Text 1941, 98 rader
Skriven 2007-07-29 13:03:08 av Roy Witt (1:397/22)
   Kommentar till text 1938 av Carol Shenkenberger (3:800/201)
Ärende: Cooking Terms
=====================

29 Jul 07 13:10, Carol Shenkenberger wrote to Ardith Hinton:

 CS> Yes, catchup in my backlog here still ongoing.  I recon' folks here

          ^^^^^^^
I hope you meant catch up, but then, you may have catchup all over your
keyboard. ;o) (aka northern gringo for ketchup)

 CS> 'Enough by eye' may be a local Sasebo (southern Japan farming area)
 CS> translation.  I hear-tell there's other terms used in Northern parts?

 CS> Grin, I just used heartell (hear-tell).  Can you tell I am not from

(hearsay = hear-tell)

 CS> around your neck of the woods?  For the rest of you, my mountain
 CS> based USA southern talk just slipped out again.  'Hear-tell' means
 CS> 'rumor'.

As in - 'rumor has it' then...

 CS>  You hear it then tell someone else about it.

aka hearsay.

 CS>  'Heard-tell' would be a rarer form of it.  Russian based teachers
 CS> will think 'hear-tell' is a mistake in english if you use it but it
 CS> isn't.

That may be. OTH, hearsay doesn't fit in with the context of the other
words being used.

 CS> It's just a wee bit of very old english from Shakespere times that
 CS> lingered in some spots.

And why I never liked reading Shakespere.

 CS>   It's usage above was automatic and unthought of until I re-read the
 CS> sentance and noted I'd been 'odd' again.

I agree, you're odd sometimes. :o)

 CS> Back to 'fistful'.  Translate as roughly 1/4 to 1/3 cup.  A closed
 CS> fistful would be 1/8 to 1/4 cup.  A 'big fistful' would be 1/3 to 1/2
 CS> cup.

Not very accurate.

 CS> For those of you reading from Russia and that ilk of lands, 'big
 CS> fistful' means as much as you can comfortably grab in your hand and
 CS> would vary witht he item shape.  It may be as much as 1 cup if it's
 CS> green beans.

What if it's corn on the cob?

 CS> (Darn, ilk.  Means 'places feeling similar'.  In this case, former
 CS> USSR lands).

No, make that - darn, xxcarol. Ilk means 'places, feeling, similar'... but
in reality, it could mean many different things than that.

 AH>>          Another intriguing system I've run across in late 19th &
 AH>> earl 20th century British cookbooks is measurement by price.
 AH>> Sixpence wort of minced beef, at today's prices, would be less than
 AH>> a quarter of an ounce.  I'm sure that's not quite what they meant.
 AH>> But what they mean is beyond me....  :-)

 CS> There's loads of funny cookery tales based on that!  You have to know
 CS> the prices of the times to get a feel, but it was pretty useful as a
 CS> term back then!

When prices were more stable than they are today. Yesterday a US gallon of
milk cost $3.49, today it costs $3.98 and tomorrow it will be even higher.

 CS> As we talk of this, it occurs to me maybe we havent mentioned that
 CS> Eurpoeans generally measure foods by weight but USAans measure by
 CS> 'volume'. This makes European cookery look far more 'exact' to us in
 CS> the US/Canada than it really is.  It also makes ours look a funky
 CS> unexact (inexact?) by their standards.

OTH, European cooks have to have a scale handy, while all we need is a
simple measuring cup.

 CS> It's competing ideas make it hard for both of us to follow one
 CS> another's recipes until we have an idea of what is meant.
 CS>                                        xxcarol

Especially when you have to convert one to the other. :o)

                R\%/itt


"Beware the lollipop of mediocrity! Lick it once and you'll suck
forever..."

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