Culinary Terms/Terminology and their Etymology

[Plantes Vertes]

French people are munching un sandwich for their brunch and enjoying a cocktail quite regularly as well.

[liuzhou]

Some English words borrowed from Chinese. Most of these came into English from Cantonese, due to the close connection between the UK and Hong Kong and due to emigration patterns in that many emigrants came from Cantonese speaking areas.

 

Cantonese romanisation here is using Jyutping while Mandarin uses Pinyin.

• bok choy from 白菜 via Cantonese baak6 coi3)
• chop suey  from 雜碎 Cantonese  zaap6 seoi3
• chow (meaning 'food') 炒 Cantonese caau2 (literally "fry")
• chow mein 炒面 from Cantonese caau2 min6 (literally, fried noodles)
• dim sum from Cantonese 點心 dim2 sam1 (literally, 'heart drops')
• gingko came into English via Japanese which borrowed it from Chinese
• ginseng 人參 Cantonese 
• ketchup It is believed that the word came into English from Malay. It may have come into Malay from the Minnan dialect spoken around Xiamen (Amoy). Alternatively it could have come from the Cantonese . No-one is sure.
• kumquat 金柑 via Cantonese gam1 gwat1
• longan 龍眼 via Cantonese lung4 ngaan5 (literally 'dragon's eye')
• loquat 枇杷 from the Cantonese 盧橘 (lou4 gwat1).
• lychee (or litchi) 荔枝 from the Cantonese lai6 zi1
• oolong (tea) 烏龍(茶) Mandarin wū lóng (chá)
• soy or soya sauce 醬油 English borrowed the word from Japanese. The Japanese borrowed it from China. In Japanese it is pronounced shō-yu
• tea 茶, from the Minnan dialect spoken around Xiamen
• tofu 豆腐 via Japanese
• wok 鍋 Via Cantonese wo1
• wonton from Cantonese 雲吞 wan4 tan1, lit. 'cloud swallow' as a description of its shape, similar to Mandarin 餛飩 hún tún

Edited June 20, 2014 by liuzhou (log)

[Panaderia Canadiense]

Ecuadorian Spanish is full of these neat little thefts/borrowings.  But as is their wont, these things have been given their own special twists.

 

One can order an Hámburguer, a Sánduche (pronounced SAN-dooch-eh), drink a Cocktél.  

 

The ones that really charm me, though, are the direct translations of English terms - Perro Caliente (hot dog) being my favourite, as it bears very little resemblance to the weenie on a bun that most North Americans are used to.  A Perrito here is a large piece of chorizo in usually a sourdough roll.

[CeeCee]

In The Netherlands it seems that English is being incorporated more and more in Dutch nowadays. It's trendy, I guess. There are also influences from German, Latin and French, although the last one has a bigger influence on the Flemmish (Non-French speakers in Belgium).

One word up for discussion in The Netherlands is the Dutch word for french fries. Will have to look up some details as this seems to be a regional difference, the Dutch use patat and/or friet/frietjes for this dish. The French patates frites is easily recognized, but some people feel it should be either patat or friet/frietjes. The -jes is a diminutive by the way. Either way, still the same dish.
 

Hamburger (although pronounced slightly different in Dutch), cocktail and such have been around for a while and mean the same thing. Relatively new are cookies (which is quite similar in pronounciation to the Dutch word koekjes) and cupcakes also keep their English pronounciation. Muffins are also available, but generally aren't English style. Brownies mostly are some cakey affair, which I find highly disappointing, although some are the real American deal.

Cakes in The Netherland generally are the rectangle madeira cake etc. varieties. A birthday cake translated to Dutch is a verjaardagstaart. Taart is often translated with pie. The savoury varieties are either hartige taart (hartig means savoury) or quiche. Dutch puddings seem to differ a bit from the English ones, but as these are not much of my interest I don't really know the difference. Would have to look that up...
The Dutch have vla, which was traditionally made like a sweet custard. The commercieel products have been thickened in a different way, so it's technically not a custard anymore. With the baking/sweets hype going on custard has found a place in the Dutch vocabulaire somewhat, but I think it's generally seen as sweet and not as possibly savoury.
Boter means butter, but the Dutch use it for margarine as well. Yes, that's right. For some it does seem to mean an interchangeable product. Margarine is also used, but the Dutch pronounces this different.
Baked potatoes translates literally to gebakken aardappelen (from a skillet), but the ones wrapped in foil from the oven or bbq are gepofte aardappels. In some larger Dutch cities the loaded potato is available under the Turkish name of kumpir. Not common use though.

Fried is generally translated to Dutch as gefrituurd, meaning it came out of the deep fryer.

Dutch is not the only language spoken in the Netherlands. Up north/north-west there is Frysk or in English Frisian: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Frisian_language I have no idea who started with what and my knowledge of both Frisian and German is quite limited, but here are some food related examples for show.
For instance tsiis means cheese with a similar pronouncation. The Dutch use kaas however.

Slaad seems closer to the English salad in pronounciation, while the Dutch speak of a salade more as the French do.

Soup and the Dutch soep are similar, but here the Frisians use sop. Oxtail soup is Kowesturtsop, which has the English cow (vs. Dutch koe (koo), but the tail seems closer to the Dutch word staart.
Eel in Frisian is iel, pronounced similar. Dutch woord is aal.
A hen in Frisian is hinne (I is used like in the English word inn), the Dutch use the same word as the English but pronounce is slightly different.
Kâlde is cold and more German I guess. The Dutch use koud, ou as in couch (English) not like the French ou.

Meat is vlees (ee is like ay) in Dutch, Frisian uses fleis which is similar but shorter than the German Fleisch.

Frisian's pankoek vs. English pancake, where the Dutch use a plural for the pans making it pannenkoek. They just added an -n, as it used to be pannekoek.

A meal is kind of the same in Frisian, but they spell it as miel. In Dutch you can use maal or more common maaltijd. The Germans spell mahlzeit, but the meaning and use of this word is slighty different I think. A dish is similar to the Dutch dis (not commonly used I think), but they also use schotel or gerecht (ch is used like in yiddish challe bread). Careful though, as gerecht can also refer to court.
Duck in Dutch is eend (again the ee is like ay), where Frisians call it an ein. Germans use Ente (like èntuh I think), for them ein means one.

 

Ketchup has an interesting background, nice mention Liuzhou! I have seen it spelled as catchup or something a like in older cookbooks, although I'm not really sure in which language I read this. In The Netherlands there's quite an influence from Indonesia, so soy sauce used to be more commonly known as ketjap (ketyap), which seems related to ketchup wordwise.

 

There's another word that is very interesting to me: piccalilly. A Dutch journalist specialized in culinary history, Lizet Kruyf,  has tracked down it's history to before 1700. It's in Dutch, but you can translate it into different languages using the flags in the right top of your screen. Check out her article at: http://www.foodlog.nl/artikel/piccalilly/.

Edited June 21, 2014 by CeeCee (log)

[Arey]

Staff note: This post and subsequent responses were split from the Mac and Cheese: Defining and Pushing its Boundaries topic, to maintain focus.

(a)Macaroni is the macaroni product the units of which are tube-shaped and more than 0.11 inch but not more than 0.27 inch in diameter.

(c) Spaghetti is the macaroni product the units of which are tube-shaped or cord-shaped (not tubular) and more than 0.06 inch but not more than 0.11 inch in diameter.

(d) Vermicelli is the macaroni product the units of which are cord-shaped (not tubular) and not more than 0.06 inch in diameter.
 Thus sayeth the in fedgov  one of its regulations. So you could have Mac and cheese, Spaghetti and cheese or Vermicelli and cheese It'smuch easier tnan saying you are having  pasta which is tube shaped and between 0.11 inches and 0.27 inches in diameter and cheese for dinner.

Somewheres there may be a very bored beaurocrat with a set of calipers and a box of pasta praying that his agency will offer its employees an early out.
in one of its cost cutting frenzies.

[Katie Meadow]

6 hours ago, heidih said:

As a kid I thought macaroni was noodles. My stepmother who is native German and French speaker thinks pasta = macaroni - interchangeable.. And now I have the silly lyrics of Yankee Doodle in my head! And of course the "luxury" fad for a while - lobster mac n' cheese. I usually saw it with shells. In the US I think Kraft for many made the blue box the standard meaning of mac n' cheese. 

 

If you look at the word macaroni, or really "maccheroni" in Italian history it does indeed refer to a generalized collection of dry pasta shapes and does not refer only to what we call elbow macaroni, which is just a shape of pasta. And yes elbows are frequently used for mac n cheese, but other shapes you favor don't make the baked pasta dish any less an official mac n cheese.

 

To complicate matters, let's talk about Yankee Doodle. The "macaroni" in the song actually refers to a European style of dressing popularized by the aristocracy in the 1700's; maccheroni meant a dandyish outfit. In other words, if you put a feather in your cap and called it "macaroni" you were an American yankee making fun of Europeans, and probably of Italians in specific. Racism, baked in.

 

[Margaret Pilgrim]

57 minutes ago, Katie Meadow said:

If you look at the word macaroni, or really "maccheroni" in Italian history it does indeed refer to a generalized collection of dry pasta shapes and does not refer only to what we call elbow macaroni, which is just a shape of pasta. And yes elbows are frequently used for mac n cheese, but other shapes you favor don't make the baked pasta dish any less an official mac n cheese.

 

To complicate matters, let's talk about Yankee Doodle. The "macaroni" in the song actually refers to a European style of dressing popularized by the aristocracy in the 1700's; maccheroni meant a dandyish outfit. In other words, if you put a feather in your cap and called it "macaroni" you were an American yankee making fun of Europeans, and probably of Italians in specific. Racism, baked in.

 

Thanks for this explanation of a long time misunderstood phrase.

[liuzhou]

I can't stand the stuff myself*, but linguistically 'macaroni' as a word is interesting.

 

Obviously it comes from Italian, originally as 'maccaroni' and later 'maccheroni' and, as already pointed out orginally just meant pasta.

 

The first recorded usage in English is from Ben Jonson, a contemporary and fellow playwright of Shakespeare's. It was then defined as 'a kind of wheaten paste, of Italian origin, formed into long tubes and dried for use as food'. 

 

Quote

He doth learne‥to eat ænchouies, maccaroni, bouoli, fagioli, and cauiare.

 

The first mention in English of macaroni with cheese is from 1769 in a Mrs. Raffald's book The Englishe Housekeeper where she writes of decoroating macaroni with parmesan.

The usage of the word arose about 1760 and referred to young men who had travelled and affected the tastes and fashions prevalent in continental society. So a dandy. This usage seems to be from the name of the Macaroni Club, a designation probably adopted to indicate the preference of the members for foreign cookery, macaroni being at that time little eaten in England.
 

The name also refers a type of penguin, Eudyptes chrysolophus or a macaroni penguin.

 

It is also a type of poem in which two or more languages are mingled together, a type of walking stick, a woodworking knife/chisel and in Australian slang 'nonsense'or 'meaningless talk'.

 

As to Mac and Cheese, it was never called that in the UK until recently when the Americanism crept in. It was always 'macaroni and cheese' or, more often, 'macaroni cheese'.

There is credible evidence that it was first introduced to the Americas by Scottish emigrants to Canada and then travelled south. The Scots got it from Italian immigrants to Scotland.

* My mother made it often and it was the only food I refused to eat no matter how many threats of severe punishment! The rest of the family loved it. One of my brothers so much so that for years my mother had to ship packs of Marshall's Macaroni to him in Spain where he lives and has three restaurants. He won't eat any other brand.

Beats me.

 

 

As you can see, it is 'elbow pasta' but never called that in the UK. It's just macaroni.

 

Edited January 11 by liuzhou (log)