My latest book deadline is now behind me, and while I desperately try to catch up on the work that's piled up while I've been editing-editing-editing, I've also finally found the opportunity to catch up a bit on entertaining, and so had friends over for lunch yesterday. I go back and forth about whether I "should" use American or British recipes when I cook. The American ones have familiar foods and familiar measurements (cups, ounces) but force me to make substitutions for the many basic ingredients that are just not basic here, whereas the British ones are new-to-me recipes that require (AmE) a kitchen scale/(BrE) kitchen scales (since the measurements are often weights) and figuring out whether the cake will be moist enough if I leave out the sultanas (AmE [near-equivalent] golden raisins). (For me, the hardest part of Christmas in the UK is not the lack of snow, but the presence of dried fruit in all the baked goods. I like dried fruit. I like baked fruit. But I do not like baked dried fruit, and I miss [AmE] Christmas cookies.)
Yesterday I compromised: British baking recipe (ginger cake with clementine (orig. AmE) frosting), American main course (chicken and dumplings). Since it's hard to get shortening (tip for American expats: Trex or white Flora are the closest things to Crisco--look for them next to the margarine) and lots of other baking-type products, it seemed like the British cake was the safer way to go. But the first ingredient on the chicken recipe brought home the fact that no recipe is safe from trans-Atlantic opacity. It called for a fryer. This is AmE for 'a chicken suitable for frying' (OED), but what it really means is a 'a small chicken'. Larger are broilers and larger still are roasters. Now, I don't know off-hand how big any of these chickens are supposed to be, as in the US, I'd just go to the supermarket and buy the one label(l)ed 'fryer'. So, I have to add a bit to the recipe:
Preheat wireless modem to 24 Mbps.
Google 'fryer chicken lbs'
Translate pounds to kilograms
Log on to internet grocer
Order 1.5 kg chicken
But at least I was just buying a whole chicken. Butchered meats are a shopping minefield. Sam wrote recently to ask:
how do American names for different cuts of steak translate into English names?
"They don't always translate" is the answer to this question. It's not that the cuts of beef have different names in the two places, it's that they are different cuts of meat. Here's the picture of British beef cuts from Wikipedia:
And here's the American:
Then, once you get into particular cuts of steak, there is plenty of room for other differences. I've not found a good source on UK versus US on this, and it's my impression that AmE just has a lot more words for steak types. Here's a helpful guide from someone on answers.com (with the misspellings corrected and all AmE terms in bold):
... rib steak which has bone in or rib eye which is boneless, same cut of meat different name because of bone removed. very good with lots of marble. porterhouse from the hind half with bone in and tenderloin on other side of bone, take bone out and it's a new york strip, t-bone [orig. AmE, now used in BrE too--ed.] same but smaller tenderloin. tenderloin itself lies right under the back bone as is the most tender steak on the cow, because there is no movement of any part of it, therefore it lies there doing nothing, all 3 are very good. sirloin comes from the hip and is the most unpredictable piece of meat, sometimes very tender other times not,it is right above the rump section.
We've discussed the pronunciation of fil(l)ethere before, but another one to mention is that in BrE one sees fillet steak on menus, but in AmE one tends to see filet mignon as a rough equivalent.
Meanwhile, on the pig:
And the British ones:
I've already discussed bacon briefly elsewhere. The other main pork difference that I can think of is gammon, a word I'd never heard in English until moving to the UK. According to someone else at answers.com (again, spelling is corrected):
[Ham and gammon] are both pork but ham is usually a leg of pork that has been aged, cured, smoked or cooked. Usually in the UK, its wet cured in a brine (salt) solution, then it's cooked. Gammon is the hind leg cut from a side of bacon, so it's cured (again in brine) but it's not cooked before you get it.
Basically, if you're served a roasted ham in the UK, they call it gammon, as far as I can tell. (I've also discovered that you can bake a ham in AmE but not BrE.)
And that's what I can tell you about meat. My education in such things has been curtailed by Better Half's vegetarianism. I am ardently plotting my next opportunity to lure friends and acquaintances into our home on the pretext of entertaining them, but with the true motive of cooking meat for myself.
Baking and baked goods are a perennial source of US/UK
miscommunication—in large part because most of our current baking/eating
habits were only invented after the split between American and British
English. We eat different baked goods with newish names and we often use
the same old words in different new ways.
While I've written
many posts that have mentioned cake (see links below), I've come to
feel the need for a much bigger one about cake. This one has been several (very busy) months in the making.
cake itself
The word cake came into English from Old Norse (or another
Scandinavian source) in around the 13th century. Way back then it was a
word for a round loaf of bread that was a bit flattened by having been
turned over while baking. These days we associate it more with
sweet baked goods, usually (but not necessarily) those leavened with
something other than yeast. But its round, bready roots come through in things like
(Scottish) oatcake (which refers to something more like modern crackers than like modern cakes) and northwestern England's barm cakes, one of the many regional names for the kinds of bread rolls with which you might make a sandwich (in the American sense). Later, cake came to mean any round, flattened food, and thus we have fish cakes and crab cakes and rice cakes and the like.
People
only started using cake as a mass noun referring to the substance (rather
than the loaf as a whole) in the 16th century, and from then it
increasingly referred to fancy or sweet bread-like things.
Many Americans would think of cake as a rather normal dessert. But those who've watched the Great British (orig. AmE) Bake Off (GBBO) will have seen that cake and dessert are
treated as different things. Such is the case in English culture (at
least) more generally. Cake is something you'd have with coffee or tea
as a break, not something you'd immediately think of preparing for the
final course of a meal. (Though you will find the occasional cake on a UK
dessert menu.) As we've already seen in the dessert/pudding post, puddings are another matter. Some look and feel like cakes (e.g., my fave sticky toffee pudding), but are not usually considered cakes in BrE. (Please do go to the pudding post, linked above, if you want to comment on puddings.)
Cake(s) as sweet baked snacks
On the other hand, in certain contexts, all sorts of things can loosely count as cake in England that would not be so called in AmE. Say you went to a
coffee shop with your friend. If you were English you might ask them
"Which cake do you want?" And your English friend might say "A (orig. AmE) brownie" or "The apple turnover, please"
or "The carrot cake, please". If you were American, and you wanted the
brownie or the turnover, you'd probably answer that question with "I'm not in the mood for cake, but I'd like that brownie/apple turnover." For
Americans, cakes are cakes and other baked goods are other baked goods.
For the English, cake can be an umbrella term for sweet baked goods eaten in the situations where one usually eats cakes in the narrower sense. (NB: I'm saying English rather than British
because not enough Scottish or Welsh people have offered to buy me
cake in coffee shops. More fieldwork needed.)
If I were Americanly asking someone which thing they wanted in the coffee shop, I'd probably say "Which kind of cake do you want?" because "which cake" doesn't really sound right in AmE, where it more usually refers to a big thing that you slice and not an individual serving of it. If a BrE speaker had a cake with their tea, it would fit on a small plate (under which the server will have inexplicably placed a paper napkin as if it's a doily, rendering the napkin useless—a coffee-shop peeve of mine). If an American had a cake with their coffee, they'd be an incredible glutton, eating enough for a dozen people.
AmE snack cake refers to the overly processed small cakes that are packaged for putting in
lunch boxes. Twinkies are a famous example, but there are lots of other
kinds as well (here's a guide).
You can get such individually wrapped cakes in the UK too, e.g. Cadbury
Mini Rolls are pretty much the equivalent of a Hostess Ho-Ho and the Mr
Kipling brand offers a variety of such products, but I don't know of a generic BrE term
for them. But again, we'd call them a snack cake but probably not a cake.
A very noticeable thing if you watch GBBO is the constant reference to sponge. Americans can use the term sponge cake (emphasis on the cake) but don't use it often because that's the prototypical cake type—and you don't need to specify the most typical type. (I've discussed the psycholinguistic concept of prototypes here.) It'd be like saying cloth shirt—almost redundant.
[Update: see the comments for some more-informed American takes on sponge, which seem to indicate that for AmE sponge is a method (making with egg whites, not butter) and for BrE it's a result (a spongy texture). This fits beautifully with other examples of Americans naming things in reference to the form of the ingredients (pre-assembly) and British using names relating to the form of the result. See previous discussions of mashed potato(es) and scrambled egg(s) and burgers and hot dogsfor other examples.]
But BrE speakers are more likely to call it sponge than to call it sponge cake, if that's the kind of cake they're talking about. A Victoria sponge (aka Victoria sandwich) is a two-layer cake with jam (and often cream) in the middle (no icing/frosting on top)—a very common cake in England. On GBBO they talk about lots of different types of sponge, like genoise or joconde, but that's specialist jargon that you don't tend to hear elsewhere. If you want more about those, see this Wikipedia entry.
A reason that BrE speakers need to talk about sponge is that it's not necessarily the default cake type. Fruit cakes are very traditional and (get ready for a shocker, Americans) even loved
in England. You cannot imagine my disappointment the first time I was
handed a slice of English wedding cake and discovered it wasn't a nice, white sponge cake like I was expecting, but a fruit cake as in the photo to the left. When I got
married in England, I had to insist that one of our cake's layers was not fruit. I
didn't care what it was, as long as it wasn't fruitcake.
(A note on spelling: AmE prefers fruitcake and BrE goes both ways: fruit cake or fruitcake.)
The
traditional English Christmas cake is also a fruit cake. This has been
adopted to a small degree in the US, where there is some tradition of
giving fruitcakes as Christmas gifts. (When/where I was a kid, the
local Lions Club sold them as Christmastime fundraiser. It seems they still do in New Zealand.) But Americans also have the tradition of mocking fruitcakes as the worst cake and the worst gift, starting with Johnny Carson in 1973: "The worst gift is a fruitcake. There
is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it
to each other." American fruitcakes are generally
unfrosted/uniced, whereas English Christmas cakes have white royal
icing(see link) and decoration.
American wedding cakes are often made of white cake, which is a kind of sponge made with only the whites of the egg (here's a recipe—notice how it Americanly never uses the word sponge). Americans also talk about yellow cake, where the yolks are left in. Yellow cake with chocolate frosting is
a well-known combination. I could link to another recipe, but I'll
instead show a picture of a very typical American cake mix—these, like many
things, come in many more varieties in the US than in the UK.
While there aren't as many cake mixes in the UK, there are a lot of long-life
ready-made cakes in boxes. (Something that surprised me when I moved to England.) The popularity of one supermarket chain's
Colin the Caterpillar cake (the birthday cake for one side of my UK family) gave rise to the 'generification' of the caterpillar cake, which gave rise to lawsuits and news stories last year. (Click on the last link for pictures.)
Another cake type I've tweeted about a lot is coffee cake:
Difference
of the Day: 'coffee cake' In AmE, a type of cake, often with a cinnamon
crumble topping or similar, that's meant to be eaten with coffee. In
BrE, a cake flavo(u)red with coffee. I've done this one before, but I
had such a gorgeous AmE one that I had to share: pic.twitter.com/UKK7omY6aO
Other US cake types include(links are to Wikipedia):
angel food cake(a
very light sponge made with egg whites and cream of tartar—an
ingredient that seems to show up in US baking a lot more than UK baking)
devil's food cake, which would probably be called chocolate fudge cake in BrE
pound cake, which
isn't necessarily American, but it's much more common in the US—and
thus shows up nearly seven times as much in AmE as BrE in the GloWbE corpus.
On the UK side, one runs into lemon drizzle cake a lot, while in the US one mostly gets lemon cake or lemon bars.
No discussion of the BrE meaning of cake is complete without mention of the Jaffa cake, which Americans would call a cookie. It is a little disc of sponge cake with a bit of orange jam/[AmE] jelly on top and dark chocolate on top of that. [I'd originally written BrE jelly/AmE gelatin here, which it might well be, but I went with what Wikipedia said.] There was a famous court case about whether such things should be taxed, since there is (or was?) VAT ('value-added tax', approximately AmE sales tax) on chocolate-covered (BrE) biscuits (AmE cookies),
which are a luxury item, but no VAT on cakes, which are, apparently, a
necessity. Part of the decision to label them as cakes was based on the
appraisal that cakes go hard when they get stale, whereas (British)
biscuits go soft when they're stale (thus demonstrating a main
difference between BrE biscuit and AmE cookie).
cake accoutrements & shapes
The utensil with which you lift a slice of cake is a cake slice (BrE 1810s) or a cake server (AmE ?1890s).
The shape of a cake depends on what you bake it in—in AmE a cake pan and in BrE a cake tin. Into the pan/tin you put AmE cake batter or BrE cake mixture. BrE reserves batter for really thin mixtures (and British cakes often seem to have thicker mixtures than American ones).
Ring-shaped cakes made in fluted pans/tins are common in Europe, but it's in the US that they came to be known as Bundt cakes, after the trademarked name of a pan sold by the Nordic Ware company. (See Wikipedia for more.)
Sheet cakes also seem to be an AmE invention—these are unlayered, frosted (and often decorated) sponge cakes made in a rectangular pan. People talked about them a bit more after Tina Fey went onto Saturday Night Live to propose "sheet caking" as a method of dealing with far-right demonstrations.
(I must say, though, that her sheet cake seems tall enough that it must be layered.)
In BrE I've seen a sheet cake referred to as a tray bake, but tray bake is used for all sorts of things that are baked in a low, rectangular pan/tin/tray, including the things Americans would call bar cookies. (For past posts about cookies, see here.)
I've written before about AmE cupcakev BrE fairy cake. In BrE today, cupcake has been imported for bigger, fancier ones.
[Late addition, 27 Dec]: I'd thought I'd written here about BrE loaf cakes v American quick breads, but my memory played tricks on me—I must have been remembering writing about it in The Prodigal Tongue. In the book, I use two banana bread recipes as illustration of how many levels AmE and BrE can differ on, and one of the differences is that at one point in the British recipe, the banana bread is called "the cake". Many sweet, loaf-shaped things that Americans bake and might well slice and butter (banana bread, zucchini (BrE courgette) bread, pumpkin bread, ) turn up as [ingredient] loaf cake in UK coffee shops. (When transferred to BrE cake status, they often have icing drizzled over.) Here's a bit of what I wrote in The Prodigal Tongue:
American baking
has a traditional category called quick breads, that is, breads
leavened without yeast. Quick breads include banana bread, zucchini (= UK courgette) bread, and my mother’s
famous pumpkin bread, as well as American biscuits
(which look a bit like British scones, but don’t feel or taste like them) and
what the British call American-style muffins, including
blueberry muffins and bran muffins (though they’ve proved so popular in the UK
that the American-style is usually
left off these days). In an American cookbook, these recipes are located in the
breadchapter.Banana breads and blueberry muffins are relatively new to Britain,
and they came over without the larger quick
bread category. They thus fell into the cake
category.
This isn't the only American baked good that gets re-classified in BrE. When I've made snickerdoodles for UK folk, I've been congratulated on my "little cakes". (The way I make them—with cream of tartar—gives them a nice cakey texture.) While the cake category is broad in BrE, it's the cookie category that's broad in AmE.
cake expressions
a piece of cakecomes from AmE in the 1960s and means 'easy'. BrE has borrowed it and added a more vulgar version: a piece of piss.
that takes the cake(AmE 1830s) versus that takes the biscuit(BrE
1880s) = 'it is the best/it wins' (though these days it's mostly used
ironically to indicate something that "wins" at being the worst).
off one's cake(BrE informal) = deranged [1880s]; extremely intoxicated [1980s]
bake sale (AmE 1890s)vcake stall (BrE 1600s, but then a more formal business) v cake sale(now more BrE than AmE, but Irish & AmE evidence precedes BrE evidence) = selling donated baked goods as a fundraiser
more links
Before
commenting on this post with comments suggesting or asking questions
about other baked goods, please see these past blog posts. Comments are
welcome on those old posts—conversations on this blog keep on going.
P.S. It's the time of year when I declare the US>UK and UK>US Words of the Year and nominations have been very, very thin this year. Please let me know if you have any nominations for these categories!
I'd told myself I was going to take a break from writing about food, but that decision seems to be in conflict with my determination to write about linguisticky things that come up in my day-to-day doings...and it seems like all I do is eat.
Better Half is mad for (AmE=crazy about) gooseberries, a fruit I'd never experienced in the US, though I did know that the kiwi (fruit; BrE) used to be called the Chinese gooseberry. Anyhow, this is the label on the punnet (BrE*) that he bought this week.
I said to him, "Sweetie, you don't have to buy things just because it says on the label that they're perfect for you."
Better Half was not amused. It is a trial to live with me, I must admit.
Gooseberry fool is a traditional British treat, which involves gooseberries (duh), sugar and lots and lots of cream. BH made some when his nan (=grandma) visited Friday, but in an attempt to make it less calorific, replaced some of the cream with yog(h)urt. (Myself, I think that yog(h)urt has its place, but that any excuse to eat cream should not be taken lightly.) Fools can be made with other fruits as well, but gooseberry fool is the king of fools.
Now, I have to give two links for recipes, suitable to each continent's measures and ingredients. For the American version, click here, for a British version, click here. Some recipes include custard in the fool, but that's newfangled tomfoolery.
If it's just about berries, sugar and cream, why do you need different recipes? Well, because cream just isn't the same in the two places. In the US, there are three (basic) types of cream: light cream, heavy cream and whipping cream, which I always thought was a con, because it doesn't seem to be terribly different from heavy cream. In the UK, on the other hand, there are single cream, double cream, whipping cream and clotted cream. Clotted cream has been subjected to heat and is very butter-like, and perfect for spreading on scones with a bit of strawberry jam. As for the first two, one might believe that these are easily translated. Single cream = light cream and double cream = heavy cream. Right?
Wrong!
...as I discovered when I first made my chocolate mousse recipe here. It called for heavy cream, so I bought some double cream. Some double cream is label(l)ed "suitable for spooning"--when you scoop a dollop onto your cake, it'll keep its shape. I made my mousse with non-spooning double cream, but it was still much heavier (48% butterfat) than a heavy cream (36-40%). The mousse was perfectly edible, but it was more like eating a truffle than a mousse. No one could finish their portion, except for BH's sister's better half, The Gardener. The man has the sweetest tooth (full of cavities) and the kind of metabolism that I mention in my prayers. Not only did he finish his own, he finished everyone else's plus the "safety serving" I'd held back in the fridge.
Single cream and light cream have around 18% butterfat. Whipping cream has 30-40%. So, if you have a US recipe that calls for heavy cream, use whipping cream if you're in the UK. North America also has half-and-half, which has 10-12% fat. I've seen it claimed that single cream and half-and-half are the same thing, but really you have to add a little milk to single cream to make it like half-and-half.
Cream is a more serious business in the UK because it is so central a part of pudding (AmE = dessert). Cream is poured over most puddings/desserts, including a cake, true puddings ("sweet dessert, usually containing flour or a cereal product, that has been boiled, steamed, or baked." --American Heritage Dictionary), apple crumble (AmE = apple crisp), or even fresh fruit salad (which, even though I am a great fan of cream, I find a little disgusting). For some desserts/puddings, one is offered warm, pourable custard as an alternative to cream. The only puddings/desserts that I can think of that one doesn't always get cream, custard or ice cream with are those that are already made of cream, custard or ice cream, like fools or trifle--a concoction of sponge cake, (BrE) jelly (AmE=gelatin, usually called by the brand name Jell-o), custard, sherry, cream, and jam. In the US, one might get whipped cream or ice cream with cake, pie or crumble/crisp, but not poured cream.
Another oddity in the gooseberry label: it says "ENGLISH MID SUMMER GOOSEBERRIES", but the county of origin (almost legible in the photo) is Perthshire--in Scotland. I fear for Waitrose (supermarket) if the Scottish nationalists pick up on this slight. (I could say something about the space in mid summer, but hyphenation will have to wait for another post.)
* A note on punnet. Historically, this word refers to a shallow basket for collecting fruit, but these days it's the (often plastic) container that soft fruits are sold in. In AmE, we tend to say a pint of strawberries, referring to the amount, rather than the container, whereas hereabouts one buys a punnet of strawberries. When I refer to the container itself, I'd probably say a pint box. If it were a bushel of strawberries, I'd probably call the container a crate, especially if it were wooden.
Grover was off(AmE from) school yesterday (because of a (BrE) dodgytummy, and we had the following exchange:
G: Is there a fruit called currant? Me: Yes, there's blackcurrant and redcurrant. G: No, but is there any such thing as a currant? Me: Yes. Black and red. G: But is anything called currant? Me: Yes, black currant and red currant.*
G: But I'm talking about currant. Me: OK. There are berries called currants. And they come in different types. And one is black and the other is red. G: Ohhhh. OK.
*I'm not even getting into white currants here, which are from redcurrant bushes. The conversation is confusing enough.
The problem in our conversation became clear to me the fourth time she asked her question. In BrE blackcurrantand redcurrantare compound nouns. Since they're one word, they only have one primary stress (i.e. syllable you emphasi{s/z}e most in speaking). You can hear a compound/non-compound stress difference in She was a greengrocer versus The martian was a green grocer. In our house (among[st] the Englishpeople) it's the first syllable that's stressed inthe currant compounds: BLACKcurrant and REDcurrant. But the pronunciation guides in UK dictionaries tend to give it as blackCURrant'. At any rate, not BLACK CURrant, which is what they'd be as separate words.
So G wasn't necessarily recogni{s/z}ing them as separable words. To her, asking this question was like hearing about (AmE) automobiles and (AmE) bloodmobiles and wanting to know if there are vehicles called mobiles (MO-beelz).
For me, it seemed evident that there must be currants. Of course, I have more life experience than the eight-year-old. And, perhaps relevantly, I came to currants as an American.
Most American mouths have never tasted the sweet yet tart
tang of the blackcurrant berry. There’s a big reason for that: in the
early 20th century, the growing of blackcurrants was banned on a federal
level in the U.S. after legislators discovered that the plants, brought
over from Europe, had become vectors for a wood-destroying disease
known as white pine blister rust.
During the 1960s, the federal ban on the berry was relaxed
in favor of state-by-state jurisdiction, and most states now allow it
to be grown. But the damage had already been done—the blackcurrant jams,
juices, pastries and cakes that are standard throughout Europe are
nowhere to be found stateside.
Americans use the Concord grape, developed in the US and used in juices, (AmE) jellies [discussed in the comments in the linked post], grape pies (a local special[i]ty where I'm from), and grape flavo(u)ring. It turns out that these grapes are very susceptible to another plant disease, so it's probably best not to export those either. The main thing the grapes and blackcurrants have in common is that they're purple—necessary if you want people to "taste the rainbow".
So when I moved to the UK, I knew about currants in the way I know about lutefisk. It's something other people eat somewhere else, about which I have only secondhand knowledge.
Did I know that they came in black and red types? Could I imagine what a fresh one looked or tasted like? I can't remember now what I didn't know then. But the knowledge was vague. I certainly didn't know that the black and red types were represented by joined-up compound nouns. I'd have imagined them more like red grapes and white grapes, where they're separate words. And if they're two separate words, then the stress pattern for saying them may well be less compound-like. But not necessarily. We often don't close up compounds, even when they do follow the compound stress pattern—e.g., ICE cream.But when they are closed, how to pronounce them is less ambiguous.
And I've only just this minute learned that the dried fruit currant is not the same as the currants I've met here (see the Merriam-Webster definition below). I may have to revise my answer to Grover.
So that's what's in currant buns. Seriously, I just thought they used some kind of low-quality currant berries in currant buns. So, my answer to G was not particularly helpful. Yes, there are currants, but in BrE, they're rarely the same thing as blackcurrant.
After my day mostly home with Grover, this tweet was thrown my way:
Help us, @guardianstyle. We are a copy desk divided: blackcurrant or black currant?
...and the congruence of currant-related events led me to write this post. Why is an American organi{s/z}ation asking a British newspaper for spelling advice? Perhaps because they (very reasonably) don't trust Americans to know anything about currants. But because currants have a different place in the culinary lives of Americans and Brits, they also have different linguistic places.
The closed (i.e. no space) compound noun status of blackcurrant tells you a lot about the centrality of that thing as a thing unto itself in British culture. British English famously (if you count 'famous among a few of my linguist friends' as famous) resists closing compounds more than American does. But when compounds are closed in writing, it signals that they have that compound stress pattern. And when they get that stress pattern, it's a signal that the concept represented by the compound is now a familiar unit in the language.
Side note: John McWhorter has recently done a Lexicon Valley podcast with the title 'Word Sex' ("How words [orig. AmE] hook up and make new ones") in which he looks at how that compound stress works and what it means. I very much recommend it, but British listeners will think he gets the stress wrong on half of his examples. At the end does discuss an AmE/BrE difference. McWhorter's been doing that podcast since early summer, and he's really made something of it. If you've tried LV before and didn't like it, it's worth trying again.
But back to the A.V. Club's problem. Is there a space or not? In BrE, no. Dictionaries (Oxford, Collins, Chambers) close the compound. The Corpus of Global Web-Based English has 166 UK blackcurrant(s) to only 11 black currant(s).
The American data is a different matter: 16 without the space, 21 with. You can see how little Americans write about the fruit. When they do write about it, they haven't got a firm agreement on how to spell it. Red( )currant is much the same. American dictionaries that have the word (Merriam-Webster and American Heritage) have the space: have a space in black currant. Webster's New World Dictionary (not a Merriam-Webster product)doesn't even bother to define it—but does have it as two words in the definition for creme de cassis.
Because the American dictionaries give it as two words, they don't bother giving a pronunciation guide—they rely on the pronunciation in black and currant to be enough. The Cambridge dictionary gives different American and British pronunciations (listen here) with the closed-up spelling. The Oxford Learner's dictionary gives both compound pronunciations (stress on first or second syllable) for both countries (listen here). And all three UK pronouncers on Forvo put the stress on the first syllable (listen here), but no Americans have bothered to offer a pronunciation of it.
So, how do Americans pronounce it? It seems they mostly don't.
I was thrilled last week to be contacted by Jan Freeman, who writes a weekly language column, The Word, for the Boston Globe. One of her readers had written in to ask how much port might be in a 'cheddar with a slosh of port', as advertised on an English website. We had a nice correspondence on the matter and I and this blog get a mention in the 24 December column in which she answers that reader query (see here, but you might have to register your details with the Globe first). One or two Globe readers have made their way here through that column, so (BrE) cheers (thanks) to Jan for bringing you here.
While slosh can be found in AmE recipes, it's found more often in BrE ones. (In some of the American recipes, it looks suspiciously like the recipes may have been "translated" from a BrE source.) American dictionaries don't cover the liquid measure noun sense of slosh. Within BrE, it's hard to pin down exactly how much a slosh is. OED only says it is "A quantity of some liquid." After a recipe on epicurious.com that calls for 2 tablespoons of whisk(e)y, a Scottish cook writes in to say that the recipe is better with "a good slosh of whisky much more than stated." So, a slosh in this context is a good deal more than 2 Tbsp. Another recipe site calls for one to soak more than a kilo of dried fruit in "a generous slosh of rum or brandy." With that much fruit, that slosh is likely to be cups of liquid. (Side note: British recipes generally don't use cup measures, but instead use grams, lit{re/er}s and portions thereof. An American cup = about 240 ml.)
In general, it seems that a slosh is a "generous" amount, and what one considers to be a generous amount will vary from recipe to recipe, liquid to liquid and person to person. While it is used for measuring (AmE-preferred) liquor/(BrE-preferred) spirits in recipes (and to my mind sounds best that way), it's also used for milk, juice and water. But compare: 36 google hits for recipe + "slosh of milk", 21 for recipe + "slosh of water", and 38 for recipe + "slosh of brandy". More recipes use milk or water than brandy, one should think, but brandy is more likely to come in sloshes. I think this is because slosh likes to go with liquor, rather than that you're more likely to use a small quantity of brandy in a recipe than a small quantity of water. That's just a (non-native) hunch, based on the fact that there's often a reason to use a sloshy quantity of water in cooking. But when it comes to spirits in one's baking, there's a need for imprecision, which slosh helps with--one person's "generous amount" is another person's homeopathy and yet another person's poison. While one can find translations of other "casual" measurements like dash, splash, pinch and smidgen into more precise measures, I've yet to find a precise equivalent of slosh.
On slosh versus splash: Both are onomatopoetic, but note that the 'o' sound seems to indicate a larger amount than the 'a' in splash. This is a well-discussed element of sound symbolism. Here's a (rather technical) quote on this from a paper (NB: link is to a .pdf file) by John Ohala:
Based on data of this sort, it has been claimed that the following sound types are predominant in the expression of "small": high front vowels like [i I y e] [...], and "large": low back vowels like [ɒ ʌ ɔ o] [...]. There is support for this pattern from experimental (Sapir 1929; Fischer-Jørgensen 1968) and statistical studies (Chastaing 1958, Thorndike 1945, Ultan 1978). The phonetic generalization that can be made is that the expression of size utilizes speech sounds whose characteristic acoustic frequencies vary inversely with size of the thing designated.
The /ae/ in splash being a more fronted, higher frequency vowel, it "sounds smaller" than the back, lower frequency /É’/ in slosh. Notice also that when you say slosh your mouth has a bigger "hollow" in which the liquid could slosh around in. The mouth seems less open (from an ingestion point-of-view) in splash.
American reader Jackie e-mailed to say that after some time living in London:
"I can't tell you happy I am to be back in [a] country in which veg is a verb."
Now, I trust that Jackie has some happy memories of London as well, but you can understand a girl's homesickness for a comfy verb like veg. Not that she necessarily had to miss it here. To veg or to veg out, while originally AmE (a clipping of vegetate), is used in BrE too, as the following Guardian headline indicates:
Saturday night's all right for vegging (8 Jan 2005)
But veg is more common in BrE as a noun, a clipping of vegetable(s). In AmE, it's more common to affectionately refer to vegetables as veggies. Here we have examples of clipping in both dialects (let the clipping wars re(-)commence!), but also another interesting case of count/mass distinctions in the two dialects. Americans eat mashed potatoes and veggies (both plural), while the British eat mashed potato and veg (both mass nouns). One is tempted to say that this is because of the traditional British tendency to cook vegetables into unrecogi{s/z}able sludge. But that might not be nice. Then again, does one need to be nice to people whose culinary contribution to the world is mushy peas (pictured, right)? [I might not be allowed to sleep in my own bed tonight after that one.]
Then again, it could be argued that it's in the plural in AmE because Americans are more gluttonous. But using mass nouns does not seem to have stemmed the 'obesity epidemic' in Britain.
In order to distract attention from the incendiary statements (particularly the food criticism) above, I should point out that veg shows its, ahem, face again in the expression meat and two veg. This has two meanings. One of these refers to a type of traditional diet. In the same way that Americans would call someone a meat-and-potatoes man, a (male) traditional eater in the UK is a meat-and-two-veg man. That phrase can, however, provide a double entendre, as it also slangily refers to a man's genitals. I'll let you work out the details of the metaphor in your own time.
Postscript: Two things I meant to mention here, but failed to (due to the heat of my debate with Better Half about the political/culinary (in)correctness of this entry). First, as Rebecca's pointed out in the comments in BrE veggie (also veggy) means 'vegetarian' and works both as a noun and an adjective. Second, British supermarkets typically have a section called Fruit and Vegetables or Fruit and Veg, but in the US, it's generally called the produce section. One is more likely to come across a greengrocer's shop in the UK than in the US. American Heritage lists this word as 'chiefly British'--I certainly knew it before moving here, but not because I ever needed to use the word. While one could call such a shop a greengrocery, people tend to say I stopped by the greengrocer's, much as people prefer the butcher('s) over the butchery.
In my American family's home, unless it's a holiday or a barbecue, milk is the drink that you have with meals. (Probably fewer families drink milk with meals today than when I was a child, though.) There is something so refreshing about a glass of milk--yet many of my English acquaintances turn their noses up at the notion. I've never seen an adult (other than myself) in the UK drinking milk with a meal (and as mentioned before, the English are more likely than Americans to have no drink with a meal), and in the antenatal/prenatal ward I had to withstand the most quizzical looks when I requested a glass of milk instead of a cup of tea. (And here was I thinking that pregnant women were supposed to pack in the calcium!)
But the English do go through a lot of milk--in their tea. Now it's my turn to turn my nose up. English tea, or at least the everyday blends that we refer to in our house as (BrE) bog standard tea, is blended to be strong enough to withstand milk and sugar. Because they're used to very strong tea, the British claim that American tea (typically an orange pekoe) is "like dishwater". Americans are more likely to drink their orange pekoe with lemon than with milk, and it makes nice iced tea. (Don't try to make iced tea with British brands like PG Tips or Typhoo--it turns out incredibly bitter. And don't try to serve nice iced tea to the English--they probably won't appreciate it, though some are starting to drink overly sugared and overpriced flavo(u)red iced teas that come ready-to-drink.) Some British folk insist that Americans would drink more tea if we had "proper" tea like theirs. Faced with the prospect of British tea, however, I've become, for the first time in my life, a coffee drinker. My thinking is that if milk and tea were suited to each other, then tea ice cream would be at least as popular as coffee ice cream. But it isn't, is it? (Mental note: prepare for onslaught of comments and small incendiary devices.)
But I started this post to write about types of milk, having done types of cream some time ago. (It remains one of the most Googled posts here, although the top ones are probably red shoes, no knickers and smacking and spanking, which are Googled late at night by people with something other than dialectal variation on their minds.) Milk with the fat removed is called skimmed milk in BrE, while in AmE it tends to be called skim milk. On the other end of the scale (3-4% fat) is what Americans call whole milk and the British call full fat milk, which is a nice dieting ploy, since I'm too embarrassed to buy it. In between, Americans have options, known as 1% milk and 2% milk, while the British have semi-skimmed milk, which is 1.5-1.8% fat, according to Delia (old-school British TV chef).
When referring to the units of milk you can buy, Americans speak of buying a half-pint, pint, quart, half-gallon (i.e. 2 quarts) or gallon of milk. (Pints aren't that common, though, as we are probably buying it to drink, rather than to splash on our tea. Half-pints are what you get with your [AmE] school lunch/[BrE] school dinner.) In BrE, one always speaks of units of milk in pints (metric system be damned!). So, you can buy a pint of milk, or two-pint, four-pint or six-pint containers. British (Imperial) and American (US) liquid measures are not the same, and a British pint is slightly bigger than an American pint ('Hear, hear!' say the blokes down the pub). But there are such things as Imperial quarts (2 pints) and gallons (8 pints), so I'm not sure why only the term pint is used in measuring milk. By law, the pint-label(l)ed containers now tell you how many (milli)lit{re/er}s they hold, but no one pays any attention.
---Note to homesick Americans within easy reach of south-eastern England. Tallula's tea rooms in Brighton, behind Waitrose, serve a nice iced orange pekoe and very nice American pancakes--although they haven't learned to serve the latter with butter and they put way too much citrus fruit in the glass with the former. When I complained once that all I could taste was orange, and not tea, the waiter said, puzzled, 'But it's orange tea'. No, it's orange pekoe--it's thought to be named after the royals in Holland, not its flavo[u]r or colo[u]r. That said, they take requests for butter and 'not much fruit' without much eyebrow-raising.--
Postscript (15 April): I meant to mention (BrE) builder's tea: very strong, with lots of milk and sugar. So, here we have the way you take your tea linked to your social class...
Post-postscript (March 2010): Tallula's has gone out of business. I am SO SAD!
Yesterday, during another lunch break (maybe I have lunch too often), I met a student who's at Sussex for the annual International Summer School--which as far as I can tell has just American students, but I may be wrong about that. At any rate, there are a lot of Californian science students wandering around at the moment. She's working with my friend Maverick, who introduced me as "Lynne, whose blog I was telling you about". At the end of the conversation, the student--let's call her Santa Barbara, after her home university--told me she'd be (orig. AmE) checking out the blog soon. So in order to welcome her, I'm going to point out the little communication hiccup I observed in her interactions with BrE speakers yesterday. If you're reading, Santa Barbara, say 'hello'!
SB is doing a psychology study under Maverick's supervision, but she was having trouble recruiting other students from the summer school to take part. Looking for possible explanations, she said to Maverick--"Well, it's midterm." It looked to me like Maverick was not getting the relevance of this, but happily SB carried on to say "A lot of the students are Physics students, and they have a big exam today." I watched the same thing happen again when the Blinder joined our conversation and SB had to bring her (apparently orig. AmE) up-to-speed on what had been discussed so far. She may have said in at least one case "it's midterms". Again, I could see the Blinder not really getting it, until SB continued on about the physics exam.
When SB said midterm she meant an exam or examination period. The reason for this not transferring well to BrE is that midterm examinations are not very common in higher education in the UK. At our university, if we have tests during the term, they're called coursework tests (I'm not marking that as general BrE, since I can't speak for other universities). It's only very recent that students in UK higher education have testing during the academic term. When I started at Sussex nearly 10 years ago, students had their exams at the end of the academic year for all courses--even autumn term courses that had ended 5 or 6 months before. This was frequent examination as compared to the experience of my older UK-educated colleagues, who, 30 years ago or more, had to wait until the end of their three-year degree program(me) to be tested on everything they had been taught.
I expect that when the Blinder and Maverick heard midterm, they thought (BrE) half term--which is aholiday/vacation period in the middle of a term (though Maverick would know that these students didn't get a break--it's only a six-week program(me)). They can tell us in the comments if I'm wrong about that. I've discussed half term before, so please click on the link to see more discussion and discuss more.
Because US students have midterm exams to contrast them with, end-of-term exams tend to be referred to asfinal examsor finals, whereas UK students (at least at my [BrE informal] uni) tend just to talk about exams.
I've avoided doing a post on how BrE puddingisused to mean (AmE) dessert because it's one of those AmE/BrE differences that is known by most people with any interest in the two countries. (And way back in the beginning, I said that this blog wasn't about those things that are well-covered in lists of AmE/BrE differences. This has led me to drag my feet, or perhaps my knuckles, in responding to requests for this topic from American readers Cathy and Jacqueline.) The pudding/dessert equation has been mentioned in passing here and there on the blog. But there are angles on this issue that deserve further discussion. So what the hell, here are some observations on them.
This comes up naturally, since I'm in the US at the moment, and the first 'new' AmE/BrE difference we taught my linguistically insightful five-year-old niece on this visit was "dessert is called pudding in England". Her immediate question was the same as reader Cathy's:
If any dessert can be called pudding, what is [AmE] pudding called [in BrE]?
But before I get to that, let's start with a fine-tuning of the general American understanding of the meaning of pudding in BrE. Yes, it can be used to refer to the sweet course of a meal, served after the main course. But in addition to referring to a course, it can also refer to a particular kind of dish, as it does in AmE. But there's still a translational problem, in that it doesn't refer to the same type of dish in the two dialects. In BrE, the dish-sense of pudding is:
A baked or steamed sponge or suet dish, usually sweet and served as a dessert, but also savoury suet puddings (e.g. steak and kidney). Also milk puddings, made by baking rice, semolina, or sago in milk. (Bender & Bender,A Dictionary of Food and Nutrition, Oxford UP, 1995)
Here's a photo of a Christmas pudding, from Cumbria Rural Enterprise Agency. It's kind of like a fruit cake, but it's cooked by steaming. I know Anglophiles who buy and eat Christmas puddings in the US, but other such puddings are very rare in the US. My personal favo(u)rite is Sticky Toffee Pudding, and I consider it my duty to sample as wide a variety of STPs as possible in order to try to identify the best. Nominations on a postcard, please! (AmE speakers should usually mentally translate toffee in BrE contexts to caramel.)
In AmE, pudding nowadays refers particularly to creamy, custard-like desserts. Wikipedia treats this better than other dictionaries I've consulted (BrE translations in brackets are mine):
The second and newer type of pudding consists of sugar, milk and a thickening agent such as cornstarch [=BrE corn flour], gelatin, eggs, rice or tapioca to create a sweet, creamy dessert. These puddings are made either by simmering on top of the stove [=BrE on the hob; AmE stove = BrE cooker] in a saucepan or double boiler or by baking in an oven, often in a bain-marie. They are typically served chilled, but a few types, such as zabaglione and rice pudding, may be served warm.
As the Wikipedia bit indicates, the steamed, cake-ish kind of pudding is older than the 'milk pudding' sense, but it's not the oldest. Originally pudding referred to more sausage-like things. Hence black pudding, a blood sausage that is far more common in Britain (especially in the north of England--at breakfast time, for godsakes) than in the US.
On the grammatical angle, note that the BrE dish-sense of pudding is often a count noun (e.g. I made enough sticky toffee puddings to feed an army) because the puddings are items with well-defined boundaries, whereas in AmE it's usually a mass noun (e.g. I made enough pudding [not puddings] for everyone) since it refers to a substance. (Throughout English, we have the ability to make count nouns out of mass nouns and vice versa, so in this case I'm talking about the natural state of these words when referring to the food as it is prepared, rather than the senses "a portion of X" or "a smear of X", etc.)
So, what do BrE speakers call the creamy stuff that Americans call pudding? I think the best answer is that they don't call it anything in particular. There is no such thing as Jell-o pudding (the form in which most Americans encounter this substance) in the UK. The closest thing to that, although it's more 'mousse-like' is probably Angel Delight. A baked custard is a kind of pudding-y thing that is found in both countries (though not very popular in either place now, I think, except in the more exotic Spanish/Mexican incarnation, flan--which Kevin in the comments reminds us is usually called crème caramelin BrE. See the comments for more on what flan means). But in the UK custard usually refers to pouring custard, which Americans might occasionally come across under its French name crème anglaise. (This was discussed before, back here.) Both countries have rice pudding and the less creamy bread pudding.
(Incidentally, Better Half and I were grocery-shopping here the other day, and we happened down the Jell-o [US trade name, used generically to mean 'flavo(u)red gelatin', i.e. BrE jelly] aisle. BH was flabbergasted by the range of little boxes to be found there, which included two brands (Jell-o and Royal) and both gelatin/jelly and (AmE) pudding mixes. The Kraft Foods website lists 20 flavo(u)rs of regular Jell-o, 12 of sugar-free Jell-o, 17 of instant regular Jell-o pudding, 9 of instant diet Jell-o pudding, and 9 of the regular and diet cook-and-serve pudding mixes. So that's 67 products before we even start counting the ones that Royal makes. I've lived abroad long enough that instead of celebrating such a range of products, I am exhausted by the thought of it and look forward to getting back to a more sensible shopping experience. But only after I've loaded up my suitcase with A1 sauce, low-calorie microwave popcorn and New York State maple syrup.)
Returning to the course-sense of pudding, the term dessert is heard in BrE. The first sense below from the OED has been around in BrE since the 17th century at least, while the second, more general sense is noted as more American, but increasingly found in BrE:
1. a. A course of fruit, sweetmeats, etc. served after a dinner or supper; ‘the last course at an entertainment’ (J.).
b. ‘In the United States often used to include pies, puddings, and other sweet dishes’ (Cent. Dict.). Now also in British usage.
Other BrE terms for this course are the more colloquial afters and sweet, which is often found in lists of 'non-U' terms. Pudding is the least socially marked of these terms.
I believe that the pudding/dessert course is the one that diverges most, food-wise, in the two countries. That is to say, there are lots and lots of British puddings that aren't found in the US and American desserts that aren't found in the UK. And, of course, some of these are sources of amusement--particularly the name of the British dish spotted dick.
Finally (and not entirely unrelatedly), pudding is sometimes clipped to pud(rhymes with wood), which disturbs me when I see it in writing since I first learned pud as a slang term for a woman's genitals that rhymes with bud and is derived from pudendum. But BrE also has a genital-slang pud, which means 'penis'. This one rhymes with wood, since it is derived from pudding. (The OED notes that this is chiefly used in the masturbatory phrase pull the/one's pud.)
Like many in the UK these days, we do our weekly shop(ping: AmE) on-line and have our groceries delivered to us by a nice person in a van (that would be called a truck in the US) that's named after a fruit or vegetable.* It started out really well. The first order we got had a free, big Galaxy bar (which in the US would be a Dove bar) as a tie-in promotion for the Sex in the City (usual BrE) film/(usual AmE) movie. Score!
Our grocery supplier gives us a free copy of the Times with every delivery, so I suppose I shouldn't complain about the quality of other freebies since the Galaxy incident, but this week we got this stuff (photo swiped from Wikipedia):
On the back, it promises "the healthier milkshake that's packed full of flavour". But this is milkshake (or milk shake as most dictionaries would have it) in the BrE sense to mean what most AmE speakers would simply call chocolate milk. I'll give you here the OED definition of milk shake:
milk shaken. orig. U.S. a cold drink made of milk, a sweet flavouring, and typically ice cream, mixed together as by shaking or whisking until smooth and frothy.
Typically ice cream? No, definitely ice cream!** And not the piddly amount of ice cream that the shake shops in Brighton use. A LOT OF ICE CREAM. And some malt powder (or syrup), please! (Gourmet Burger Kitchen does ok, but lime is a rather odd flavo(u)r for a shake from an American perspective. But they're from New Zealand. Who knows what they do there?)
I'm just grumpy, of course, because I'm on a diet and instead of having mostly-ice-cream malted milkshakes, I'm having water--with a slice of orange in it when I'm really treating myself. The upside, though, is that I did taste the low-fat Yazoo drink that I was sent, and I don't feel that I'm missing much. In fact, I'm glad to have an excuse to pour it down the drain, even though the perpetual student in me thinks: "FREE CALORIES MUST BE CONSUMED."
* I can't believe this hasn't caught on more in the US. No, not naming vehicles after produce--having your groceries delivered. It's wonderful. I suppose that in the land of cars, it's not as much of a service.
** Note that certain fast food establishments sell shakes. Not milk shakes, because they can't legally advertise them as containing milk. Those may not have ice cream in them, but they at least try to mimic a milk shake with ice cream.
And here's the American:
And here's the American:
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