Riz de veau

[Laurence Horn]

James Smith wrote:

>--- Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:
>....
>>    THE COOK, 24 August 1885, pg. 9, col. 2:
>>
>>    _KITCHEN ENGLISH IN FRANCE_
>>    The use of English in the kitchen in France is as
>> bizarre as the use of French in the kitchen in
>> England or America.  The simple ginger snap is set
>> down grandiloquently in the bill of fare of an
>> American summer hotel as _gateaux de gingembre_.
>> And a recent bill of fare at the Grand Hotel in
>> Paris offered "Irisch-stew, a la francaise"--truly a
>> marvelous dish.  (...) Hitherto we have held as
>> legendary, only, the translation of _riz de veau a
>> la financiere_ as "smile of the little cow in the
>> style of the female financier"--but, after this,
>> nothing is impossible.
>         ***********************************
>This may have been the source for Ambrose Bierce's
>entry in The Devil's Dictionary (1911).
>
>"RAREBIT, n.
>      A Welsh rabbit, in the speech of the humorless,
>who point out that it is not a rabbit. To whom it may
>be solemnly explained that the comestible known as
>toad-in-a-hole is really not a toad, and that
>riz-de-veau a la financiere is not the smile of a calf
>prepared after the recipe of a she banker."
>
>     *************************************
>Or was this perhaps an oft repeated witticism of the
>epogue?

Well, Bierce had the rabbit/rarebit right (as far as his explanation goes),
but I don't quite understand why the sources of the shared "witticism"
concurred in the faulty assumption that "riz" or even "ris" (both
pronounced [ri]) correspond to 'smile'.  "ris" (besides denoting 'thymus',
but curiously spelled "riz" 'rice' in the dish under consideration) is the
somewhat archaic noun for 'laugh' (the more usual noun, even in the 19th
century, is a zero-derivation from the verb "rire"), while the noun and
verb for 'smile' are both "sourire", i.e. 'sub-laugh', which always struck
me as a nice way to conceptualize 'smile' (not to be confused with
"souris", 'mouse').  But the Bierce/COOK concurrence clearly indicates a
collaborative effort at work here.  "Calf-laugh" would even have been
catchier than "Smile of a calf".  Very strange.

larry