[Sca-cooks] cuskynoles
lilinah at earthlink.net
lilinah at earthlink.net
Sun Aug 1 10:41:59 PDT 2010
Katherine wrote:
>How intersting that the way to cut out the dough was as small circles. I
>think she is telling us parenthetically that the word 'nan' implies a
>circular shape. Modernly does nan/naan mean this? Or could it be also
>translated as loaf?
Then and now "nan" is Persian for "bread" - the word is used in
cognate languages, and was borrowed by other unrelated South and
Central Asian languages. In Persian it is written with an alif, which
is a strong "a", so is pronounced almost like "non". Nan bread does
not come in loaves. It comes in breads: one nan, two nan (whatever
the plural is, nan-i (?)), three nan, etc.
Nan can be cooked slapped onto the sides of a tannur (the original
Arabic word; So. Asian word "tandoor" comes from "tundur", the Turkic
pronunciation of tannur), on the floor of a tannur on a tray of hot
pebbles, on a pan on a charcoal fire, etc.
I haven't heard of an historical humpy lumpy Persian loaf cooked in an oven.
Now, the Arabic khubz (means "bread") can be flat and cooked on the
walls of a tannur, or in a tray on the floor of a tannur, or on a
convex iron pan on a charcoal fire, or in some other type of pan on a
charcoal fire, AND it CAN be humpy lumpy and cooked in a more
European style oven, "furn", in which case it is rounded, somewhat
like a French boule, but quite unlike it in texture and flavor. This
Arabic word goes back to Medieval times in al-Andalus, borrowed from
the Spanish or Catalan for oven.
Historically nan and most forms of khubz are flatbreads and i just
don't think of flatbreads like ruqaq (which is like lavash) or nan
(some of which are can be 3 feet long but about 3/4 inch high) as
"loaves".
BTW, in kushknanaj/kushkananaj, the stress is on the syllable "-nan".
--
Urtatim [that's err-tah-TEEM]
the persona formerly known as Anahita
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