this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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Here are 3 examples:
Fried egg, fried rice, fried chicken

All these "fry" are different. If you were to use the "fry" in fried rice to fry an egg, you'd get scrambled egg. Fried chicken is done by submerging it in oil, which you won't do with fried egg or fried rice.

This post is made from the perspective of a Cantonese/Chinese speaker. We have different words for these different types of "fry" (煎, 炒, 炸 respectively)

(Turns out I did post it in the wrong sub and I didn't realize, and now I feel very stupid. Photon UI has once again screwed me over. Got mad for no reason.)

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (8 children)

We have some oddly obtuse language for cooking in English.

We use the same phrase to describe foods that are high in temperature and contain lots of capsaicin (hot). We can use spicy, I suppose, but it gets a little odd describing foods with lots of spices that aren't chili pepper. I generally say "well-spiced" and that gets the message across. We hardly have a way to distinguish "types of spicy" flavoring, such as that from chili, horseradish or peppercorns. I've seen some people start to say mala (loan word, 麻辣) for numbing spice, but that's uncommon and new.

That's just a few examples.

Most of our more precise language for cooking comes from other languages, like French. To saute, to braise, bain-marie, julienne, sous vide, etc. I'm not sure why English has so many lexical gaps specifically around cooking.

It's gotten WAY better. Some recipes from, like, the colonial era, have instructions like "cook well in a cold oven until done", so progress has been made, it's still often imprecise and clumsy.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'm not sure sure why English has so many lexical gaps specifically around cooking

Have you seen British "cooking"?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Lol, have my upvote.

Now baking... The Brits seem to get that.

It's all a result of history.

Hell, Brits were still under austerity through the 60's, and didn't really recover financially from WWII until the 80's.

There are some great shows on Amazon done by historian Ruth Goodman and friends. Victorian Farm, Tudor Farm, etc. "War Farm" really shows how difficult the Brits had it until post-WWII. I'd watch them in sequence, because it's great insight to the different periods.

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