Some days, a given word will look improbable. “Vehicle” has never looked correctly spelled to me. Today, “lobster” struck me as ridiculous.
-sters are usually people: Spinster. Mobster. Prankster. Pollster. But a lobster is not a person who lobs. It is a crustacean rather poorly equipped for ball games, among other things it is not prone to doing.
“Lobster”, the OED tells me, is cognate with langoustine and locust, from the Latin locusta, which means lobster, not locust. The insects (scarabei) were named after the crustacean, not the other way round, from similarity of shape.
The option of confusing lobsters for locusts is rather appealing. Exodus 10:13, for example: “and when it was morning, the east wind brought the lobsters.” Then again, who really wants to live on steak and locusts?
I followed the link through from the monthly eGullet highlights email: of course I’d be interested in the thread on “shaky food history“. There, down near the bottom of the first page of discussion, was an intriguingly unfamiliar word, mentioned precisely because it was not easy to look up. The poster, sanscravat, wrote,
While researching an herb I’d heard of (butnege) I found only three references in print — all three were, word for word, identical. None contained any worthwhile info, and none cited their source. A letter from Paula Wolfert was the only thing that led to a decent answer (turned out that “butnege” was nothing more than dried mint — something that none of the printed sources seemed to know).
It’s true. Butnege is a little-used word. Google gives me four hits. Google books provides one. The ad-ridden Essortment page is only vaguely informative in writing that “Butnege is an uncommon spice not readily available in the U.S. It is a leafy green spice similar to basil or oregano in appearance, but it has a distinctive taste. ” The ad-free, if uninformative, page at IraqIran mentions it only in passing: “A dish that was developed among farmers is tishreeb fajilla, fava beans with oil and lemon juice, thickened with old bread and enhanced with the special Iraqi herb called butnege.”
Gary Allen, in The Herbalist in the Kitchen, is more decisively clear, defining it as Mentha aquatica, a specific variety of mint, and one which matches up with the eGullet poster’s conclusion. He says he learned this from the book, The Baghdad Kitchen, which recommends using any kind of mint if this particular kind cannot be gotten. So – case closed?
Surely, though, if this were the standard name for the herb, it would be more widely used. My hunch was that the lack of use of the word was due to the way it had been transliterated – from Persian, from Arabic, from whatever language it originally came from in Iraq. So I asked for help.
My friend Little Diamond (of A Diamond in Sunlight) did some investigating on my behalf and came to a different conclusion than had my previous few sources. The Arabic version is بطنج, transliteratable as butnege, but also as butnaj (34 Google hits) or butnij (49 Google hits). Its translation has clearly vexed a number of people. Consider this confused discussion over what it might be, wherein people confidently inform others that it’s thyme, sage, Saudi mint, or a blend of herbs. (Usefully, one commentator notes it’s definitely not peppermint.) In The Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens, the authors give more synonyms, in transliterated Arabic and in English, for which they propose “river mint”. “River mint” clearly cannot be the Australian plant by that name, and may indeed be Mentha aquatica for all I know, as proposed by the poster I began with.
In English, Little Diamond tells me, according to the online sources she could find, this plant is called betony. It’s an alternate name, in Arabic, for betuniqa. Etymologically and superficially, this makes sense: all these words have the b-t-n sequence, a commonality more meaningful in Arabic than in English, it is true, but still a compelling choice for possible origin and meaning.
Now being betony does not exclude it being mint, as betony is a member of the mint family. It does not taste at all the same, however. Betony is bitter and astringent.
In the English-speaking world, betony is infused as a headache cure, and used for historical recreation cooking, as it was a popular ingredient in the Early Modern and before. (See, for example, this sixteenth-century curative recipe or, from different source, Conserve of Betony.) Beer can also be made from it.
Intriguing though this search has been, I don’t know if I have solved anything or only made further confusion in a translation challenge which has clearly stumped other people with fewer food-related resources. Perhaps the original poster and other authors, such as Wolfert, a specialist in the food of eastern Mediterranean, are all correct, and Mentha aquatica is the necessary ingredient when butnege is called for; it is certainly far more their area of expertise than mine! Perhaps betony, another mint variant, is the necessary ingredient; it is what Little Diamond tells me it transliterates to in Arabic and, in terms of comprehensible etymology, it is the more satisfying solution of the two.
There must be thousands of people out there who just know the answer, from being relevantly bi-lingual cooks, but what are the odds they will ever go web-searching for this particular transliterated spelling variation and thus come to resolve my uncertainty?
I was following the directions for a spinach raita, but using kale, common winter vegetable, as a substitute. The resulting flavor was milder, but still rich with greenery. Where does “kale” come from, I idly wondered – idly enough that thoughts of languages unknown to me flickered through my head; I didn’t think of the German word Kohl, the etymologically-related kohlrabi, or the English cole-slaw.
In Middle English, kale or cale or cail or calewort was a generic name for cabbage variations, with its earliest documented from around 1300. (OED) A sixteenth-century naturalist (but not a pirate), William Turner, wrote, in The names of herbes, that “Brassica is named..in englishe colewurtes, cole or keele.”
In Scotland, the vegetable was ubiquitous enough that, like the word for rice in Japanese, kale became synonymous with meals more generally. The kale-bell was the dinner bell, with kale-time synonymous with dinner-time. Water-kale was any broth made without fat or meat, cabbage-variants entirely optional. (Robert Henryson refers to it in “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse.”) As a result, the kale-pot, known by that name, was used for cooking up soups and stews, not just broth and cabbage.
As of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the “kailyard” was, as you would expect, a yard, or vegetable plot, where kale was grown. The term was used to derogatorily brand a group of Scottish writers, sentimental for rural life, including the author of Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie. (As I learned from eat the seasons.)
I see that the Kale industry encourages me to “Discover Kale“, from which I learn that Lincolnshire is a hotbed of kale-growing. March is the tail-end of its growing season in the UK, so it may be several months before I have much cause to think on kale again, whether as cabbage, meal, or literary movement.
Now that the first shoots are up and snowdrops are blooming, it’s about time for the foods of spring.
You will rarely need to know what the Bisaro pig is. It’s a pig, which is more than our party knew at the Portuguese restaurant on Friday night, when we collectively failed to ask the waiter for a translation. None of us had it, nor its accompanying sweet potato mash and pickled baby onion sauce.
The Bisaro is not just a pig. It’s a central and northern Portuguese pig, part-boar, of Celtic origins. The breed was classified by J.F. Macedo Pinto in the nineteenth century as “Bizaro Type 1, or Celtic”. Supposedly, it originated in Gaul. Its labeling could hardly be more mythic, more Asterixian.
Bisaro pigs grow to a meter tall at the shoulder, and a meter-and-a-half in length from shoulder to tail. They look like this, approximately. Their iterations, for comparison, were studied for genetic origins in the c. 1999 article, “Genetic characterization and inventory of the Bísaro pig through visible effect genes. Their utilization in the genotypic comparison between populations and in the establishing of a nucleus for in vivo genetic conservation” (PDF). In the article, the pig is regularly referred to as the “ancient Bisaro”.
Since breeds were first systematically categorized in the nineteenth century, it’s rather hard to say just how much the modern version of the breed resembles the pig-boars known to what would have been Asterix’s companions. (Had he, y’know, been real.) As a living, breeding creature, however, odds are it has developed and changed over the intervening centuries quite a bit, if not as much as languages do.
Two brochures arrived simultaneously from two Indian restaurants located at the same address. One had decent copy editing. The other didn’t. Its earnest, well-intentioned descriptions are notable for their erraticness; I have no idea why a “Chicken Tikka Omelette” requires elaboration (“Chicken tikka comes with omelette”), while other, more vague, items, such as “Soup” do not.
Much of the shoddy grammar and phrasing quirks I forgive. This isn’t the work of a native English speaker who grew up unable to communicate effectively in his or her native tongue, but that of someone for whom English is a second language. The overuse of “succulent” I blame on indoctrination into the overdone world of food adjectives in lieu of actual description.
Typos are a different kettle of fish, so to speak, even when their intended spelling is obvious. Thus we have spent multiple moments in the last day talking about seabusses.
The seabuss is “stuffed with fragrant fresh herbs, and gently steamed toabsorb [sic] the fragrance of the herbs”. I suppose that means they don’t often take aboard non-herb passengers, there being no space for them. Perhaps schools of seabusses steam themselves over deep sea volcanic vents for spa-like refreshment. Perhaps they go to the garage at the end of the day for a tune-up.
In any event, seabusses sound like they’d be too large for my plate, even if they do only cost £12.95.
© S. Worthen 2009