Nov

In the Kitchen with OIC: “Pan” Cultural Cuisine!

by Joyce McGreevy on November 23, 2020

In lockdown? Don’t flip out—flip a pancake instead!
Gilaxia/ iStock

Easy Pancakes from Around the World

Rembrandt sketched them. Shakespeare wrote them into his plays. Sweden established an academy in their honor. They’ve starred in ancient tales and modern movies, inspired mad dashes and dashes of spice and color.

They are pancakes. For many of us, that means a common breakfast food that takes minutes to cook, seconds to eat, and hours to walk off. In fact, that little circle on your plate connects to a multitude of ingredients, shapes, languages, and traditions. Oh, I see: Known by hundreds of names and varieties around the world, this food encompasses a rich “pan” cultural cuisine.

Let’s explore this sisterhood of the traveling pancakes. Along the way, we’ll see how different kinds of pancakes stack up. On your return, peruse our menu of online classes to cook easy pancakes from around the world.

Palatschinke are among the most popular of easy pancakes from around the world. (Image by MariaPolna and Pxhere)

Popular in Slavic culture, palatschinke are Greco-Roman in origin.
MariaPolna/ Pxhere

Breakfast of Ancient Champions

For many culinary historians, all foods lead to ancient Rome. The Romans spiced their pancakes and dubbed them Alita Dolcia. Lyrical but lazy, it simply means “another sweet.” In the second century, Greek physician Galen saw fit to provide a detailed recipe for them in his medical tome. Still popular today, traditional teganitai are sizzled in olive oil and topped with honey.

But did the Greeks invent pancakes as is often claimed? It’s true that many forms of pancake developed throughout Europe, became popular in the Middle Ages, and later crossed the Atlantic. However, archaeological evidence shows that indigenous peoples of the Americas had been making cachapas, arepas, and other corn-based pancakes since early pre-Columbian times.

A cachapa, a Venezuelan pancake, is among the easy pancakes around the world made with corn. (Image by nehopelon and iStock)

Starchier than tortillas, Venezuelan cachapas are filled with creamy cheese
and eaten hot off the griddle.
nehopelon/ iStock

Early on, almost every culture improvised griddles from hot stones. At food festivals in Lucca, Italy, a few chefs still rock this method. To make necci, they pour batter onto hot, flat stones, cover them with chestnut leaves, and stack them on top of each other. The choice of leaves is apt, because necci are made with chestnut flour, milled from the harvest of local forests.

Flour Power

Chestnuts, corn—these are just two items on a long list of pancake possibilities, as well as reminders that “gluten-free” pancakes are nothing new. The flours that power a culture’s popular pancakes include:

rice: India’s dosa and malpua, Korea’s jeon
chickpeas: Southern France’s socca
beans: Nigeria’s akara, Japan’s dorayaki
potatoes: Ireland’s boxty, Ecuador’s llapingachos
buckwheat (which isn’t a wheat at all): New Brunswick’s ploye, Nepal’s phapar ko roti)

Add wheat, and suddenly the globe is paved in pancakes from Samoa (panikeke) to Morocco (beghrir) to New Zealand (pikelets).

A dish of malpua pancakes from India shows why some easy pancakes from around the world have been popular for thousands of years. (Image by Kailash Kumar and iStock)

India’s malpua has sweetened palates for 3,000 years.
Kailash Kumar/ iStock

**What’s in Your Pancake?**

The variety of flours is matched by what different cultures put on, and in, their pancakes. The world beyond maple syrup extends to condensed milk (Thailand), sour cream (Russia), shredded coconut (Brazil), pork fat with lingonberries (Sweden), bonito fish flakes (Japan), and edible flowers (Korea).

The look varies widely, too. Italy’s borlenghi are so big they’re also known as cartwheel pancakes. By contrast, Dutch poffertjes are teensy—they originated in a church as an improved form of communion host. Amen!

Scrambled pancakes, or Kaiserschmarrn, suggest the variety of easy pancakes from around the world. (Image by Pxhere)

Purposely scrambled, Austria’s Kaiserschmarrn means “Emperor’s mess.”
Pxhere

As for color, Indonesia’s kue ape pancakes come by their vibrant green naturally, thanks to pandan. The leaves of this tropical plant are used to make an extract that’s been compared to vanilla. The batter is cooked in woks to create a spongy center and a crispy edge. Home cooks— which is all of us these days—can find pandan flavoring extract for sale online and at our local Asian markets.

Kue ape pancakes from Indonesia are bright green, showing the variety of easy pancakes from around the world. (Image by MielPhotos2008 and iStock)

Kue ape are made with wheat flour, coconut milk, and palm sugar.
MielPhotos2008/ iStock

Not all pancake ingredients catch on, of course. In Miss Parloa’s New Cookbook (Boston, 1881) the pancake mix called for “a bowl of snow.” Seems it met the melts-in-your-mouth test, but was a little too back-to-the-land.

Pancake Planet

The world’s pancakes come with a generous side of fascinating stories.

According to traditional storytellers, it wasn’t the gingerbread man, but the pancake who ran away. Well, rolled. The runaway pancake features in several “fleeing food” tales, including in Norway, Germany, and Russia.
In Japanese legend, a samurai accidentally left his gong at a farmer’s house where he had been hiding. The farmer used it to cook “gong cakes,” the literal meaning of dorayaki. Dorayaki pancakes are also the favorite food of a time-traveling robot cat. Doraemon is the title character of a smash-hit series of manga books and movies.
In Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” the Bard flips pancakes into wordplay. Coincidentally, “as you like it” is the literal meaning of okonomiyaki, another Japanese pancake.
Several countries have religious traditions of eating pancakes the night before Lent. In France during La Chandeleur, the pancake of choice is a crêpe. An old tradition was to place one crêpe into a drawer to attract prosperity. It would certainly have attracted something.

Women running with frying pans in the Pancake Race in Olney, England evoke the fun and history of easy pancakes around the world, (Image by RobinMeyesrcough, licensed by Wikemedia Commons CC BY 2.0)

On hold for now, the Pancake Race in Olney, England was first run in 1445.
Robin Meyerscough/ CC BY 2.0

Coming full circle, the most astonishing thing about pancakes remains their sheer variety, even when considered (or better yet, eaten) within a single country. Italian pancakes alone include crespelle al bitto, ciaffignone, chisciöl, scrippelle ‘mbusse, and several others. In short, we’ve only just scratched the surface of the pancake’s many layers.

That’s all the more reason to get your hands on recipes for easy pancakes from around the world. Check out the menu below this post. We’ve stuffed it like a savory Breton galette with links to virtual cooking classes and entertaining demos. After all, what goes better with pancakes than a side of links?

A chef making dozens of tiny pancakes suggests the popularity and variety of easy pancakes from around the world. (Image by mel_88 and Pxhere)

Have yourself a merry little pancake!
mel_88/ Pixabay

Get cooking! Click on a pancake name to sign up for a live online cooking class: potato pancakes, crêpes, Japanese soufflé pancakes, Bavarian apple pancakes, Osaka style okonomiyaki, and Chinese scallion pancakes.

Can’t wait? Click on a place name for quick how-to videos: Venezuela (cachapas), Nepal (phapar ko roti), Austria (kaiserschmarrn, in German with English captions), Ireland (boxty).

Comment on the post below, or inspire insight with your own OIC Moment here.

Joyce McGreevy 4 Comments

Cultural Diversity/Cultural Heritage & Traditions/The World's Chefs/Worldwide Sites

Nov

Gaining Perspective in a Chaotic World

by Meredith Mullins on November 17, 2020

Time to shake things up?
© Meredith Mullins

The Rewards of Seeing from Varied Angles

How often does your perspective change these days? Can you think of times when you expanded your view of a situation or of the world just by changing your point of reference?

Perhaps when you summited a mountain and the 360-degree vista expanded exponentially while distant objects became flattened miniatures that suddenly seemed small in the grander scheme of things?
Or, when you looked down and found a detail in the street that you’d never seen before even though you’d walked over it a thousand times?
Or, maybe when you crawled through that narrow opening between cave rocks and discovered a cathedral ceiling of stalactites in an underworld worthy of Raiders of the Lost Ark?

Hidden treasures through just a crack in the rocks
Photo courtesy of PxHere

Changing how you see the world is important whether you’re traveling with eyes and mind wide open or sheltering in place during a pandemic.

A constant shift is the key to gaining perspective in a chaotic world. As French writer Anaïs Nin said, “We do not see things as they are, but rather as we are.”

What do you see here?
© Meredith Mullins

The Time Is Right for Gaining Perspective

The timing could not be more urgent for gaining perspective. We are living in stressful times—a global pandemic, domestic and international terrorism, and elections with significant consequences in a divided USA.

It might be time to shake things up . . . to explore some examples of how to change one’s view, such as turning the world upside down and varying your points of reference. There are many interesting ways to gain perspective as we travel through these chaotic times.

Embrace Matanozoki

Matanozoki is the Japanese word for peeking between your legs to turn the world upside down. A creative way to change perspective.

One of the premier viewing spots for ultimate matanozoki is the isthmus of Amanohashidate in Kyoto Prefecture.

Matanozoki viewing near Kyoto, Japan. Can you see the dragon reaching toward the heavens?
© iStock/bee32

When you look between your legs, the sky becomes sea and the pine-tree covered sandbar looks like a dragon reaching to the heavens. (Granted, to see said dragon, you have to let your mind wander imaginatively . . . but, why not?)

Turn the world upside down from time to time.

Turn the world upside down for a change in perspective.
© Meredith Mullins

When in Doubt, Climb Things

A favorite way to change perspective is to go aerial. Climb things. Fly over things. See the forest rather than the trees.

An aerial view in Iceland becomes an organic abstract.
© Samuel Feron

Travelers love to climb things or to rise above ground level to see the “bigger picture,” to take pride in summiting, or just to make sure that they have the best selfie that adventure can buy.

The Empire State Building. The Eiffel Tower. The Seattle Space Needle. The Sydney Harbor Bridge. Mount Kilimanjaro. Mount Everest. The Great Wall of China. Angkor Wat. Machu Picchu. Christ The Redeemer Statue in Rio de Janeiro. Dubai’s Burj Khalifa.

All of these places provide a new perspective, worth climbing to the top to see the world on high.

The tallest building in the world: Dubai’s Burj Khalifa
Courtesy of PxHere

Give Ugly (Different?) a Chance

Speaking of tall things that monopolize a skyline, structures like the Eiffel Tower in Paris were not always popular. When the Eiffel Tower was first built, artists and writers called it “a truly tragic street lamp,” “an ungainly skeleton,” and “the metal asparagus.”

Writer Guy de Maupassant ate lunch every day at the tower because, he claimed, it was the only place where he couldn’t see the offensive structure.

An ungainly skeleton or Paris icon—what do you see?
© Meredith Mullins

As we now know, most have accepted the tower as a Paris icon and a striking, long-lasting piece of structural art. Time heals wounds.

Another such structure in Paris is the Montparnasse Tower, completed in 1973, with most everyone wondering who gave permission for a 59-story monstrosity to be built in the center of the romantic City of Light.

The monolithic Montparnasse Tower
Courtesy of PxHere

I doubt if many people will ever come to treasure the appearance of the Montparnasse Tower. It rises like an angry giant and can be seen from just about every Paris neighborhood. When you photograph the Eiffel Tower from the north, the Montparnasse Tower is always lurking in the background.

However, once inside, at the restaurant Ciel de Paris, the views are breathtaking. (Ciel in French can mean sky or heaven. In either case, it seems to be true.)

Do the ends justify the means? You be the judge.

The view from the Montparnasse Tower
© Meredith Mullins

Look Up

As life-changing as being “at the top of the world” might be, you can also learn from hitting the ground and looking up. We are used to observing at eye level, so remembering to alter viewing perspective or to look up from time to time often offers rewards.

Experiencing autumn from the ground up
© Meredith Mullins

Like improv comedians or jazz musicians, it’s important to build on the possibilities of the moment. Pushing the boundaries and varying the view works well to see things more completely.

A new perspective: under a bridge looking up
© Meredith Mullins

See the Details

Whether you believe “The devil is in the details,” or the original quote, “God is in the details,” the point is well taken. Noticing details is rewarding, but you have to slow down and change your perspective in order to really see.

The beauty of the “up close and personal”
© Meredith Mullins

Try On Different Shoes

No, this isn’t an ad for the ample shoe closets of the Sex in the City characters. This is a call to occasionally put yourself in the shoes of others.

Become a child again. Feel the freedom of reckless abandon or the pure joy of skipping down the street. Let imagination run wild.

A new perspective: unfiltered joy
© Meredith Mullins

Empathy is also a key way to gaining perspective. What exactly is the other person saying or thinking? How might understanding their perspective change your own point of view?

After the U.S. election, several key figures suggested we put ourselves in the shoes of our political adversaries, in the hope that it might help to unify the divide. The time is right for this kind of healing. (But if you read some of the twitter threads in response to these suggestions, you probably noted that some challenges lie ahead.)

Seeing details from afar
© Meredith Mullins

Gaining Perspective from Einstein

As we think about how to adapt during these challenging times—Einstein’s words seem a timely message.

You cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that was used to create that problem.

Oh, I see. The time is right to shift our points of reference—to change the way we see. Gaining perspective in a chaotic world is key to a brighter future.

Comment on this post below, or inspire insight with your own OIC Moment here.

Meredith Mullins 2 Comments

Art of Travel/Life Lessons/Worldwide Sites

Nov

You Can’t Just Make Up Words—Oh, Really?

by Joyce McGreevy on November 9, 2020

A woman reading the Oxford English Dictionary, a source of implicit language lessons on how to invent a word. (Image by lilbellule789 and PIxabay)

Spoiler alert: This page turner’s ending is all about the . . . zyzzyva!
lilbellule789/ Pixabay l

Language Lesson: How to Invent a Word

It’s become a sitcom trope: One character’s remark prompts another character to retort, “That’s not even a word!” or “You can’t just make up words!”

But according to the most widespread, time-honored language lore, people have been inventing words ever since the guttural grunts of one human first morphed into vocal patterns that made sense to other humans.

Let’s settle this with the world’s shortest language lesson, here.

Oh, I see: Making up words is precisely how language happens. When people invent a word, language grows and goes out into the world, keeping robust pace with ever-changing ideas and events until the time comes to pass the torch to other new language.

A woman binge-watching TV unknowingly embodies a language lesson—how you invent a word is influenced by other inventions, too. (Image by Kali9 and iStock)

As the words turn: The word TV (first known use: 1945) spawned TV dinner (1954),
sitcom (1962), dramedy (1978), channel surf (1988) and binge-watch (2003).
Kali9/ iStock

World of Words

According to Global Language Monitor, English speakers alone generate over 5,000 new words a year. While most “new” words of any era fall out of use—When’s the last time you heard someone say icebox, courting, or dungarees?—about 1,000 new words become so embedded in everyday use that they enter the ultimate word hall of fame—the dictionary.

A dictionary opened to the word dictionary show that people invent a new word or words about language itself. (Image by Pxhere)

Um, has anyone ever used a dictionary to look up the word dictionary?
Pxhere

Between Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary, 2020’s newbie words include social-distance, WFH (working from home), deprioritize, all-dressed, and a slew of medical terms. As in, “Now that we social-distance by WFH, we’ve deprioritized business casual, started wearing athleisure, and mostly live on all-dressed pizza.”

As you can see, some new words are old words that have been given new meanings. These new words not only demonstrate the evolution of language and reflect issues affecting our world today, they also annoy the heck out of purists.

To Verb or Not to Verb

For example, maybe you’ve heard someone rail against the practice of turning nouns into verbs, also known as “verbing.” Like when conference becomes conferencing. Someone may even have told you that this isn’t proper English.

Now if only that purist had been around 400 years ago, they could have delivered their complaints to a champion verber—Shakespeare. He transformed nouns like elbow and gossip into verbs, elbowing out old norms and setting purists gossiping.

An actor in period costume evokes the idea that when you invent a word you it becomes a kind of time capsule or historical language lesson. (Image by Pxhere)

What’s in a name? Richard Burton models Shakespearean jeggings (2009)
—oops, leg warmers (1915)—oops, pantyhose (1959)—oops, hose (1100s).
Pxhere

In fact, Shakespeare’s habit of anthimeria is one you probably share. Anthimeria is the use of one part of speech as another, such as when:

you bookmark a website (noun used as a verb)
you need a good night’s sleep (verb used a noun)
or, as one 60s pop song put it, “you keep samin’ when you oughta be changin'” (adjective used as a verb)

Samin’ is not what words do. You might even say, these words were made for walkin’, because language is constantly on the move, dancing to new tunes, topics, and events to communicate new meanings.

Looking Back-Word

As for where humans’ first words came from, sorry, I wasn’t there or I’d’ve made notes. But what I can tell you are some time-honored ways of making up words that we still use today:

1. Adding Suffixes and Prefixes. Undoubtedly, you already know that historically, many words materialized as humans began affixing adorable word parts onto plain old root words. The transformations were limitless!

Current examples: declutter, preexisting, unplug

2. Clipping. Another way we get new words is to give old words a haircut. That’s how public houses became pubs, pianofortes became pianos, fanatics became fans, and typographical errors became typos.

Current examples: celeb (celebrity), prom (promenade), blog (web log), stats (statistics)

A duck that can quack suggests an instant language lesson in how to invent a word—use onomatopoeia. (Image by Pxhere)

Creating words can be a quack up! Onomatopoeia is forming words that imitate sounds.
Pxhere

3. Blending. If you’ve ever read Lewis Carroll’s poem “The Jabberwocky,” the so-called nonsense words were actually blended words. Carroll called them portmanteau words, after a kind of suitcase that opened into two sections. So slithy actually “packed up” both slimy and lithe, and chortle combined chuckle and snort.

Throughout history, many blended words crossed into mainstream English, such as smog (smoke + fog), motel (motor + hotel), telethon (telephone + marathon), brunch (breakfast + lunch).

Current examples: Brexit (Britain + exit), pixel (picture + element), rom-com (romantic + comedy)

4. Compounding. Similar to blending, compounding coins one new expression from two old words. Backseat driver, bean counter, smiley face, tie dye, and mood ring have been with us since the days of disco inferno, leisure suits, and the floppy disk, but the Bard himself—an avid popularizer of compound words— would have reacted to them with bare-faced, addle-pated confusion.

Current examples: gig economy, dark web, screen time

A child’s hand taking an orange embodies an language lesson in how to invent a word—borrow from another language, like the Arabic for “orange”, naranj. (Image by JoshMB and Pixabay)

How to make new words? Borrow from another language—like orange,
from the Arabic word nāranj.
JoshMB/ Pixabay

5. Eponyms. What’s in a name? Words we use on a daily basis. OIC Moments readers know such famous examples as:

boycott from Irish land agent Charles C. Boycott
Fahrenheit, from physicist Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit
America, from Italian mapmaker Amerigo Vespucci

But did you know that words like diesel and nicotine are also eponyms? German engineer Rudolf Diesel gave his name to both the engine and the fuel that powered it, while sixteenth century diplomat Jean Nicot de Villemain apparently introduced tobacco to France. Even sideburns, guppy, shrapnel, mesmerize, and leotard are named for real people.

An eponym can be based on fiction. Consider paparazzi. In the 1960s Italian film La Dolce Vita, a photographer named Paparazzo works for gossip magazines. The word paparazzo was used because it sounds like the buzz of an annoying insect.

Where are the women, you may ask? Underrepresented. The most famous is Amelia Bloomer. No, she didn’t create bloomers, but her advocacy for women’s rights inspired the name of this alternative to the heavy dresses that restricted women’s movements.

Current examples: Jacuzzi, Darwinian, Tesla

A tornado symbolizes a surprising language lesson—people sometimes invent a word by mistake. (Image by Pxhere)

Word twist(er)? Mistakes can create new words. English speakers inverted o and r in
the Spanish word for “thunderstorm,” tronada, and then used this to describe
another kind of extreme weather—the tornado.
Pxhere

For-Word into the Future!

These are just a few language lessons in how to invent a word. As each new word emerges, the knowledge it carries adds to the lore—and often the allure—of language. You have my word.

Letter tiles evokea key language lesson—there is always the potential to invent a word. (Image by Pxhere)

What’s the next new word?
Pxhere