East African Spice Mix: Berbere

This is a common spice blend used in many countries in East Africa, especially in Ethiopia and Eritrea. It is so commonly used, many families make their own, so there are numerous variations to recipes for berbere (pronounced as if, "bur-bur-ah"), including for the "heat level." In East Africa, many of the spices are first toasted in whole form, and then they are ground, but to make this blend a little more simple, you can use already ground spices, but you can toast them in a dry skillet briefly, if you'd like, but take care not to burn the spices, which can happen quite quickly... ah, that's what I've been told. (Let me uncross my fingers before I move on.)

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons cayenne pepper or other hot red ground chilies
1 teaspoon ground fenugreek
1 teaspoon ground cumin
2 teaspoons ground coriander
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 teaspoon mild smoked paprika (Spanish paprika is smoked)
1 teaspoon onion powder   

This is the hard part... haha  Put all ingredients into a jar or other small storage container, put the lid on the jar and shake the jar until the spices are well mixed. You should shake the container before each use.

WORD HISTORY:
Zen-This word, distantly related to "semantic," goes back to Indo European "dhyae," which had the notion, "to look, to see." This gave transliterated Sanskrit^ "dhyana," meaning, "meditation" ("mentally looking in a focused way at the various aspects of a subject, often regarding a god, or religion, eventually as part of Buddhism"). This was borrowed by Chinese^^ as transliterated "dzien" (by pronunciation), and this was borrowed by Japanese^^^ as transliterated "zen," with the deep mediation part of Buddhism meaning. Seemingly first borrowed by English circa 1730.

^ "Sanskrit" is an ancient language from the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo European; thus, it is related to English, although much further down the family tree. It is still in use to some degree, especially in India.

^^ "Chinese" in its several forms belongs to the "Sino-Tibetan" language family. It's best known relative is Burmese.

^^^ For such a large language, the overall history and ties of "Japanese" to other languages is a bit sketchy, but it is part of the "Japonic" language family. Over time, some have attempted, unsuccessfully, to connect Japonic, and thus Japanese, to Korean. The similarities shared between Japanese and Korean have been generally assumed to be from borrowings due to contacts between the languages, not directly from a shared common ancestor.          

Filipino Adobo Chicken

If you're a regular reader here, you've likely seen the term "adobo" used by me several times, often, but not always, about Latino recipes. Filipino adobo does not have the same meaning as in "New World" cooking terminology. In some Latino cultures it is a dry kind of seasoning or seasoned salt, while in other Latino cultures it is a mixture of chilies, spices and a liquid component. In the Philippines it refers to a way of cooking by using a marinade for meat or seafood. The Spaniards, who colonized the Philippines from the 1500s until 1898, applied the name "adobo" to the cooking style already present in the Philippines, with the idea of marinating being the common connection to Latino cultures, where both liquid or dry seasonings are used to flavor and tenderize meat by marinating, but where the marinating product was given the name "adobo," not the preparation process.

You won't need salt, because the soy sauce has plenty. You can see, if you like a little heat, add a chili pepper or some cayenne. Chili peppers can vary in the level of heat, even the same kind of chilies. One jalapeño may be mouth-scorching, while the next may be so mild as to be similar to a bell pepper, so sample them and proceed accordingly. When I first made this dish, I used half of a fresh cayenne pepper, but it didn't even move the needle, so I added the other half, but it also didn't supply much punch, which goes to show how mild some "hot" chilies can be actually be, regardless of their name and reputation.

Ingredients:

2 1/2 pounds chicken thighs or whole legs
8 to 10 black peppercorns, cracked a little to release flavor
1/3 cup white or rice vinegar
8 cloves garlic, crushed
1/3 cup soy sauce
3 bay leaves
1 tablespoon brown sugar
2/3 cup water
(optional) 1 finely chopped jalapeño or serrano chili, or 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
(optional) cornstarch and water

In a large bowl or non reactive pot, place the chicken thighs, the peppercorns, the vinegar, the garlic, the soy sauce, the brown sugar, the chili pepper or cayenne and the bay leaves. Cover and refrigerate for 4 to 6 hours. Turn the chicken at least once, preferably a couple of times, while marinating. Heat the oven to 350 (F). Remove the dish and marinade from the refrigerator and place the chicken thighs on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or foil. Bake in the oven for 40 to 50 minutes, depending upon the size of the chicken thighs, until the skin is somewhat firmed up. Meanwhile, add the water to the marinade and then bring to a boil over medium high heat on the stove top, then reduce heat so that the marinade/sauce simmers very lightly for about 10 to 12 minutes, uncovered, until sauce is reduced, OR, mix some cornstarch and water together very well. Keeping the sauce simmering, gradually add the cornstarch to the sauce, stirring constantly, until you reach the desired thickness of the sauce. (Optional) If you want the chicken to be well coated with sauce (photo #2), after the sauce reaches the desired thickness, put the fresh from the oven chicken thighs into the pan and turn to coat. Cook for just a minute. Serve with rice.

Just with some sauce spooned over, or in the second photo, chicken coated in sauce

WORD HISTORY:
Soy-This word goes back to transliterated Chinese "tshi-yew," which meant "soy bean oil." This was borrowed into Japanese as transliterated "shoyu" and early Dutch traders to Japan took the word as "soja," which was borrowed by English in the last quarter of the 1600s, as "soya/soy." When I was a kid, it seems to me I heard "soya" used a lot in reference to the beans, but "soy" used for the famous sauce.

Turkish Meatballs & Yogurt Sauce (Köfte)

The Turkish name for these, Köfte, pronounced sort of, "kuftah," simply means "meatball." Ingredients can vary somewhat from place to place in Turkey, and beef is not uncommonly used. You can increase the amount of chili pepper or cayenne for more heat, but the amount I show below should not scorch anyone's mouth. Notice there is no egg, although I saw a few recipes which included egg, but they "seemed" to be from non Turkish cooks. The yogurt sauce can be made well in advance, even the day before, and it should be chilled for at least a couple of hours, in any case. The time will allow the flavors to blend, so make the yogurt sauce first.  

Ingredient (about 10 meatballs):

1 pound ground lamb
1 onion, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, chopped
1/4 cup breadcrumbs (Panko are great, they're coarse)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons ground sumac (optional) *
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 teaspoon hot chili pepper flakes or ground cayenne pepper
1/4 cup chopped mint leaves

The Yogurt Sauce: 
1 cup plain Greek yogurt
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 large clove garlic, minced
2 tablespoons chopped mint (can be fresh or dried)
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
pinch of freshly ground black pepper

For the yogurt:
Combine the ingredients in a bowl, cover and chill for a minimum of a couple of hours, preferably longer.

For the meatballs:
Preheat oven to 350 (F). Line a baking sheet or shallow pan with parchment paper or aluminum foil (this will make clean up much easier). In a bowl, add all the ingredients and mix just until all are mixed in. Roll heaping tablespoons of the mixture into meatballs. Allow a little space between the meatballs. Bake uncovered for 45 minutes, by which time the outsides should be a "little crispy," but the insides will be tender. Just to be safe, as all ovens are not the same, check the meatballs after 35 minutes, then judge how much longer they may need for the level of "crispness" you like. Leaving them unchecked for the entire 45 minutes may dry them out. I used the entire 45 minutes and they were wonderful, but I did check them at 35 minutes, then again at 40 minutes. 

* This type of sumac is not the poisonous variety we think of in the United States and Canada, although it is from the same overall plant family. This spice, from the plant's berries, is deep red in color, with a tangy, sort of lemony flavor; in fact, if you don't have it, or don't have access to buy it easily, you can just leave it out, or I found some recipes mention substituting a squeeze of fresh lemon juice, or a teaspoon of grated lemon peel. I had some sumac, so I used it. 

WORD HISTORY:
Turk/Turkey-The Turks speak what linguists believe is a language unrelated to English, coming from the Turkic language family. There has been disagreement about this family of languages from central Asia, and its ties or non ties to the Altaic languages, also from central Asia. Anyhow, ancient Chinese used the term "tu-kin" for the people living in the area of the Altai Mountains (thus "Altaic" for that language family), but whether "tu-kin" is the ancestor of "Turk," is seemingly an open question. Did these people adopt a variant form for themselves, or did Chinese get the term from these people? Whatever the truth, it seems that Greek picked up "Tourkos," perhaps from Persian "turk." ^ Latin picked up the word from Greek as "Turcus," and this passed into French as "Turc." English got the word from French during the 1200s or 1300s. The national name, "Turkey," came into use during the 1300s, from Latin "Turchia." ^^

^ Persian is an Indo European language related to English, but much, much further down the family tree.

^^  The English word for the bird we Americans think of for Thanksgiving, came from a shortening of "Turkey hen/Turkey cock," as there was a similar bird brought into Europe by the Portuguese, imported by way of Turkey; thus the name came to be applied to the bird. As for people called a "turkey," ahh.... I'll leave that alone!

"The Good Earth," A Great Book and Movie

Many of you may have never heard of Luise Rainer, but she was the first person to win back to back Academy Awards, winning the Oscars for Best Actress in 1936 and 1937. Luise Rainer lived in Germany (born in Düsseldorf, and she was Jewish), Austria, the United States and Britain. She passed away December 30, 2014 at the age of 104. Her second Academy Award came for her performance in "The Good Earth," a black and white film based on the book of the same title by Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winning author Pearl S. Buck, whose family lived in China for decades beginning in the late 1800s, thus giving Ms. Buck a great deal of first hand knowledge about the Chinese people she wrote about. Pearl Buck was born in Hillsboro, a little town in West Virginia.

The book and film have several parallels to China's society at the time, like the tethers of the past and traditions, but the attempts to change to a more modern society. The film is pretty faithful to the book, but there are some differences. The story centers around the lives of Wang Lung (played by one of my favorite actors, Paul Muni) and his wife O-Lan (played by Luise Rainer in her Oscar winning performance). Together the two work very hard to make their small farm successful, all the while raising their children. Success brings greed, and Wang Lung begins to buy more and more land. A drought wipes away the material wealth accumulated by Wang Lung, and the family has to move away to try to find work so they can survive. They eventually return home to successfully work their land and the years pass. The couple's sons grow up and get good educations, but they feel no special connection to the land which has provided for their family. O-Lan, worn out by a life of hard work and child-rearing, is shunned by the again successful Wang Lung, who takes a young dancer as his second wife, but she proceeds to "get involved" with one of the couple's sons, causing great turmoil in the family. A swarm of locusts descends upon the land, threatening to destroy the crops. The family unites to drive the locusts away, but O-Lan is dying. Wang Lung sees how much she has meant to his life.

If you've never read the book, nor seen the movie, please do both. You will not regret it. The movie is available on DVD. A "Word History" is below the picture.

Photo is of the 2006 Warner Brothers Home Video DVD

WORD HISTORY:
Ketchup-This word, also at times rendered as "catsup," ^ comes from one of the Chinese dialects, perhaps Cantonese, where "ke-zhap/ke-jiap," meant "tomato sauce." Whether this word was then picked up by English traders in the early 1700s directly from the Chinese version, is uncertain. Another possibility is, several of the Chinese dialects, all part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, ^^ have similar words, but some mean "fish sauce/brine," which then was borrowed by Malay, a southeast Asian language, but with the fish brine meaning. The leap from fish brine to tomato ketchup is a bit tough for me, so I lean much more toward the borrowing from Cantonese.

^ When I was a kid in the 1950s and 1960s, "catsup" was a fairly common usage, but as the Heinz brand came to dominate the market, their use of "ketchup" also began to prevail. To be quite honest, I'm not sure the last time I heard the word "catsup."

^^ Sino-Tibetan languages are widely spoken in parts of Asia and it is a language family just as is Indo European, the family to which the Germanic languages belong, and to which English belongs.

Tea Time

Expanded a bit on 12-27-2015 and photo added, as well as a little editing on 8-19-21

Tea drinking apparently goes back at least 4500 to 5000 years in China. It wasn't until the mid 1500s that western Europeans came into contact with tea, as the Portuguese settled in Macao (also "Macau") in southeastern China, which remained as a Portuguese colony until 1999! Then Dutch traders established themselves in southeastern Asia in Indonesia in the early 1600s, which later became the Dutch colony "the Dutch East Indies." The mid 1600s brought the marriage of England's King Charles II to a Portuguese princess, who made tea drinking a prominent feature among the nobility. The price of tea in those times was prohibitive for the spread of the drink to those not in the upper classes, but increased trade and involvement in India brought more tea, and lower prices, and sugar, into England. It wasn't long before the British began to sweeten their tea with sugar from the New World and tea drinking became popular with the general population, making tea the national drink. The ancestral homeland of the English (the Anglo-Saxons) is northern Germany, and their close relatives, the Saxons and the Frisians, still inhabit the area. The similar climate to Britain along the North Sea coast of Germany, and the availability of tea from Dutch importers, made tea a popular drink with the Frisian and Saxon population of the area, where tea is still the regional beverage. In the East Frisian part of northern Germany, rock candy is used to sweeten their tea, with some cream carefully layered a bit below the surface. The idea is to provide three distinct tastes: the bitter black tea at the top, the tea/cream mixture in the middle, and then the addition of the sweetness of the melting rock candy near the bottom. The East Frisians are known for their pickiness for black tea and their brands are considered topnotch.

Russians have had a strong attachment to tea going back to the 1600s, although its high price initially limited its availability to the upper classes. Russians traded directly with the Chinese by overland route, organized in caravans. It was quite a trip and "supposedly" the tea acquired a smoky flavor from being near the campfires during its long journey,* a characteristic still common in the most popular form of black tea in Russia, although the flavoring is now added. It is the national beverage of Russia, although vodka drinkers may question that... hic! Hey, I'm a tea drinker, honest!

Chai is a spiced black tea (sometimes green tea) and is my favorite. Chai typically has a lot of milk and sugar, and you can most certainly get it in any Indian or Pakistani restaurant in the U.S. or elsewhere. I make my own, pretty much every day, although I'm sure some Indians might not approve of my recipe or technique, although from what I'm told, there are considerable variations, even in India. Generally chai is black tea in about a 50-50 milk/water mixture, but I use far less milk (I use evaporated milk). When I've bought chai at Indian restaurants, it has always been very sweet, and I make it somewhat less so. I use fresh grated ginger, some ground cardamom, a bit of ground cloves (and often some ground allspice, too), a small bit of mace (or nutmeg), and some ground cinnamon. Some Indians or Pakistanis use black pepper in chai, too, and others use fennel seed. After letting the spices steep for awhile, you can strain the tea into your cup. You can buy tea bags already with a spice mixture in them, but I've never been very impressed with the result. You can also put the ingredients into a pan and gently boil the mixture. In this case, I tend to use a cinnamon stick, rather than ground cinnamon, as well as whole cloves and crushed cardamom seeds. I prefer to add the milk after the cooking is done, but you can cook it right along with the tea. Note: A while back, I also started using black pepper in chai, sometimes ground or sometimes whole crushed peppercorns. It gives the chai that added "zip."  

* It seems a bit of a stretch to me that tea packed for such a trip would acquire the smoky flavor this way. I wonder if at some point some open tea was exposed to the campfire smoke, the users liked it, and they then chose to repeat the process?

 

WORD HISTORY:
Tea-This word comes from a Sino-Tibetan word, "sla/tsla," which likely meant "leaf." Sino-Tibetan is a large language family in Asia and Southeast Asia which is the ancient ancestor of the Chinese dialects, like Mandarin and Cantonese, as well as southeastern Asian languages like Burmese and others. Sino-Tibetan is to these modern Asian languages what Indo European is to English, German, Italian, Russian, etc. Min Nan, a dialect of Sino-Tibetan had "te." Malay, an unrelated language from the Austronesian language family^  in southeastern Asia, borrowed the word from Min Nan as "teh." The Dutch East India Company was a private company granted Asian trade rights by the Dutch government in the early 1600s. The Dutch picked up the word from Malay "teh," rendered in Dutch as "thee," which they then brought back to western Europe, along with a lot of the product itself. English borrowed the word in the mid 1600s as both "tee" and "tea," before finally settling on the latter. Many other European languages borrowed the word from Dutch, for example, German has "Tee" (pronounced "tay"), West Frisian has "tee," French has "thé." Interestingly, the Portuguese had established themselves in southeastern China, at Macao, in the mid 1500s. The Chinese dialect in Macao pronounced their form of Sino-Tibetan "sla/tsla" as "cha." The Portuguese took the term as "chá," which they have retained to this day as their word for "tea." This same Chinese term spread elsewhere, providing forms to Russian and Persian, and from Persian to Hindi and other languages/dialects in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. English borrowed the word, likely from Hindi, as "chai," a term now used more specifically for "sweetened spiced tea." It is pronounced "ch," as in Charles, and "eye."    

^ Hawaiian is from the Austronesian language family, too.

The Word On Some Other People

Regular readers will recall that I recently did a series of articles about why we use the names we do for various groups of people. I stuck with names of some of the Germanic groups, as these groups are more closely related to English, which is a Germanic language. Now, I'll move on to some other groups.

Greek-For such an influential group of people, the history of this word is a bit obscure. For quite some time, these folks were known as "Hellenes," the name of a particular ancient tribe, but it seems that Aristotle began the use of "Graikhos" in place of "Hellenes." The question is, "Why?" Some linguists claim that an ancient group of people called the Illyrians (essentially the ancestors of modern Albanians) used a form of this word for the people living in and around Epirus (a Greek city), but other linguists aren't so sure, with some claiming that it came from ancient Greek settlers from a coastal town named "Graia," who then crossed over into southern Italy, there encountering the Romans. The Romans then used "Graeci" as their own word for all "Greeks." Whatever the origins of the word, Old Germanic picked up a form of the word from Latin "Graeci;" Old Greek had "Grakoi." In Old English is was "Crecas," a plural form, with the "c" pronounced with the hard sound, like "k." Gothic, another Germanic language now extinct, had "Kreks." Later in English, the "C" became "G," and the spelling was therefore altered to "Grecas," before the modern spelling was adopted. I should note that the Romans took a number of words from Greek, and eventually some of these words found their way into other languages, including English (See "Turk," below). Also, Greek is an Indo European language, related to English further down the family tree.

Hun-The Chinese called these people from central Asia "Han" (short "a," like in "father") and "Hiong-nu." Turkic groups called them "Hunyu," which seems to have been picked up by Latin as "Hunni." It would seem that English got the word from Latin, and in Old English is was "Hunas," a plural form, with the "u" being long. The Huns came roaring into Europe during the 4th and 5th Centuries, A.D., and their one leader has been famous the world over, "Attila," usually known in English with the addition of "the Hun." The Huns eventually settled down and operated out of an area in southeastern Europe, and the area therefore became known as Hungary, in English, from Latin "Hungaria, but Latin seems to have gotten the word from Greek "Oungroi." Another group of people, the Magyars, who were related to the Huns, eventually moved into this area, but the name stuck, and the country is still called Hungary and the people Hungarians, although these people don't use either term, but rather a form of Magyar for both.