Rome Journal

Andrew moves to Italy. Hilarity ensues.

Saturday, June 03, 2006

more fun with Italian

Four months since my last post. Dang.

Okay, here's something that has been going through my head lately. For the last couple of months, I've been collecting regional Italian cookbooks-- I have this fantasy of becoming zee great Italian chef, you know?-- and getting a crash course in culinary Italian. For the most part, it's pretty straightforward. "Chop" or "peel" translate pretty well, and technique is technique, you know? There are some differences that seem somehow cultural-- phrases like "wash the fish in the appropriate amount of water" isn't something you'd see in English-- but they only add to the charm.

The vocabularies are different, though. Sometimes this makes sense: where we have "anchovy", fish-loving Italian has both alice and acciughe. And don't get me started on sardines: sardine and sarde to begin with, plus the puzzling mascoli (no, they're not "masculine"; actually, as was explained to me in Syracuse, mascoli are more tender and smaller than your average sardine.)

And most recently, I've noticed that there are no fewer than three words to describe "stuffed" foods (as in stuffed vegetables, etc.): ripieno, farcito and imbottito. As far as I can tell, there's no real difference between the three. It's like that business about the Eskimos and snow...

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