LL-L "Delectables" 2010.01.03 (01) [EN]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 03 January 2010 - Volume 01
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From: Roger Thijs, Euro-Support, Inc. <roger.thijs at euro-support.be>
Subject: LL-L "Delectables"

I bought an Hollandish salad in a cup in the Match grocery a couple of days
ago, just for trying what "Hollandish" salad may mean. Basically it
contained mainly lettuce, with the traditional tasty mediteranean cheese
replaced with little cubes of young Gouda. So what is in a name?

When I was a kid, salad was synonym of "lettuce" and vice versa. Nowadays
salad can go from a range of all combinations of vegatables, fruit and other
stuff up to some stabilized colored emulsion, often looking like mayonnaise,
with someting mixed in for giving it a name

Also in my kids' time an other part of the lettuce was used than what they
use nowadays. At the time only the green leaf was withheld and the nerves
were threwn away. Nowadays you only get the nerves. I guess modern people
prefer it to be crispy, it holds for longer, and it fills the bowl more
easily.

I'm a farmers' kid and fried cock with lettuce was often on the Sunday menu:

- The cocqs were raised with wheat only, turning their breast meat rather
yellow and consistent (as compared with the pappy white breast of
mass-raised poultry). It was fried in farmer's butter till it had a
caramelized brown outside.
- The lettuce was washed in salty water, only the green parts of the leaf
were used (needing quite some heads, since the leafs at the outside were
also removed). It was mixed before serving with home made mayonnaise (that
needed to be freshly prepared since it got a skin after a brief while). It
was finally mixed with a little bit of chopped green onion pipes (leaf that
grew upon the onions). It was topped with slices of tomato, whereupon slices
of boiled egg and topped with a point of colored mayonnaise (mayonnaise
mixed with some tomato extract and a bit of whisky)
- It was served with "ossetong" potatos. These rather small long potatoos
remained tasty after boiling, didn't become mealy but remained consistent
and couldn't easely be crushed with a fork (they would jump off the plate).
Ossetong potatos had a very poor yield and were not economical to cultivate.
May father just reserved a small corner somewhere on our land each year for
producing some of it for Sunday and holiday use.

The drink was normally brown Faro beer (I guess I have been drinking it
since I was aged  1 or 2).
Faro beer was a rather sweet beer. When the food was served with salty
French fries, rather a bitter Cristal bock beer was served. Cristal Alken is
still in commerce, but it lost its old taste. When token over by Kronenbourg
it had to be sweeten a bit for satisfying modern taste.
We didn't drink much wine at the time, since the quality of what one could
find at the parish groceries was very poor. Red wine was used for preparing
rabbit (but I'm sure red vinegar with some sugar would have done as well)

Our preferred dessert: a bloc composed of layers with "petit beurre"
biscuits, soaked in Hertekamp gin, with a chocomousse filling between.
At that time it was not criminal to have a bit of alcohol in kids' food.

It was not nouvelle cuisine, nor ketchup seasoned food, but that
old farmers' food was not that bad.

I have often problems with semantic differences in vocabulary; een "gekookt
eitje" in Dutch is not a "cooked" egg, but a "boiled" egg. Cook and boil are
both translated as "koken" in Dutch. When translating in reverse it may be a
trap.

Momentarily I'm doing a project in the walloon area and I'm often faced with
similar problems. The example that follows is not related to food. Shoes may
be translated into as well "souliers" as "chaussures" in French. Sunday
shoes are generally "souliers", working shoes are generally "chaussures".
Safety shoes are "chaussures", although some models for the ladies may be
very nice and look like "souliers". I guess the semantic transition may
differ regionally, but it is part of the traps non-native speakers tend to
fall in.

Thanks for all birthday wishes and a happy new year to you all.

Regards,
Roger
I will be at the CES in Las Vegas later this week (staying at the MGM
Grand).

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
 Subject: Delectables

Thank you very much for the food-related contribution peppered with
linguistic observations, dear Roger.

There seem to be areal lexical features involved.

   - Low Saxon *Salaad* and (Northern) German *Salat* mean both 'lettuce'
   and 'salad', too. Obviously this is why many Dutch and German speakers say
   "salad" instead of "lettuce" in English.
   - Low Saxon *kaken* and German *kochen* mean both 'to cook' and 'to
   boil'.

As far as names of dishes are concerned, please don't forget that many of
them are just made up "catchy" names for commercial purposes. The "Holland
salad" you referred to may well be one of those things because the recipe
calls for Gouda cheese (perhaps one of my favorite Dutch cheeses, by the
way). (In English it's pronounced as though it was spelled "Gooda," by the
way, not the the native [aU] or older [OU] sound derived from older /ol/,
hende Golda.) People throw around names of that sort a lot. For instance, if
they use feta cheese in a recipe they might call the dish "Greek" so-and-so
even if it has nothing to do with Greece.

The long potatoes you referred to may well be those they call "fingerling
potatoes" in North America. They haven't been around for terribly long.

I hope you'll have a good time in Las Vegas! Without wanting to offend
anyone, I have to add that it's anything but my favorite town. Good thing:
check out the restaurants in gambling dens, because many of them have great
food for lower prices, the idea being to get you in the door so you're
tempted to gamble.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
Seattle, USA

•

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