"Appetizing," "Appy" and Variations

[Fat Guy]

Stellabella, I only studied two years of Yiddish and it was academic Yiddish so it didn't include a lot of the "Yinglish" that is commonly used by immigrant Jews (and now by the society at large). I am however not aware of a Yiddish precursor to "appetizing." In addition, I think the correct usage of the word is not limited to "accompaniments" but rather runs the whole gamut of what we would today call "prepared foods."

[Steve Plotnicki]

Stellabella-Please do not trust Macrosan's interpertation of yiddishisms. He is a Yid from Brit and the way we are using the words are idiomatic to New York Jewery. A good example of idiomatic terms describing basically the same thing would be

Corned Beef - New York Jew

Salt Beef - British Jew

Smoked Beef - Canadian Jew (most notably from Montreal)

In this instance, the word is an idiomatic use to describe the foods that would be served as appetizers, i.e., to create an appetitie for a main course. And what would one call a store that sells all things that one associates with creating an appetite? You guess it, an "Appetizing Store." The Yiddish word for appetizer is forschpeiss. The literal translation of that is "spicy beforehand" and it describes something spciy you would eat before a meal. It is sort of like Antipasta in Italian. Except the Italians had a word to describe a shop that would sell the ingredients for antipasta. Salumeria.  There is another aspect to this that is probably important. Jewish dietary law dictate that milk and meat products aren't mixed together. And a delicatessen basically describes a shop with meat products. An Appetizing store pretty much describes one with dairy products. So I am assuming that the use in question is a NY Jew phenomenon and came about when someone wanted to open a shop that sold lox, herring etc. and there wasn't an equivelent of the word for it in English.

[Fat Guy]

The Canadian term is "smoked meat," and smoked meat is pastrami not corned beef. Also Canadians say it "smo'meat, eh?" And wouldn't pretty much anything you get at the appetizing store (aside from the token 50-year-old canned goods lining one wall of every such establishment) qualify as appetizing (noun)?

BTW, Plotnicki, go into your control panel and adjust your time offset to zero, so your edits aren't dated 23 hours before they happen.

[Steve Plotnicki]

Steve-You could well be right because I haven't been in Montreal in almost 20 years. But that smoked meat stuff certainly seemed like corned beef back then. As for what constitues appetizing, I think it is fish that is smoked, marinated or cured. There is another aspect to this and that is that an appetizing store is the Jewish gourmet shop. Smoked fish is expensive. So anciliary items like olives are usually found displayed as "Fancy Olives." But "appetizing" really describes the fish. But the rules of yiddishkeit allow things like tuna fish salad and sliced munster cheese to be called appetizing providing they are purchased at the same time, and included in the same bag as smoked fish. But if we went to Greengrass and bought some bagels and chocolate candies, one could not say they had purchased appetizing without breaking the rules. But if one has a measly 1/8 of a pound of lox in there, one could claim that the entire contents of the bag was appetizing when asked what's in the bag.

[Fat Guy]

Plotnicki, the reason your analysis here is so erudite is because it comprehends the "in the same bag" phenomenon, which is clearly an offshoot of the uniquely Jewish way (derived from the tradition of kashruth) of viewing what food touches what other food and utensils as critically important to the status of that food. I've never seen anybody put it in writing before.

Corned beef is, as you know, not smoked. Smoked meat is, as it claims to be, smoked. It's milder than New York style pastrami, but once you smoke the beef it's out of the corned beef category and into the pastrami category. I'm so glad something came up on these boards where I know more than you, you mamser.

[jhlurie]

And the true "Jewish" response to your logic, Steven is simply to say "feh" and give you the downward hand wave.  

[macrosan]

We definitely need a "Jewish" Forum at eGullet. It would probably best go between "Cooking" and "Adventure in Eating", and would need a committee of Discordinators (maybe 25 would be sufficient).

[Fat Guy]

We'd need two such forums, so there could be a rivalry. "Oh, I don't participate in the other Jewish forum."

[Steve Plotnicki]

Macrosan-Not a Committee, a Minion. The board is closed unless you have 10 users.

[Fat Guy]

Ten adult male users, that is, though if we get nine we can use a kid for the tenth. Also we can run the board, we just can't read from the sacred book of eGullet. I'm a Levi, if there's a need for the second aliyah (or the first, but somehow I peg Plotnicki as a Kohain).

[Jinmyo]

So, I don't know from Yiddish being such a shiksa but I do know it's "smoked meat" in Montreal and the rest of Canada. Which tastes nothing like corned beef.

[stefanyb]

I am loving this thread.  Getting back to appetizing: like the German "delicatessen", the dairy items and smoked fishes that were the dairy/pareve ying to the meat of deli yang, were known as "appetitanreger" or appetizers.  This word may have morphed into appetizing.

Vay is mir. (sp?)

Literal translation- Woe is me

[Fat Guy]

Certainly a German usage would be more likely than not to have impact on the Yiddish usage, Yiddish being primarily based on German, with Russian and Hebrew as secondary components.

Since Yiddish is written in the Hebrew alphabet, there are no correct or incorrect English spellings. However, the standard pronunciation would be more like "oy vay iz mir."

[robert brown]

Making use of a Safireian device, starting a sentence with a gerund is the mark of an accomplished writer. Regarding the origins of the word "appetizing", I am using the resource of my academic/intellectual relationships to try to find a definitive answer. Discovering it may just be impossible, however.

Wishing you all a good and appetizing weekend,

Robert

[Fat Guy]

I too have put out the call for help. If anybody says to you, "Hey, another guy asked me the same question just the other day," we'll know the circle is complete.

[robert brown]

Steven, it is starting look like the origins are oral in origin. But let's see what the academics say.

[robert brown]

My academic pal, holder of the Chair in Jewish Studies at Austin doesn't have a clue. My own view is that it is derived from what I call the "Essex House Sign" phenomenon in which whatever came after the adjective "appetizing" somehow became  extinguished or obliterated, altering the sense of the original intent.

[jhlurie]

My own view is that it is derived from what I call the "Essex House Sign" phenomenon in which whatever came after the adjective "appetizing" somehow became  extinguished or obliterated, altering the sense of the original intent.

This isn't very different from what I suggested on page 1 of this topic... one part of speech can be made into another when something becomes implied.  Right?

[Fat Guy]

I think there are two issues here: One is the part of speech. The other is the meaning of the word. Appetizing seems not to be synonymous with appetizer.

There's nothing about it in Rosten, and my Yiddish-English dictionary lists only a word for appetite (in Yiddish, it's appetite too). But what we're talking about here is Yinglish, which isn't so well codified.

I will continue to pursue this on my end.

Amazing that the Essex House now houses ADNY.

[Steve Plotnicki]

My guess would be the Yiddish equivelent of Franglish or Spanglish, which is how most newly minted words are coined. And the word was craeted by either a shopkeeper who invented the word when asked by a landlord or signmaker what type of shop he had, or by housewives on the Lower East Side who needed an Americanized term for the shop that they bought their appetizers in. My kishkes tell me it was probably the latter example and it caught on in a big way. I have faith in numbers and there were more housewives than shopkeepers.

[Steve Plotnicki]

Of course the answer to the puzzle is "Yanglish." Here is the answer,

Mark Federman of Russ & Daughters

Sometimes things are sinpler than we might imagine.

[robert brown]

Steven S. I guess it comes down to how you equate what one does at Alain Ducasse, NY and in the rest of the Essex House.

[Fat Guy]

Robert, exactly.

Steve, I don't see that as a complete answer.

[Steve Plotnicki]

Steve-Do you mean we need to find Yettie Weinberg who in 1898 was on her way to get some appetizers for dinner (lox and herring) when her neighbor Mrs. Goldstein, who was standing on the fire escape 3 stories up from the street looked down and saw Yettie and then yelled, "Yettie, vie geist der? And Yettie, who all of a sudden was at a loss to respond (and Yettie was otherwise not the type to ever be at a loss for words) thought about it for a second and yelled back, "Ich geist to the Appetizing Store." Do we really have to find the first version of that story or can we just reconcile ourselves to say that's how it must have happened? It makes sense to me. It was called the Appetizing store because the things they sold there were "appetizing" as in very appetizing.

[Fat Guy]

That's right, Plotnicki: I won't rest until Yettie herself registers as an eGullet user and explains it to us.