More food & drink from Costa Rica

[Mike Salovesh]

Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:

>    LA COCINA DE LENA bills itself as ¨the best restaurant in town.¨  It´s       > located in the El Pueblo restaurant section of San Jose.  Some items are below.

 <<several items skipped so I can emphasize just two>>

> ALMUERCITA--stuffed cabbage.

That word is troublingly strange.  "Almuerzo", commonly, is the second meal of
the day, after desayuno, literally breaking a fast.  (There are five mealtimes
per day in much of Central America and in southern Mexico.  Desayuno would be
something light at around six A.M.; almuerzo is a much heartier breakfast eaten
around ten AM. Then there's comida at around 2:00 PM, some kind of snack at 6:00
PM or so; and cena, supper, at perhaps 9:00 or even 10:00 PM.)  The infinitive
for taking that second breakfast is "almorzar", accent on the third syllable; in
derivatives, o changes to ue in  an accented syllable .  That's a standard shift
of pronunciation in many Spanish words. "Almuercita" is strange because the
"-ita" diminutive shifts the accent to the third syllable; normally, the ue of
accented syllables would change to o in another syllable.  The word I would
expect would be "almorcito". I'd also expect a masculine terminal -o, not
feminine -a.

Then again, maybe I've just gone through a tremendous scholarly demonstration of
the depths of my ignorance.

> GALLO PINTO--mixed rice and beans, meat, eggs and sour cream.

That's a very high-class gallo pinto.  Ordinary gallo pinto is rice and beans,
served with  optional hot sauce.  The simple gallo pinto is a major staple in
peasant diets in Central America . . .  where meat, eggs, and/or sour cream
would be more than a peasant family could afford.

-- mike salovesh   <salovesh at niu.edu>   PEACE !!!

        IN MEMORIAM:     Peggy Salovesh
        25 January 1932 -- 3 March 2001