory, the encounter colored by my nearly-total lack of money during this two-nights stay. I slept in the barberry bush by Karl Marx bridge, and walked to the Soldiers’ Market each morning to help the greengrocers unload their crates, getting a little pile of herbs and tomatoes for my work. My morning and evening meals consisted of freshly baked flatbread which I made into warps with these vegetables (the trick was to know which bakeries work in the morning and which ones, in the afternoon), and the lunch – of a khachapuri at Lagidze’s. On the day of my departure, I still had a few spare rubles and decided to splurge for something non-vegetarian and a beer in a basement khinkali shop.
The dumplings turned out to be so spicy that it put me into a life-and-death financial bind: can I possibly stretch my one mug of beer to quench the burn, or should I give up & buy the 2nd one and forgo the next meal altogether?
At least in Mexico City, the standard meats at taco stands were always longaniza, chorizo, and suadero. I must’ve looked them up 25 times but never fully retained the meanings.
I know chorizo is the shorter, red sausage, and totally different from Spanish chorizo and I think also totally different from Argentine chorizo. (I hate Mexican chorizo but I love Spanish chorizo.) Longaniza is the longer brown sausage, and suadero was cuts of meat. I of course had many many khinkali in the seven months I spent in Georgia back around 2011 but I didn’t know there was an Armenian equivalent. When I made a side trip to visit friends in Yerevan (one of which was the main contributor of Armenian in Wiktionary) they confessed they had no idea where to take me because they never eat out or go to pubs or bars. My recollection is that Armenian food was more Middle-Eastern-like than Georgian food.
Having now read the entire article the burning question on my mind is whether Shteyngart managed to get Conde Nast to pay for all the martinis-and-related-drinks described via expense reimbursement or whether the golden age (cashflow-wise) of long-form magazine journalism is truly dead and gone and he just had to consult with his accountant as to whether he could take a tax deduction for them as research materials or some such thing offsetting the income generated by selling the final written product for publication. NB for those not drinking on an expense account: the time you want to go to the western outpost of Dante on Hudson St. is not Friday night as he did, but 3-5 pm weekdays when they have significantly discounted prices on various martini-related options, just as the mothership on Macdougal St. has significantly discounted prices on various negroni-related options during those same hours.
Oh, I would be very surprised indeed if Shteyngart had to pay for his own boozing. Conde Nast has deep pockets, and authors don’t.
My local lunch place in DF had chorizo toluqueño (the green ones) and gorditas de chicharron from blue corn. The evening one had tacos al pastor and mariachis. But that was before the virus.
” On suadero as a colloquial form of sudadero ‘saddle blanket’ (the cut being named from its thinness and perhaps the color, before or after cooking?), note the delightful entry for suadero ‘saddle blanket’, in Shirley Lease Arora (1977), Proverbial Comparisons and Related Expressions in Spanish: Recorded in Los Angeles, visible here (I hope), page 433:
suadero
ella es rubia como suadero (she is blonde like a saddle blanket). Mexico 23.
A suadero (sudadero) is a rough-fiber blanket put under the saddle of a horse or donkey and is characteristically an unattractive yellow-orange in color; the comparison refers especially to brunettes who bleach their hair (informant).”
I must say I don’t remember having heard that expression before (“rubia como suadero”) even though I was alive in Southern California in 1977. I don’t recall my uncles or cousins saying that even though they’d be the kind of people to say something like that since my mom’s side of the family are all rural Mexicans who grew up around horses, donkeys and cattle. Maybe it wasn’t a very common expression, or maybe it’s a regional expression familiar to whoever was the informant.
At least where my family is from in Durango I seem to remember burlap sacks being used as sudaderos and I also remember them being made of ixtle. I had a chance to ask my mom and she confirmed that (at least where we are from) they are/were made of ixtle which is the fiber made from agave plants. It’s often used for ropes and twine and scrubbing pads and does tend to be rough and a yellowish color.
That said, any blanket could be used under the saddle and one of my aunts had the constant problem of a couple of nephews who were always borrowing her blankets to use as sudaderos whenever she did the laundry and hung it out to dry.
Down at the Southern end of the Americas, saddle blankets are ‘calchas’, with an interesting etymology: Mapudungun kallcha, kalcha ‘pubic hair’
Down at the Southern end of the Americas, saddle blankets are ‘calchas’, with an interesting etymology: Mapudungun kallcha, kalcha ‘pubic hair’
This is great to know! Thanks for that.
From these beginnings, calcha has made it as far as the Philippines: Tagalog katsa ‘cheesecloth; rough unbleached muslin; coarse cloth used for making sacks’.
W-ary says for the Tagalog word, ‘Borrowed from Spanish calcha (“workman’s clothing and bedding”) with elision of /l/. Ultimately from Mapudungun kallcha (“body hair”), from kaḻ (“hair”).’
But Augusta’s Mapudungun dictionary gives kal· ‘lana, vello’ and kal·cha ‘el pelo de las partes pudendas’. Erize’s dictionary agrees, and so does Fernández Garay’s Ranquel dictionary. Smeets’ grammar agrees and for kalcha adds ‘armpit hair’.
Moesbach’s etymological placename dictionary, however, has cal ‘lana, pelusa’ and calcha ‘pelusa, vello’, under calchacura, from cura ‘stone’: ‘nombre vulgar de los líquenes (en esp. Parmelia).’ It might be a dialectal difference, but I think Moesbach (or his sources) might have been too delicate.
And then, the Diccionario de americanismos makes it complicated (here). For ‘saddle blanket’, ‘item of clothing’, and ‘bedclothes’ (all NW Argentinian), it says the source is Quechua caucha (no gloss given.) I haven’t been able to find it in Quechua dictionaries (and the <c> can stand for any of six phonemes). It does give Mapudungun calcha ‘pelos interiores’ as the source for the meaning ‘mechón de pelos o plumas que tienen ciertos animales o aves en las patas’, as used in Chile and NW Argentina.
Distrust and verify, I say.
On further thought, I think I was unfair to Moesbach. A reasonable chain of semantic shifts would be ‘hair’ > ‘body hair’, ‘pelt’, ‘fuzz’, ‘wool’; and then on one hand ‘pelt’ > ‘clothing’, ‘blanket’, and on the other hand ‘fuzz’ > ‘pubic hair’, like the euphemistic English fur.
The etymology from Mapundungun appears to originate with, or at least to have been widely disseminated by, Rodolfo Lenz (1904) Diccionario etimolójico de las voces chilenas derivadas de lenguas indigenas americanas, p. 162, no. 104, available here. The constellation of meanings there is something like Mapundungun kalcha ‘pubic hair’ (‘coarse hair or body hair in general, like axillary hair’?) > Chilean Spanish calchas ‘fetlock tufts; feathers on the feet of chickens, doves, etc.’ > ‘tattered edges, shreds of cloth hanging from clothing, especially old trousers’, (railway construction worker slang) ‘pack of clothing and bedding’(?), and Argentine Spanish ‘garments for personal use that are worn or used to shield against the elements(?); pieces of riding gear’. This last was recorded by Samuel Alejandro Lafone Quevedo, p. 63 in Tesoro de catamarqueñismos (1898), available here.
I was wondering what the meaning of the Mapundungun -cha could be, and I was disappointed to read the following in Aldo Berrios (2023) Frecuencia fonemática del mapudungun, p. 47 (available here; typography edited):
Maybe others can find out more about Spanish calcha.
@Y
This word seems to have a similar semantic range: cover, item of clothing, but I don’t know if the phonetic shape works (maybe t=>ch because colcha?).
qata: s. cubierta; manta; frazada; cobija; colcha; abrigo; sábana; cobertor; cuñado
qatakuna: s.(tex) cobija; ropa; cobija de la cama; frazadas; mantas; colcha
https://aulex.org/qu-es/index.php?busca=colcha
EDIT: if -cha is also a thing in Quechua maybe also *qat(a)cha.
“Coarse hair” reminds me of the original topic of this post… The Wiktionary entries for shishito and 獅子唐 that were linked to don’t have any cross-references that lead to the etymology of the 獅子 shishi ‘lion’ in 獅子唐 shishitō. LH readers shouldn’t miss out on the etymology of Chinese 獅 ‘lion’, and also the cross-reference there to Tocharian B ṣecake.
On the possibility of Tocharian borrowing, note this paragraph from Václav Blažek (2005) ‘HIC ERANT LEONES: Indo-European “lion” et alii’, p. 27 (here):
I don’t know if this specific date of introduction holds up on closer inspection. Also note this comment from Martin Schwartz on Language Log as a useful correction to the Iranian etymology for the Chinese in the Wiktionary.
Xerîb, thanks for the Lenz and Berríos references.
I searched in Augusta’s dictionary. -cha is really rare, and I wonder if it ever was a morpheme. Maybe kaḻ is somehow a shortened form of kaḻcha, rather than the other way around.
Ben Moulineaux has a lovely online collection of historical materials on Mapudungun, many transcribed. Luis de Valdivia’s 1606 Arte y Gramática has “Cal, lana, pelo o vello de animales” and “Calcha, pili interiores hominis”, and Febres’ 1764 Arte de la Lengua General del Reyno de Chile has cal ‘lana, ò vello’ and calcha ‘[pelo] verendorum’ (in the S-M section), ‘pelos interiorios’ (in the M-S section).