Archive for the ‘Language and food’ Category

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The food train rolls on

October 26, 2025

Yesterday’s leg of the train trip, on this blog in my posting “Tex-Mex cheese enchiladas”:

[On] cheese enchiladas with Tex-Mex chili gravy, as celebrated by Nelson Minar in “Tex Mex Gravy” on his weblog Some Bits yesterday. A stunning sociocultural contrast to my food posting on this blog yesterday, “Vienne en Isère 3: La Marjolaine”, about Fernand Point’s dacquoise cake La Marjolaine, both elegant and extravagant.

Then in this comment on that posting, NM sets us off on the next leg (which you can think of as Vienne en Isère 4 (there will be a Vienne en Isère 5):

You are right that Tex-Mex enchiladas are a world away from your dacquoises. I can’t think of anything in Tex-Mex cuisine to match those. But Helen Corbitt might have had something. She was Texas’ answer to Julia Child and wrote a lot of fine food books that were popular in my mother’s generation. I am sure one of her cookbooks has a pleasant cake, perhaps alternating layers of angelfood cake and Cool Whip with some tinned fruit to gussy it up. Not quite French patisserie but pretty fancy for Dallas.

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Posted in Books, Language and food, Music, Social class | 6 Comments »

Tex-Mex cheese enchiladas

October 25, 2025

Or, more exactly, cheese enchiladas with Tex-Mex chili gravy, as celebrated by Nelson Minar in “Tex Mex Gravy” on his weblog Some Bits yesterday. A stunning sociocultural contrast to my food posting on this blog yesterday, “Vienne en Isère 3: La Marjolaine”, about Fernand Point’s dacquoise cake La Marjolaine, both elegant and extravagant.

I’ll give you NM’s food take first, then some words about NM, whose interests (all represented on his blog) also include gay activism and queer studies, and software engineering too. A gay foodie techie, who could have imagined such a thing! (And he’s been a friend since he was an undergraduate at Reed College.) Then I will return to les dacquoises, for yet another pass.

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Posted in Culture, Friendship, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, This blogging life | 6 Comments »

Vienne en Isère 3: La Marjolaine

October 24, 2025

Yesterday’s posting “Another visit to Vienne en Isère” ended with a menu from a 1971 lunch Bonnie and Ed Campbell had at the fabulous restaurant La Pyramide in Vienne in 1971; I wondered what choices they had made from the menu, and Bonnie recalled that they had chosen La Marjolaine as the dessert. A specialty of the house, as it turns out. A photo of this remarkable flourless cake, and then crucial information from the Epicurious site’s “This Classic French Cake Tastes Like the World’s Best Candy Bar: The majestic marjolaine — beloved by chefs all over — is worth making for your special celebration” by Genevieve Yam on 1/20/22:

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Posted in Language and food, Taste | Leave a Comment »

Another visit to Vienne en Isère

October 23, 2025

A follow-up to my 10/21/25 posting “A world postcard”, about a card from the Librairie Lucioles (the Fireflies Bookstore) in Vienne en Isère, France. First, a bit more about the town of Vienne, with its Roman history. Then, a note on one particular feature of note, the Vienne Pyramid, an obelisk originally from the Roman circus in Vienne. Which leads to the extraordinary Vienne restaurant, Fernand Pointe’s La Pyramide, named after the circus obelisk. And then to e-mail from my old friend Benita Bendon Campbell, with a recollection of a lunch she and her husband had at the restaurant in 1971. So: from bookstore to Roman chariot races to food, glorious food.

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Posted in Art, History, Language and food | 3 Comments »

Quiche, Henri, les flics!

October 21, 2025

Gretel Cunningham Young (of Columbus OH, where she grew up, with my daughter Elizabeth, many years ago) on Facebook yesterday:


— GY: My goal was to make a half-vegetarian, half-carnivorous quiche, so I ordered this divided pan

Noting her reference to carnivorous quiche, plus an odd quirk in way English vegetarian is used, I reacted to her statement with some alarm (my response in an expanded and improved form here):

— AZ: But I don’t think I want to get near a carnivorous (‘meat-eating’) quiche, lest I be devoured by it. vegetarian quiche has the adjective vegetarian ‘(of food or diet), plant-based, excluding meat’, not the noun vegetarian ‘(of people) a vegevore, someone who eats only plant-based food; a non-carnivore, someone who does not eat meat’. A quiche that’s a vegetarian would not be a threat to me (as a being made of meat), but it would nevertheless be creepy, in a cannibalistic sort of way. The meaty correspondent to vegetarian quiche ‘quiche for vegetarians’ would be quiche for carnivores.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, French, Language and food, Lexical semantics, Puns, Semantics of compounds, Silliness, Slogans | 1 Comment »

The Pomeranian-nimbus

October 12, 2025

An Ellis Rosen cartoon that came by on Facebook recently:


(#1) The hybrid creature the pomeranian-nimbus, being taken for a walk, on a leash, by its owner — so being presented as an extraordinary dog, a cloud canine; note that the woman’s dog recognizes the p-n as a dog, and appears to want to play with it (see the wagging tail)

(The name of the dog breed is standardly capitalized, because it’s a proper name denoting a creature originating in the geographical region of Pomerania, and I’ll use Pomeranian from here on.)

The compound Pomeranian-nimbus is a copulative  N1 + N2 compound (like Swiss-American or hunter-gatherer), denoting a thing or things of both the N1 type and the N2 type.  But in fact the creature is not just a mix of Pomeranian dog and nimbus cloud, but is actually a nimbus Pomeranian ‘Pomeranian dog that is (also) a nimbus cloud’ (your standard N + N compound in English is semantically modifier + head) — rather than a Pomeranian nimbus ‘nimbus cloud that is also, or at least resembles, a Pomeranian dog’. A nimbus Pomeranian, or, more compactly, a nimbopomeranian, a nimpom for short.

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Posted in Abbreviation, Compounds, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and plants, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Meteorology, Music, Names, Poetry, Portmanteaus, Semantics of compounds, Silliness, Word attraction | 3 Comments »

Holy Romaine Empire

October 11, 2025

🏳️‍🌈 👨‍❤️‍👨 🏳️‍🌈 National Coming Out Day, and also J&A Day, Jacques and Arnold’s wedding-equivalent anniversary (some explanation of that cooccurrence in an appendix to this posting)

The 10/8 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, posted here because it’s sweetly bizarre (true to the strip’s title), complex, and cleverly goofy (like the one in my 10/9/25 posting “The flannel frontier”); something to enjoy for a moment in the midst of terrible times:


(#1) A phonologically perfect pun (Caesar the salad punning on Caesar the emperor), the pun-like Holy Roman Empire (a German political entity) playing on Roman Empire (governed by the Caesars of Rome), and a phonologically imperfect pun (romaine the salad green punning on Roman) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

(The two salad puns are Wayno’s; Holy Roman Empire as a pun-like play on Roman Empire is an invention of the Roman Catholic church in Germanic lands in the early Middle Ages.)

The cartoon shows a Caesar (with laurel leaves) appearing before his people, cradling a humongous bowl of salad and waving a pair of salad servers like a weapon (Julius Caesar is often portrayed in Western art as wielding a sword). Next to him, a soldier utters a variant of the ceremonial greeting Hail Caesar! — celebrating not Caesar, but his salad.

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Posted in Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, History, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and politics, Language and religion, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Names, Puns | 9 Comments »

Cellarettes and cabinet drinks

October 9, 2025

Adventures in furniture inspired by a Benjamin Dreyer posting on Facebook yesterday:

Goshamighty, I completely forgot to mention, when I posted my Old Acquaintance piece a few hours ago, that in commencing this morning to read John Van Druten’s 1942 The Damask Cheek (co-written with one Lloyd Morris), I learned a new word! It’s cellarette: “a movable cabinet or container, often made of wood, designed to store and secure alcoholic beverages.”

If there’s a more perfect word to turn up in a play set in “The library of MRS. RANDALL’s house in the East Sixties, New York. December 1909,” [the  setting of The Damask Cheek] I can’t think of it.

BD locates the sociocultural milieu of the item (and then its name as well) as privileged urban upper class — traditional, elegant, and elite — and we will see that his classdar is first-rate.

I then broke in with the news that I have one of these things, a very nice one, of Danish design, made of teak, on wheels, with a durable bar top, in two parts that slide open to reveal the storage spaces within (there will be photos). I am neither elegant nor elite — I have several good points, but they are not these — but this clever and handsome object suits me (and it was mine and Jacques’s, and before that mine and Ann’s, so it comes with with waves of sweet memory; I will soon pass it on to my grand-child Opal).

But first, the cellaret / cellarette. The object and the name.

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Posted in Furnishings and tools, Language and food, Language play, Music, My life, Plays, Social class | Leave a Comment »

The FY restaurant

October 5, 2025

Following on my 9/27/25 posting “From the annals of remarkable commercial names” (about the Chew Chew Grill / Chew Chew’s Diner in Toronto), Sim Aberson wrote on Facebook on 10/3:

— SA > AZ: While discussing commercial names, a very good Vietnamese restaurant in Miami, Phuc Yea — of course it’s pronounced fook yeh. [I omit commentary on the well-deployed SPAR (aka dangler) and the NP (topic-introducing) sentence fragment]

— AZ > SA: Oh my. No doubt intentional. Though I’ll point out that the enthusiastic intensive-modifier use of the F-word in Fuck yeah! is pretty much as low on the raunchiness scale as the F-word gets.

As it turns out, definitely intentional. And cheeky.

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Posted in Language and food, Names, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

entre más carne mejor

October 3, 2025

More from the annals of commercial names, thanks to this Facebook report from Steven Levine, on the road in Asbury Park NJ:

On the way to Ocean Grove NJ for a weekend with some friends, our culinary tour of the Jersey Shore, I passed this sign:


(#1) The Meat & More Corporation of Asbury Park: a butcher shop, noted here for its double entendre name

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Posted in Double entendres, Jokes, Language and food, Spanish, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

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