Text 1968, 218 rader
Skriven 2007-07-30 09:12:53 av Roy Witt (1:397/22)
   Kommentar till text 1947 av Carol Shenkenberger (3:800/201)
Ärende: Cooking Terms
=====================

30 Jul 07 17:59, Carol Shenkenberger wrote to Roy Witt:

 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
 RW>> you keyboard. ;o) (aka northern gringo for ketchup)

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

They tend to do that. I imagine you could pick up a new one for a song in
your eastern Pacific travels. Here, they vary in price from under $10 to
over $50.

 CS>> translation.  I hear-tell there's other terms used in Northern
 CS>> 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...

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

That makes sense, until you realize that there's no past tense for hear,
accept heard. So I think your pronunciation would be more like - here'd
tell.

 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.

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

I think the story goes something like this; These people were of Irish
decent and were formerly in debtor's prison in Ireland. To work off their
debt, they volunteered to come to colonial America. Many of them escaped
and hid out in the foot hills of the Apalanchians, earning the nick name
of 'hill billys'... Irishmen are very hard to understand, as are the
Scots. In order to communicate, their language evolved into something more
intellible, but still different from the British influenced English spoken
at the time.

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

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

Yeah, Joe Palooka spoke like that and he made the funny papers. :o)

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

I would imagine that you're fun to be around without the accent. Gittin'
ya 3 sheets ta the wind, should be even more fun.

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

You mean the Aussies say that a lot. It's probably a fad that comes and
goes. No different I think, that 'bitchin' was normal speak for native
Californians, unheard of where I came from. Today, I still use that word,
but these Texicans don't know what it means. Of course, they're too
hifalutin to ask.

Hifalutin - Another native American word meaning pompous or pretentious

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

Now that would be interesting to watch... :o)

 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.

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

Being retired and bored out of my skin, I found a job that doesn't take
much effort to perform and it's not that steady, sit around and wait for a
call to action. Such was the case last week, when I got a call to unlock
the door of a Ford F250 pickup at one of the water parks around here. This
guy talked like a true Texan, accent so thick it was hard to converse with
him. Then his 10 to 13yo son spoke up and he sounded exactly like his dad.

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

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

I mentioned 'bitchin' above, but there are a lot of other wierdies there.
The worst one is the butchered Spanish my MIL used to call, Mexican slang.
She spoke Castillian Spanish fluently.

 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
 CS>> 1/2 cup.

 RW>> Not very accurate.

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

Of course you know that some people just throw things together and they
always come out perfectly. I met a Mexican lady at a pot-luck picnic who
made the most delicious Cheese, Potato and Chili Pepper Enchaladas you
could ever imagine. I asked if she would mind sharing the recipe and all
she could tell me was that she just 'threw it together'... I came close to
hers after experimenting for a while, but never as good.

 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?

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

Very true. Both of my grandmothers planted 'victory gardens' long after
WW2 was over. My mother did too, but her thumb wasn't as green as
grandma's. My great grandparents had a garden next to a small creek that
ran through they're lot, as did my parents in later years. Corn always
varied in size from one stalk to the next.

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

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

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

Right. I was thinking Russian. USSR includes more than Russia.

 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
 CS>> know the prices of the times to get a feel, but it was pretty useful
 CS>> as a term back then!

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

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

Well, dividing the price of one gallon by 16, we could use that measuring
system too. So, .22 cents worth of milk equals one cup. (These are
American cups, not metric cups)

 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
 RW>> a simple measuring cup.

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

Yeup. If you don't continue to use ounces and cups, etc., you'll
eventually lose the ability to readily figure the equivalant in metric.

 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)

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

I think that would depend on the size of the pasta. 20grams of small elbow
macaroni is about 1/4 cup. Couscous would be a different story. (I cheated
and used a gram scale to measure the macaroni - don't have any couscous)

                R\%/itt


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