Arnold Zwicky's Blog

On Facebook recently, Alessandro Michelangelo Jaker remarked on a product label he found at the Hy-Vee supermarket in Watertown SD:

(#1) [AJ:] Canadian friends 🇨🇦: please explain this. What is a Canadian steak 🇨🇦🥩 supposed to taste like?

FB posters seem to have disregarded AJ’s little joke, which turns on parsing CANADIAN STEAK SEASONING as

[CANADIAN STEAK] SEASONING ‘seasoning for Canadian steak’

— a parsing strongly suggested by the font sizes on the label — rather than

CANADIAN [STEAK SEASONING] ‘type of seasoning for steak, associated with Canada’

— which is what the company is actually selling, and which posters went on to describe (as I will myself, in a little while, since this sort of meat rub will not be familiar to many of my readers). I note that this reading of CANADIAN STEAK SEASONING is probably a mischievous willful misparsing on AJ’s part, since he’s accustomed to doing fieldwork in Canada and would likely be familiar with the product. And, since AJ is a friend of mine, I know and appreciate his wry sense of humor.

Parsing ambiguities. But first, some words on parsing ambiguities in expressions, like CANADIAN STEAK SEASONING, of the form

Modifier + N1 + N2 (where the modifier is an Adj or another N, in a compound-noun construction)

The potential for ambiguity — between a complex modifier, Modifier + N1, and a complex head, N1 + N2 — is all over the place in these expressions, but it’s mostly not noticed because one of the readings is unlikely or preposterous in the real world, or just in context of use. Some examples from postings of mine:

gay consumer advocate (surprise!: intended complex modifier, gay consumer), pork knuckle pasta (intended complex modifier, pork knuckle, there being no such thing as knuckle pasta, like elbow pasta, though there could be), Spanish fetish brand (intended complex head, fetish brand), Indian rubber ducks (intended complex modifier, Indian rubber), Congressional Brain Injury Task Force (intended complex head Brain Injury Task Force), permanent laundry markers (intended complex head, laundry marker), rechargeable battery tycoon (intended complex modifier, rechargeable battery), and the prize goes to: big penis book (the actual book is both a big book about penises and a book about big penises)

Canadian steak seasoning. Now on the meat rub itself. From the Spice Jungle website on Canadian steak seasoning / Montreal seasoning / Canadian steak spice / Montreal steak spice, a culinary substance of many names:

(#2) From Spice Jungle’s gigantic display of their seasonings in bulk

The Great Northern Goddess of steak spice blends. She’s a stout and hardy mix that commands attention from all her subjects and compassionately grants their dishes glory in the form of an herbal-garlicky flavor.

Canadian steak seasoning is a popular spice blend from The Great North and originating out of Montreal. The recipe is credited to Morris Sherman, a broilerman who worked at Schwartz’s, a famous Jewish delicatessen and restaurant in the 1940’s and 50’s. Canadian steak rub was originally used as a pickling spice that was sourced from Jewish-Romanian recipes. Sherman began using it as a meat rub; it became so popular that other delis and restaurants began to copy it.

ingredients: salt, spices, garlic, paprika, and chile pepper

I believe that coriander is prominent among the spices, but of course the ingredients of the Canadian steak blends offered by various companies are commercial secrets.

You might have supposed that a Canadian spice would be polite and un-pushy, maybe with a bit of French flair to it, but this one is both garlicky and pepper-hot. The brute fact is that steak rubs are generally aggressive, even if they originated in Montreal.

This entry was posted on August 19, 2024 at 9:29 am and is filed under Compounds, Constituency, Language and food, Modification, Parsing, Semantics of compounds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.