Word World
It never ceases to amuse me how languages evolve, and how words and phrases take on new meanings. As I explore more of the culinary world through food memoirs/blogs/podcasts, I keep coming across interesting words and phrases for concepts unique to specific cultures, or sometimes different words and phrases for the same concept in entirely unrelated cultures.
For instance, recently I learned that Korean has the word son-mat (손맛 ): a composite word “hand-taste”. Growing up in Marathi culture, far away, I’ve heard a Marathi sentence “तिच्या हाताला चव आहे” (her hand has taste, literally). I’m sure this is a pretty universal concept, even if not every language has a word for it.
Speaking of the “taste of the hand”, here is an interesting tidbit from the world of sourdough baking.
If you bake a lot of sourdough bread, your hands might look like your loaves. Bacterially speaking, that is. The microbes found on bakers' hands mirror the microbes within their starters — the bubbly mix of yeast, bacteria and flour that's the soul of every loaf.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/11/12/665655220/sourdough-hands-how-bakers-and-bread-are-a-microbial-match
Now we don’t know (or maybe we do, but I’m not sure) if these bacteria on the baker’s hand change the taste of the sourdough breads they bake, but we shouldn’t be terribly surprised if that were to be proven, right?
Anyways, that brings us to the phrase for this week: Fare la scarpetta.
This Italian phrase’s literal translation would be: to do the small shoe. What does that even mean, you ask? Well, it’s a phrase used for “licking the dish clean”. How is that related? Imagine taking the last small piece of bread and curling it into a small shoe-like shape to lick clean last of the pasta sauce on the dish. Why does Italian need a phrase for something like this? Because in typical Italian dishes, the sauce has all the intensified flavors (especially the ragu or such meat-based sauces, slow cooked over a long time) and to waste it on the plate would be, well, culinary sin. Okay, that’s my theory, but I’m pretty sure it’s not entirely off the point. But do read this for a little more context (there is also, supposedly, a class angle to this — including a rather “un-mannerly” act, especially for European culture, to lick a dish clean) La Scarpetta on Miko Davies Blog.
Podcast World
One of the podcasts I listen to regularly is Good On Paper by Atlantic where host Jerusalem Demsas and their guest challenge popular narrative with data with data. One of the recent episodes of this podcast takes a look at the legal “rights” of slaves before emancipation and the Civil War — especially for interactions between the blacks themselves, but even, curiously, between whites and blacks. Therein I learned another shade of meaning to the word “privilege”. While blacks had no formal constitutional rights like the whites, I learned, they were accorded some privileges that meant they had some sort of quasi-rights that were respected by other white people. While this doesn’t lessen the evil of slavery, it’s an interesting piece of information to learn about.
You can check out the episode here: Good on Paper: How Slaves Used the Law
Quote World
From podcasts to quotes on podcasts. Recently I listened to the Korea-related podcast episode on The Empire Podcast (William Dalrymple and Anita Anand). The American General Douglas MacArthur went rogue on President Truman, who fired him (MacArthur). Wikipedia article about General MacArthur refers to a Time article which quotes President Truman saying:
I fired him because he wouldn't respect the authority of the President. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.
This quote is so fantastical, that I had doubts about whether it’s true. Turns out there are doubts.
The source is Merle Miller, who in 1973 described remarks that Truman had allegedly made to him in interviews in 1961 and 1962. In 1974, Miller came out with an “oral biography” based on the interviews.
In a 2006 book, however, historian Robert Ferrell said that he had listened to the tapes and concluded that Miller’s book was “a gross literary fraud.” Miller, Ferrell wrote, “changed Truman’s words in countless ways, sometimes improving the literary effect. Adding or subtracting words, he thoughtfully added his own opinions. He inserted his favorite cuss words. . .
From https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/did-truman-really-call-macarthur-that/
BTW, he’s one of Donald Trump’s favorite Generals.
“We need you to be as bold and determined as the immortal General Douglas MacArthur, who knew that the American soldier never, ever quits” he said during an address at the United States Military Academy in 2020.
The learning: not all quotes are real. Even if they are on Wikipedia. Especially if?
Related Links:
Trump’s 2020 Address at United States Military Academy.
Introduction to Slavery and Class in the American South: an abstract
The Empire Podcast Ep #173: The Koran War: Dividing the Peninsula
Medium post: Scarpetta: The Italian Word for Dipping the Sauce on the Plate with a Small Shoe, or Bread