I predict that the majority of the posts in this category will be by Kieran Healy.
Comment #63 from "Modesty Prevents Me."
You know what that post (specifically, the phrase "in every German supermarket that I've ever been in") reminds me of? I stepped into a little market in the picturesque Rhein wine village of Bacharach, and there's a pack of American-style hamburger buns. As in, festooned with the stars and stripes and Statue of Liberty. It was such a strange mismatch. Do American tourists really come to town, buy burgers and buns, and cookout down by the riverside? Seems unlikely.
Not likely, JRoth, but maybe Germans want to have American-style bread for their burgers, instead of eating their Bulette on a German-style Brötchen.
I've bought peanut butter in Germany similarly festooned with American flags.
Do you have to fish out the flags before you eat it?
No, Ben. It is part of the pain one must endure as an American.
(Tiny American Flags for expats!)
5: No, but you do have to call for a truce in the civil war.
maybe Germans want to have American-style bread for their burgers, instead of eating their Bulette on a German-style Brötchen.
But, as an American, I'm always happiest with burgers served on Brötchen-style rolls! I'm particularly fond of Mohnbrötchen for that purpose.
The funniest thing, to me, is the "ketchup" available in Germany.
Me: This ketchup is such crap. It's brown, and doesn't taste anything like ketchup.
Wife: Well, that's because Germans don't really eat ketchup; it's mostly for Americans.
Me: Then why don't they simply serve American-style ketchup?
Wife: Don't be such a cultural imperialist.
Me: I still say it's crap.
New Zealanders, and therefore Samoans, have this horrible stuff that they call tomato sauce but that serves the purpose of ketchup (it's not spaghetti sauce, it's explicitly for putting on burgers and fries and such). It is sweet, and flavored with cloves, and indescribably foul.
I'm down with the curry ketchup you can get in Germany, though. It's one of those things you have to come to terms with as its own entity, unrelated to the things with which it shares a name.
10: Kind of like anything in Germany called "salsa".
Taiwan french fries are almost all made of sweet potatoes. Takes some getting used to.
Chinese have very mixed feelings about potatoes of any kind, thinking of it as an emergency substitute for rice. Historically it's been that, and according to Needham potatoes were responsible for a big population increase, because they made it possible to survive failures in the rice crop. (Rather the opposite of the Irish experience, where the potato was the staple which failed.)
10: Curry ketchup caused me heartbreak at a Kirmas festival - I thought it would be tasty (at least better than the non-curry ketchup), but I didn't like it, and they squirted it all over the fries, presumably b/c I'm an American, and Americans put ketchup all over their damn fries.
Maybe next time I'll bring packets of Heinz with me.
13: I read in a cookbook that the Thai word for "potato" translates as "barbarian eggplant." I've no clue if this is true, but it pleases me greatly.
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A black writer just published something in n + 1. The website, but still.
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I'm feeling pretty confident about my prediction.
15: I am delighted by a cooking article that said that in Chinese, a tomato is a 'western persimmon.'
In Lithuanian at least fou of the names for fruits are derived from different languagees' words for apples.
Apple - Obuolys - from same root word as "apple"
Orange - Apelsinas - from German "Apfelsine" or Chinese apple
Tomato - Pomodoras - from Italian "pomorodo" or golden apple.
Peach - Persikas - from Latin "malum persicum" or Persian apple.
13. During WWII in Britain, they tried to persuade people that sweet potatos were like ordinary ones, and made fries out of them. Therefore most of my parents' generation hated sweet potatos implacably, and you couldn't give the things away until people my age grew up.
Sweet Potato fries are delicious.
20: from the same time period, at least in northern scotland, schools were giving out milk pudding at lunch made with milk powder and too much water. every day. There's a lot of left over distaste for them.
21 though, is absolutely correct. half & half can b e great too.
21 is true, but it's a bit of a shock if you're expecting yer actual spuds.
Those who have the will to win,
Cook potatoes in their skin,
Knowing that the sight of peelings,
Deeply hurts Lord Woolton's feelings.
I read some book as a kid about people who'd been shipped off to a camp in Siberia by the Soviets, and the incredible hardships and starvation and all. And there was some purple prose about the fantastic potato-peeling skills the heroine had to develop so as to peel the potatoes so thinly as not to lose even a precious morsel of potato flesh. And even as a child, I remember thinking "Eating them with the skins on never occured to you?"
25: I read that book too. I forge what it was called. I don't remember thinking that. You, LB, are a Bad Person.
Yeah, pretty much. I try to live with it.