[Sca-cooks] Noty or Notye

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Jadwiga Zajaczkowa / Jenne Heise:
>  > Harumph! That "'y-blaunched' crap", as you call it, is as much a part
>>  of the culture, and therefore the mindset and, ultimately,
>>  methodology as your dearly-bought modern cook's experience,
>
>Hm... but what about those of us who are not translators and primarily
>cook from non-English manuscripts? We are reading materials in
>translation. When I first started out cooking, despite being an English
>major, I found translating the Middle English frustrating. I also had to
>struggle with gothic typefaces in facsimiles

I can barely read them myself, but I'm not sure I'm getting your 
point. Obviously, anyone who needs a translation needs a translation, 
and either creates one or obtains one from another source. My point 
was only that translating from Middle English, when one is an English 
speaker, is eminently doable even for the non-linguists among us, and 
that an untranslated language is not necessarily "crap". Marcel 
Proust in French notwithstanding.

I touched on this very briefly some time ago, on the subject of 
kitchen prep work: sometimes when a task is daunting, you can either 
use up all your energy bemoaning how difficult it's going to be to 
peel and chop that 50-lb bag of onions, or you can shut up and just 
do it, and turn it into a 49 pound bag of onions, then a 48-lb bag, 
etc. Sometimes (not always, but sometimes) you just go ahead and do 
it, using the tools available to you, such as a good glossary (I 
highly recommend the one in the back of Curye On Inglysh) and the 
trick I mentioned of reading the text out loud. Hey, it worked in 
"The Thirteenth Warrior", ay?

And recipes are especially conducive to this type of treatment 
because they tend to be the equivalent of a short paragraph, rather 
than pages and pages of text which, if you put it down, you'll lose 
your train of thought.

>Now, after years of practice cooking foods in translation, I found that
>I can interpret Middle English a bit better, and I can also read
>facsimiles with facility, if not with comfort.

Yep. Me, too. I'm fairly comfortable with it, too, but everybody 
starts off in the same place and moves to that point. Maybe I'm 
trying to promote the practice of people doing their own 
transliterations (am I using that word correctly?) by not so much 
denigrating those who can't or don't, but just by saying the task 
shouldn't be all that scary.

A.
-- 




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them 
eat cake!"
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
	-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry 
Holt, 07/29/04