[Sca-cooks] The Science of Cookery

[Julia Szent-Gyorgyi]

> Velvet antlers are the antlers newly formed, where the fuzz hasn't worn off
> yet.  Are you thinking of the recipe where you make antlers out of
> marzipan-ish stuff?

No, this one's number 7 under stag: "stag's young antlers and ears in
aspic". (I'm lazy to look it up in two places, so that's my
translation.)

>  And since it says "his", I'd go with stag.

"His" is an artifact of translation. Hungarian doesn't have gendered pronouns.

I looked it up in the dictionary, and it gives different species names
for _szarvas_ (Cervus elaphus) versus _őz_ 'deer' (Capreolus
capreolus), and implies that both words technically apply to either
sex of the animal. (You can specify with words like _hím_ "male" or
_bak_ "buck".) Based on the Latin names, _őz_ is 'roe deer' and
_szarvas_ is 'red deer'. (I'm never going to remember which is which.
Three letters, one syllable, starts with R, has an 'e' in it: there's
nothing to tell them apart with!) I don't know whether the period
distinction was exactly the modern one, but Science of Cooking has
separate sections for the two critters, with _szarvas_ first, implying
greater prestige. Google says red deer are larger than roe deer, so
that matches.

(Another sign of greater prestige: the attribute-based name 'with
horns', which indicates that this critter had magical/religious
significance such that his name couldn't be uttered, and a metonym was
used instead. Another such critter is the wolf: _farkas_ 'with tail'.)

The dictionary also reminded me that there _is_ a separate word for
antler: _agancs_ -- but it's an 18th-19th century neologism.

>Though someday I really want to HEAR her say
> y'all in a Hungarian accent.

I don't do accents, not even Hungarian ones. :-)

(Hungarian is my first language, but I was born and raised in southern
California, and I don't have a foreign accent in either language.
Granted, my reading vocabulary in English far exceeds my speaking
vocabulary, but that's mostly due to my parents not buying a
television until my sister and I went off to college -- and even then
it was actually an old computer monitor hooked up to a VCR, so they
could watch old Hungarian movies.)

Julia
/\ /\
>*.*<