Random Stuff XXVIII: Food-Related Words
A while back I was invited to a banquet, and I had to suppress an unexpected, involuntary shudder. Why did that word strike such a primal chord? Sifting back through my memories, I unearthed a bit of long-forgotten childhood trauma. Long, long ago, good sense would occasionally escape the brother and me, and we'd place in a local spelling bee or some other meaningless competition whose sole purpose was to introduce little kids to unnecessary anxiety at far too early an age. We were compelled to attend an awards banquet in order to receive our brightly colored, construction-paper certificate lovingly encrusted with bad, pretentious calligraphy. But not before being subjected to several hours of particularly brutal kid torture. First, the dinner: leftover school lunch, those scraps which even elementary school students wouldn't eat, resold to the cream of juvenile academia and their progenitors for about fourteen times the original price. The food invariably bequeathed an overpoweringly nasty, dry taste in my mouth that staunchly resisted any attempt to flush out with water. A nice, pulpy orange juice or a Coke would have done the trick, but this was Utah: there existed no beverages, in the minds of school officials, except milk and water-and you only earned the latter after visibly chugging down one-fifth your weight of the former. (To make matters worse, back then I had a nasty reaction to straight milk; I've grown out of it, but to this day I can't drink milk unless it contains at least 10% Hershey's Syrup.) Then came the speeches. Interminable, monotonous speeches without a shred of meaningful content. As we slowly died of thirst and boredom, speaker after speaker would thank the entire school board-naming each member and relating a personal anecdote about each-for the opportunity to address such a fine group of young scholars; and would continue to blather on about nothing until we'd gnawed off several toes in a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to distract ourselves from the nearly lethal onslaught of concentrated ennui. (Like Prometheus' liver, they'd grow back in time for the next spelling-bee or economics-fair banquet.) I was such a good little overachiever that the possibility of deliberately misspelling a word, and thereby sparing myself the banquet ordeal, never even occurred to me.
Funny-I hadn't thought about those banquets in decades, until the word triggered a major sewer-system-backup of memories. Guess I'll have to work a little harder to repress them.
Have you ever seen the word gravies, as a plural, anywhere except in the context of salvaging vitamins leached from boiled vegetables? "Use the water from preparing vegetables in soups, gravies, ...." Also, you'll notice that gravies never appears alone, or even first, in its capacity as recycled vitamin receptacle: the word soups must precede it.
Vegetarians may want to skip this section.
Another food-related word that really gets me is moist. What's the deal with people's obsession with moist meat? Many years ago, a friend invited us over for Thanksgiving dinner. She raved endlessly about this new technique for cooking turkey that she'd discovered. It was promised to yield superbly moist turkey. Basically, you drape an asbestos cloth over the turkey, in essence converting your oven into a large steamer.
I hid my disappointment; all day I'd been looking forward to crunching on a postcard-sized patch of nice, crispy turkey skin. When the fully-cooked meal emerged, we saw that it was, indeed, moist beyond imagination. Condensation was fairly pouring off the bird's pallid, wrinkled flanks, and the entire house was saturated with a sickly steam redolent of boiled kidneys. Every one of the guests offered effusive praise (Kathy and I abstaining): "Oh, it's so moist!" "That looks so moist and delicious!"
It was revolting: pungent and slimy, with an odd metallic overtone reminiscent of my own blood. In other words, more or less what I expected. I assumed I'd have a date with Sam and Ella later that night, but evidently the internal temperature got high enough to take care of the creepy-crawlies. Autoclaved turkey. Yum.
More recently, I had the misfortune of trying a steak cooked in one of those George Foreman grills. This device is pretty near miraculous in its speed of preperation and efficient use of energy, but is extremely poorly suited for preparing food that ought to be grilled or char-broiled. I watched with skeptical curiosity as the grill was clamped around an innocent steak. Scant minutes later, a gun-metal-grey, soaking-wet steak was revealed. Again, the manyfold praises of moistness were intoned with due reverence.
Have you ever eaten a boiled steak? I refuse to describe the experience, except to say that it was startlingly similar to the turkey. Steak should not be moist. Brownies should be moist. Steak should be juicy. And seared to a flavorful, carbonaceous crisp on the exterior. My ideal steak would be readied for consumption by exposing it to the sun's core for a picosecond or two. Just brush off the helium-3, and we're ready to go.
(To their credit, our hosts came to the same conclusion as we did regarding the Foremanized steak.)
The moral of these stories: juice springs from within; moisture is imposed from without. Please don't impose on your meat.
And now for something completely different-English words that look misspelled, but aren't:
minuscule
sacrilegious
supersede
privilege
fiery
liquefy
carillon
Did I miss any?
Funny-I hadn't thought about those banquets in decades, until the word triggered a major sewer-system-backup of memories. Guess I'll have to work a little harder to repress them.
Have you ever seen the word gravies, as a plural, anywhere except in the context of salvaging vitamins leached from boiled vegetables? "Use the water from preparing vegetables in soups, gravies, ...." Also, you'll notice that gravies never appears alone, or even first, in its capacity as recycled vitamin receptacle: the word soups must precede it.
Vegetarians may want to skip this section.
Another food-related word that really gets me is moist. What's the deal with people's obsession with moist meat? Many years ago, a friend invited us over for Thanksgiving dinner. She raved endlessly about this new technique for cooking turkey that she'd discovered. It was promised to yield superbly moist turkey. Basically, you drape an asbestos cloth over the turkey, in essence converting your oven into a large steamer.
I hid my disappointment; all day I'd been looking forward to crunching on a postcard-sized patch of nice, crispy turkey skin. When the fully-cooked meal emerged, we saw that it was, indeed, moist beyond imagination. Condensation was fairly pouring off the bird's pallid, wrinkled flanks, and the entire house was saturated with a sickly steam redolent of boiled kidneys. Every one of the guests offered effusive praise (Kathy and I abstaining): "Oh, it's so moist!" "That looks so moist and delicious!"
It was revolting: pungent and slimy, with an odd metallic overtone reminiscent of my own blood. In other words, more or less what I expected. I assumed I'd have a date with Sam and Ella later that night, but evidently the internal temperature got high enough to take care of the creepy-crawlies. Autoclaved turkey. Yum.
More recently, I had the misfortune of trying a steak cooked in one of those George Foreman grills. This device is pretty near miraculous in its speed of preperation and efficient use of energy, but is extremely poorly suited for preparing food that ought to be grilled or char-broiled. I watched with skeptical curiosity as the grill was clamped around an innocent steak. Scant minutes later, a gun-metal-grey, soaking-wet steak was revealed. Again, the manyfold praises of moistness were intoned with due reverence.
Have you ever eaten a boiled steak? I refuse to describe the experience, except to say that it was startlingly similar to the turkey. Steak should not be moist. Brownies should be moist. Steak should be juicy. And seared to a flavorful, carbonaceous crisp on the exterior. My ideal steak would be readied for consumption by exposing it to the sun's core for a picosecond or two. Just brush off the helium-3, and we're ready to go.
(To their credit, our hosts came to the same conclusion as we did regarding the Foremanized steak.)
The moral of these stories: juice springs from within; moisture is imposed from without. Please don't impose on your meat.
And now for something completely different-English words that look misspelled, but aren't:
minuscule
sacrilegious
supersede
privilege
fiery
liquefy
carillon
Did I miss any?