Reminds me of a time was talking to German relative about cooking and she kept talking about making a "duff". Took me a long time to realise she was making a "dough", but had only seen the word written.
Another native English speaker that grew up as an expat here: similarly I’d only recognise ’bread’; a ”bacon bap” was a thing unto itself, as were teacakes (as far as I am concerned). And yet I know words such as ’slovenly’, ’incardinate’, and ’adipocere’ (off the top of my head) so my vocabulary isn’t poor.
Some linguistic context: gombóc means "dumpling" in Hungarian, and gömböc itself is a less commonly used name for head cheese (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_cheese), which is traditionally filled into the pig's stomach and therefore also has a round-ish shape.
TIL about "bog butter" and half a dozen other culinary terms that I've never heard of. Maybe for good reasons we don't make these food anymore? (banbidh, old curds, real curds, bainne clabair, sowens, flummery, etc)
I'm a native English speaker and I've never heard most of those, probably because I didn't grow up in the UK.
When I went to university in Lancaster, I didn't know what a "bacon bap" was (it's a plain bread roll with bacon inside, maybe butter if you're lucky). People ate them for breakfast.
If someone said "batch", I'd probably be confused with "bach" (NZ slang for a small apartment, which is pronounced as if it has a "t" in it).
To save time reading the article, here's the list.
That seems pretty expected. If you’d asked me to guess where the word diesel came from, I probably would have guessed a name. Compare that to German chocolate cake, which seems preposterous.
> æbleskiver (apple slices, round pancakes with zero apple)
That reminds me that the regional name for deep fried rectangular potato prisms in Berlin is “Pommes”, which is the French for apple, because everything else was dropped from the bowed French “pommes de terre friets”.
I had a similar experience in India where I was watching a cooking showing and they were talking about some chicken dish. Suddenly I heard "Put the chicken [beep] in the pan", then I realized they were cooking Chicken breast and the word breast was beeped out.:P
Just in case anyone was losing sleep over the first example, "räksmörgås" in Swedish means "shrimp sandwich".
It's a well-known semi-posh dish [1] (and yes it's an open sandwich since in Sweden that is the default), as well as a fun word since it contains all of our three national characters (åäö) at the same time, thus popular among programmers when dealing with i18n etc.
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