Text 1947, 141 rader
Skriven 2007-07-30 17:59:31 av Carol Shenkenberger (3:800/201)
   Kommentar till text 1941 av Roy Witt (1:397/22)
Ärende: Re: Cooking Terms
=========================
*** Quoting Roy Witt from a message to Carol Shenkenberger ***

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

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

Hehe that too!  Mostly though it's my slightly degrading keyboard.

 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

RW> (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'.

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

Yes but my area of the south uses 'hear-tell' as a truth with only the faint
sense that there may be 'more to the story' or 'some portion unknown' as the
main meaning.  Ok, 'rumor' yes but when they say hear-tell, they kinda mean
they trust the source?  Actually it's normally pronouced 'hear'd-tell' (Hear
with a d added, never 'heard' as in 'herd').


 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.

Now that i think of it, I was wrong.  The farther back in the mountains you go,
the more oft one hears the 'past tense' version.

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

True.  Hearsay would be a semantic equal for many uses though.  Exceptin' it
aint used there <g>.

BTW, I have almost no accent at all lessen' ya get me 3 sheets ta the wind,
then I be almost unintelligible Mountain south...  My friends find it
hilarious to buy me beer and watch it happen.

A weird consonance is when in Queensland Australia just recently, ran into
'there ya go' al the time.  Thats also mountain talk and I used it
automatically but nly noted they say it too after the second day there in
Brisbane.

They wer all agaga over a real southern accent BTW. Plied me with many Coopers
Pale to get it just right, that they did!

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

RW> And why I never liked reading Shakespere.

Lots of the mountain talk related to that time frame.  As folks moved out more
westerly, it dropped away to what we'd call 'pure american' but those little
pockets of non-mainstream still exist.  There's quite a few words used in
Shakespere's time, still in use where I come from. Crops out in my writing
from time to time though I'm only occasionally aware of it.

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

Grin, sure nuff am!  Sadly you have little linquistic wierdies from California
other than 'valley girl' I should think.

 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.

RW> Not very accurate.

Nope, sure isnt.  Never was meant to be all that much more than a proportion
idea.

 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.

RW> What if it's corn on the cob?

That would be just 1 or 2 or whatever suited but notice, that too was
proportionally a problem.  Ears of corn arent always the same size even though
now supermarkets make it seem that way.  We mass market to the grocery stores
only ones of a regular size but if you grow some on your own, we see 'feed
corn' sized ones too.


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

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

Sure but in that specific case, meant as I said <G>.

 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!

RW> When prices were more stable than they are today. Yesterday a US gallo
RW> milk cost $3.49, today it costs $3.98 and tomorrow it will be even hig

Yes, and people pretty much stopped using cost as a measure by 1950.  Some of
the funny and frustating old recipes use '3 penny worth of beef' or 'a
ha'penny of flour'.

 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.

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

Thats a USA view of it though.  Sure, they seem to have a kitchen weigher there
but they adjust by eyeball most of the time the same as we do.  We just throw
them off by using a volume measure to start, and one they mostly do not use
and havent for a generation (ounces, cups etc).

 CS> another's recipes until we have an idea of what is meant.
 CS>                                        xxcarol

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


That is true too!  I do that pretty regular now but even I get confused
sometimes. 20grams is what in dry pasta?

                                       xxcarol

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