CTP (S3E112) Words on Your Plate: Why Food Names Matter

CTP (S3E112) Words on Your Plate: Why Food Names Matter
Exploring more of the fascinating intersection of Activism, Community Engagement, Faith / Religion, Human Nature, Politics, Social Issues, and beyond  
Mark Morton joins us to explore the fascinating origins of food words in his book "Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities." We delve into the rich etymological history of everyday culinary terms and discover how language reveals our cultural past.
• English food vocabulary developed through cultural interactions with Germanic, Norse, French, Latin, Greek, and indigenous languages
• Many food names have surprising origins – "avocado" means "testicle" in its original language
• Italian pasta names often have descriptive meanings – "vermicelli" (little worms), "spaghetti" (little strings)
• Food expressions like "eating crow" and "humble pie" originated from class distinctions in food consumption
• Regional naming differences across North America include "Bismarcks" (jelly donuts) and various terms for sandwiches
• Historical inversions in food status – lobster was once poor people's food while organ meats were prized by nobility
• Early alcoholic beverages like "small beer" were safer to consume than untreated water
• Food words reflect cultural exchange, social hierarchies, and changing values throughout history
Cupboard Love is available at all major book retailers, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and through local bookstores. Visit Mark Morton's website at markmorton.ca to learn more about his work.

A Short Story: A Lasting Legacy? book Trailer

Transcript

Welcome to CTP Podcast

Speaker 1 0:08

Welcome to the Constitutionalist Politics Podcast, aka CTP. I am your host, joseph M Leonard, and that's L-E-N-A-R-D. Ctp is your no-muss, no-fuss just me, you and occasional guest-type podcast. Really appreciate you tuning in. As Graham Norton would say, let's get on with the show. Hello everyone, this is going to be a quick, cheat intro segment. I'm going to be lazy. I've got so many guest recordings built up. I'm going to get lazy and cheat. On some Saturdays I don't have to dream up a monologue topic this way. So, and I'm also not going to say what guest will be appearing, because I'm going to be lazy and cheat and use the same intro several Saturdays to intro a guest show. So, as Graham Norton used to say, let's get on with the show. Surprise interview, take care, cop plus. Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Christitutionalist Politics Podcast Today.

Speaker 1 1:32

Not likely hate to have anything to do with Christianity or politics, unless if he's got a partisan cake to sell Joining me today. Mutual friend of Mickey Mickelson, mark Morton, and about his amusing, acclaimed and erudite cupboard love a dictionary of culinary curiosities. It's back in print for the first time in two decades. I never get tired of talking about my faith, but it does get a little boring. Only talk of politics all the time, right. So hey, covered love.

Speaker 2 2:17

Okay, let's have some fun so, yeah, thank you for having me. I'm really, I'm really pleased to be here. You want me to tell you, tell you, what the book is generally, and then I let's let's do the proverbial first things first.

Speaker 1 2:31

you know the proverbial first question first. Sure, you know the proverbial first question. I like to joke. Cue the who song who are you, who, who, who, who? Right, where were you born? When were you raised? How much time did you spend in prison, and is that where you learned how to cook? You know those details.

Speaker 2 2:53

What makes you think I'm not still in prison?

Speaker 1 2:57

Are you married. You may be, then yeah. Just a joke people, Just a joke.

Speaker 2 3:07

Well, I'm in Kitchener Waterloo, Ontario, and you're in Detroit, aren't you?

Speaker 1 3:11

I've been through Kitchener many a time.

Speaker 2 3:12

Played hockey in.

Speaker 1 3:13

Kitchener, waterloo, ontario, and you're in Detroit, aren't you? I've been through Kitchener many a time, played hockey in Kitchener many a time, yeah.

Speaker 2 3:19

So just kind of north and in fact my youngest son, matthew, just arrived, like about 50 minutes ago, and he lives in Windsor. So just across the lake, across the river from me.

Speaker 1 3:29

Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah. So I almost literally could throw a stone from my house across the river into, well, the suburbs of windsor. Yeah, yeah, windsor proper is fun fact for those who don't look at a map often. Windsor, canada, is actually south of Detroit. Yeah, think of right the way Michigan is. Do the hand thing, however, it works Right. In the thumb area there is Detroit. Windsor kind of is like my thumb. For those seeing on behind-the-scenes video channels, it's actually south of Detroit.

Speaker 2 4:17

But I okay, before I tell you about myself, I got to tell you one more fact, one more geographical fact that I think is amazing. So the southernmost point in Canada is Point Pelee National Park.

Speaker 1 4:27

Yep.

Speaker 2 4:28

Been there. It's actually north of the very northern sorry, it's actually south of the very northern tip of California, Can you believe it?

Speaker 1 4:38

Yeah, it gets down that far. People think Canada. They think, oh, just that frozen, You're Santa's neighbor, right? You're all up there. No, people don't realize, because it does get so cold. So far, all of your population really is in the southern part just over the border from the.

Speaker 2 5:01

States, yeah, something like 85% are within 100 miles of the US-Canadian border, I believe, or 20-some that actually have components of them that are south of parts of Canada, like Vermont, maine, you know, and so on, and so on. Yeah, so, as for me, I grew up no, that's it.

Speaker 1 5:23

We're just here for a geography lesson.

Speaker 2 5:29

Well, I grew up north of North Dakota in the province of Saskatchewan. You know the Great Prairies of Canada.

Speaker 1 5:35

Go Eskimos, they're always going to be the Eskimos. To me, the Eskimos, not the. Elks, the Eskimos.

Speaker 2 5:42

Yep, yep, no the.

Speaker 1 5:44

Saskatchewan Rough Riders yeah they're amazing.

Speaker 2 5:47

I'm thinking of Edmonton, edmonton Eskimos. Yeah, saskatchewan doesn't have a hockey team.

Speaker 1 5:54

Yeah, that's kind of weird. Eventually they've got to get a team back in Quebec and they should get a team in Saskatchewan eventually. Yes, one in the Eastern Conference, one in the Western. We need a team back in Atlanta again. It took a while. We got a team back in Minnesota after the North Stars became the Dallas Stars and we need a team back in Phoenix now that they're the Utah Hockey Club.

Speaker 2 6:22

Yeah, yeah, no, I agree, I think that'd be great. I think there's fan support for it. Oh, yeah. So anyways, yeah, I grew up on a small farm, a small poor farm, born in 1963. So I'm now 61, which I don't know how that happened.

Speaker 1 6:39

I turned 63 this year, so I'm with you.

Speaker 2 6:43

You know what one's knees start to feel like then. And then I went to university and majored in English literature and then eventually I did a PhD in English literature 16th century English literature and then I, while I was teaching in English departments in a few different universities, I started writing books. The very first book that I wrote is the one that you know Mickey got us in touch about, which is Covered Love. And yeah, it came out. The first edition came out like 30 years ago, then a second edition came out about 25 years ago and now a third edition has come out just a couple of days ago.

Speaker 1 7:23

I love it. I love it. No, you mentioned English, so I got to tell you my Joe original Shakespeare joke. Yeah, to be or not to be, tis truly the question, because if it's to be, I got bingo, give it to me Bingo. Yeah.

Speaker 2 7:47

Well, let's see, I think I can match that one. So there's a couple of philosophers. So what's his name? Sartre I forget Sartre's first name says to be is to do, and then Kierkegaard says oh, to do is to be, and then Sinatra says do be, do, be, do to be, and then Sinatra says doobie, doobie doo I think I've actually heard that one before or variation, that's a good one, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 8:11

What was the one you said in the? You asked how I was doing. I said could be better, could be worse. What was?

Speaker 2 8:18

Oh yeah, yeah, that's the old one about a statistician. He's got his feet in an oven and his head in a refrigerator and he says on average, I'm feeling fine.

Speaker 1 8:29

Yeah, but I'm pumped. I can never pass the lame puns. I loved it, so I wanted you to share it. Yeah, but indeed, at any rate, let's talk cooking.

Speaker 2 8:41

Sure, yeah, so yeah, the book I was mentioning Covered Love. It's a dictionary of the origins and histories of food words in English, and English, as I'm sure you know, has a very, very well, I think it would be fair to say it's got the richest vocabulary of almost any language, because we've had collisions or conflicts or interactions with so many other cultures and languages, you know, going back to the ancient Romans when they came to America.

Cupboard Love: Food Word Origins

Speaker 1 9:08

Originally English, more or less a Germanic dialect derivative yeah and which is why today in Germany, in the middle of the sentence you'll hear an English word, because there still was no German word for that.

Speaker 2 9:25

Or lots of words, like the German word for king is Koenig, and if you see that K-O-E-N-I-G, it kind of looks like king. You know, so you can see.

Speaker 1 9:31

Exactly. Oh, there's a lot of words like that Absolutely.

Speaker 2 9:36

And then the Vikings came, you know, in the 10th century, and a whole bunch of Norse words came in to England then. And then in the Renaissance, you know the 1600s, a whole bunch of Latin and Greek words and then some French violated.

Speaker 2 9:51

Yeah, you're right, I forgot about the French 1066 conquering England the Norman conquest and it totally transformed the English language. I mean, probably 40% of the English language now is French in origin and then indigenous languages, like when Europeans came to North America and they encountered the indigenous peoples here, they took a lot of words and then, of course, as they started sailing around the world and went to Africa and Caribbean and China and so on, took all the food words from there as well.

Speaker 2 10:28

So it's a really rich history of food words and cooking words in English that we have, and there's about a thousand entries in Cupboard Love and each entry explains where a word, a different word, comes from.

Speaker 1 10:41

Give us. I don't want you to give away the book, but Jesus, give us one. What's a favorite? What do you like? Why do you like it when it is its origin? What's?

Speaker 2 10:54

it about. Well, I'll give you a couple. You know, sometimes when I'm giving interviews, I'm thinking, oh, is this going to be okay for me to say in this interview? I get the impression on this one it'll be okay. So avocado, for example. Avocado, how dare you? It gets worse. No, it comes from the languages of. One of the languages of Central America is. Well, it was called Nahuatl I'm probably not pronouncing it correctly and in that original, oh.

Speaker 1 11:23

I can't wait for the transcript to stumble on that word.

Speaker 2 11:26

Yeah right. Well, you know, if you think about what an avocado looks like, it might not be surprising that in that Central American Indigenous language it means testicle.

Speaker 1 11:39

Well, there goes the G rating on this show.

Speaker 2 11:46

A lot of words are like that, like what's another? Okay, this isn't an especially common one, but there's a kind of cake called Liebesnacken, and if you Gertrudeite, liebesnacken means bone of love, and it's a cake that is elongated. You know it's and it's has when it, when it's served, it's served with two almonds at one end and it's a Exactly. It arose as a, as a fertility remedy, you know. So, ok, know, okay, yeah, okay. So a lot of food words have to do with sex, surprisingly, Interesting.

Speaker 1 12:33

Yeah, I'll have to flag this PG-13.

Speaker 2 12:38

I'll give you another example that is, you know, suitable for children of any ages. There's something called Funastrata, and you probably haven't heard of it, and there's a good reason for that, but it's a word that appeared on surveys that were given by the US military to their soldiers, because they wanted to find out what kinds of foods they liked and what kinds of foods they didn't like. So one of the things they asked about was Funestrata. Now, the thing about Funestrata is it doesn't exist. It's never existed, you know. But what they wanted to do, it was a made-up word.

Speaker 1 13:13

It was kind of a test word to throw in there to test the survey like a psychology test. Exactly Right, a test question that there is no real answer for, to see how you respond.

Speaker 2 13:28

Yeah, yeah, exactly A test for validity. So if somebody said I love Funestrata, well they'd know that one.

Speaker 1 13:35

Well, let's survey out, yeah.

Speaker 2 13:38

So Funestrata was one of those words. Baked ermal, you know, was another one Braised trach.

Speaker 2 13:49

None of which exists. Well, you should invent one, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly in that edition, you go with those. Now you know another, this, this one I love too. Back in when was it? I think it was probably the early 2000s on the simpsons you know the the sitcom the Simpsons, there was an episode where Homer crosses the tomato plant with the tobacco plant and creates something he calls tamaco, which he describes as delicious and highly addictive. The thing that happened, though, after that is an actual botanist, I guess, or geneticist. He realized that tomato and tobacco, they actually come from the same plant family, they both belong to the nightshade family, and therefore they could theoretically be crossbred. And so he did this, and he called it, of course, the tobacco, which he took the name from Homer. You know, it's amazing.

Speaker 1 14:43

You know, life in life imitates cartoon yeah, yeah, yeah I, although it doesn't I I was never a smoker, so, uh, it doesn't sound very pleasant.

Speaker 2 14:55

I don't think I'd try it no, no, I mean, especially when you already have we already have some foods that seem addictive, like chocolate and potato chips. I mean, who can stop eating potato chips once you start? Oh yeah. Maybe they put nicotine into them.

Speaker 1 15:12

Well, the salt craving, usually, unless if you're buying an unsalted chip, a big unsalted chip.

Speaker 2 15:21

Yeah, and what's the point?

Speaker 1 15:22

Yeah right, they don't taste so good Salt, sugar and fat. That's the point. Yeah right, they don't taste so.

Surprising Food Etymology Discoveries

Speaker 2 15:25

Salt, sugar and fat. That's the three things that humans crave. Yeah, so that's basically what Cupboard Love does. It's got a thousand of entries like that that explain where these various words come from. I'll give you one other example, and this is sort of more of an academic one, so the word loaf as of an academic one.

Speaker 2 15:44

So the word loaf as in a loaf of bread that's one of the oldest words in English Goes back to about the fourth century at least. I mean, we can't really go back further than that and back then it was pronounced to get my throat going here it was pronounced hlaf, hlaf, like H-L-A-F. Hlaf. And there was another word that it came to be kind of latched onto, which was wyard, which is where we get the word ward and guard. So a hlaf wyard was a loaf guard, which was their word for the king, the local king, who looked after you because he looked after your bread. If you didn't have bread, you were going to die after you, because he looked after your bread. If you didn't have bread, you were going to die. So the chlafward, the bread guardian, was a really important person back then. So that's chlaf and how it's related to loaf.

Speaker 1 16:34

Yeah, I don't think it's much of a laugh. For the sake of the transcript, we're laughing. That's another joke. People Lighten up right. So there aren't really any recipes per se also in the book.

Speaker 2 17:53

There aren't, Although I did another book. I've written and had published four different nonfiction books and one novel. One of the other nonfiction books is called Cooking with Shakespeare and it's about food culture in 16th century England.

Speaker 1 18:08

To go back to my Shakespeare joke we're tying everything together.

Speaker 2 18:13

It's beautiful, it's all unity and that does talk about food culture, like it talks about what people ate, what manners were, and some of it's pretty horrifying what they didn't eat, because things that we eat, some of the things we eat, they didn't eat. Like they didn't eat lobster unless they were very poor because they thought lobster was basically like a bug of the sea.

Speaker 1 18:33

Yeah, oh, that is weird because that also reminds me of ribs. Ribs today are expensive and more deemed as an upscale thing, like the lobster story, when ribs in the past were the schlub of meat thrown together for the farm hands, the ranch hands, yeah, like the best cuts of meat back then were some of it were like what we now consider awful, like the liver, the kidneys, the heart, stuff like that.

Speaker 2 19:08

You know, if you were a noble and you went hunting and got a deer, got some venison, you would make sure that you ate the heart because there was still this feeling that it would make you courageous. You know, because of its association with the heart and courage and so on, so things that they ate, that we no longer eat a lot of birds like. I mean, how many birds do we eat nowadays? Chicken, turkey, duck, geese, you know not a lot of other things Back then. Basically any bird you can think of they ate. So even sparrows, even tiny little birds like sparrows.

Speaker 2 19:40

And you might say Wouldn't be much to that. Yeah, no, no, tiny little drumsticks, but they had interesting ways of catching them, because they're obviously too small to shoot or get hit with a sword?

Speaker 1 19:51

Yeah, you shoot one and you'll be blowing it to bits, yeah yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 19:56

But what they did is they went to you know pine trees and they took you know the resin which is the sticky resin on them. They'd get that, or tar Tar would work as well and they would put it on the branches of a tree. These poor little birds would land on the branches and get stuck, and then people would come along and just pluck them off the tree like apples. So that's how they would catch little birds like sparrows. They ate crows. Yeah, they ate.

Speaker 1 20:20

Well, there's the old saying eating crow. Eating crow exactly yeah that has an origin and reality, why it's become what it's known today.

Speaker 2 20:32

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's because crow over time, probably by about the 19th century or so, came to be seen as something that only the poor people ate. So when you ate crow it was like you were doing something humiliating. And you know the expression humble pie to eat humble pie. Same kind of thing there. Because humble or humble, you know because of how they say they drop the H's in the UK. In England, umbels used to be the word for intestines, so umbel pie was intestine pie and eventually, when that came to be seen as a pretty awful thing, as I think most people do- yeah, yuck, I wouldn't eat it.

Speaker 2 21:15

No, no. It became seen as a really humiliating thing to eat. So umbel pie, umbel pie.

Speaker 2 21:25

Yeah, I don't care how poor I may be, I don't think I want to eat intestine, yeah, although I think a lot of places still use intestine, or sparrow even. But intestines, of course, were the original sausage casing and still are, you know, used in that way. And that's actually where we get the word pudding from, you know, have you ever heard the expression? Oh, he socked me right in the pudding. You know, right in the pudding, right, right in the intestines, because the English word pudding came from the French word boudin, which means intestines, because puddings were originally like puddings, as in meat puddings or haggis, that was considered a pudding. They were made in intestines. So, yeah, I forget where I came from with that.

Speaker 1 22:16

Yeah, well, it is amazing and fascinating. Fascinating that, and obviously, unless they hear us talking.

Speaker 2 22:29

They're not likely to find this anywhere else.

Speaker 1 22:30

Yeah right, this isn't the kind of thing people generally would go on to the internet to find, but it is amazing in the old, whole overall sense of language and how it developed and came to be.

Speaker 2 22:46

And yeah, the origins of things yeah, yeah, and there's some, there's some. I'll give you some examples of some things that are kind of specifically us like. As I mentioned, I I grew up in saskatchewan, north of north dakota, north Dakota, and there what most people call jelly donuts we call Bismarcks.

Speaker 1 23:07

Interesting yeah, why is that?

Speaker 2 23:09

Well, I think because of Bismarck, North Dakota, Earlier on, of course. I was thinking Germany, yeah yeah, you know, I think you're right what was Bismarck? He was the, he was the.

Speaker 1 23:22

Otto von.

Speaker 2 23:23

Bismarck yeah.

Speaker 1 23:25

In the.

Speaker 2 23:25

First World War. That's the famous shit, yeah.

Speaker 1 23:28

Hence named after yeah.

Speaker 2 23:31

Some people call the same things jam busters. I mean that pastry for some reason has lots of different names across North America, so does. What do you call a long sandwich that has meat in it and stuff like that? Yeah. What do you call a long sandwich that has meat in it and stuff like that? Yeah. What do you call that kind of sandwich on a long bun?

Speaker 1 23:48

Right, well, yeah, either a hoagie or a like at Subway. You would call it a what I'm drawing a blank right now, but yeah, yeah, yeah. I got to ask you do you put mayo or vinegar on your French fries?

Speaker 2 24:08

I like mayo and vinegar, definitely, definitely.

Speaker 1 24:11

And most listening in the US is going. Oh my God.

Food Culture Through History

Speaker 2 24:17

Yeah, well, and poutine, of course, is one of Canada's contributions to food words. But yeah, you mentioned hoagie, which is interesting. I thought maybe you would call it that because of being in Detroit. Elsewhere, like further south than you, some people call it a poor boy or a whole boy. What else is it called? It's got about like eight different names across the world.

Speaker 1 24:39

What is it that Johnny's Sub Shop Sub's Submarine Sandwiches? That's what I was trying to think of. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 24:49

Yeah, it's got a lot of different names for some reason. I mean, there's a lot of regional foods like that, just trying to think of another. Oh, here's one Down in the States. I believe you can confirm this for me there's a berry and I think it's called the service berry. Have you heard of that?

Speaker 1 25:05

I'm not familiar.

Speaker 2 25:06

Okay, okay. Well, where I grew up it's called the Saskatoon berry. It's a really good little berry. It makes a beautiful pie, but yeah, it's got different names in different places. Nanaimo bars have you ever had that? No, it's a dessert. It's chocolate and what else? Grain crackers and stuff like that. It's a Canadian invention.

Speaker 1 25:31

So it almost sounds almost like a bit like a s'more Kind. Of.

Speaker 2 25:38

What else does it have in it? Chocolate?

Speaker 1 25:40

and graham would be s'mores and marshmallows yeah, so it's kind of similar.

Speaker 2 25:46

It's more dense though and it's named after there's a city in British Columbia called Nanaimo, where I guess it was invented, as far as anybody knows, yeah.

Speaker 1 25:56

And of course, we're arguing over different pizza types these days.

Speaker 2 26:00

Oh yeah.

Speaker 1 26:00

Yeah, they're Detroit-style New York oh, yeah, yeah, they're Detroit style, New York style, Chicago style. Detroit style really is actually Greek pizza. People don't understand. Like we have Greek town in Detroit, you go to Nicky's that's kind of where the original Detroit pizza came from and it's really Greek, which is much more doughy, a lot more sauce, very little cheese. So whenever I go to like Nicky's to order cheese Detroit style Greek pizza there, I think extra cheese please.

Speaker 2 26:36

Yeah, yeah, yeah. In in Saskatchewan, where I grew up the, the way they make pizza is they put the meat on top, so it's not cheese on top.

Speaker 1 26:45

Detroit style, is that right? Detroit style. Greek style thick crust square. Yeah, that sauce is kind of almost a sauce sandwich Dough, sauce cheese, more sauce.

Speaker 2 27:03

Yeah, it gets messy.

Speaker 1 27:04

Yeah in the Greek pizza, they bury the pepper, they bury the meat under the yeah, whereas, like you're saying, though, usually the meats are on top of the cheese.

Speaker 2 27:16

Yeah, yeah, and I love Chicago pizza and I love Chicago as a city. I think it's an amazing city and if you don't get shot, Well yeah. Yeah, we stayed out of certain areas, that's for sure. Yeah, I mean still.

Speaker 1 27:32

True, detroit's a lot better, of course, than 60 years ago, but still there's parts of Detroit that look like Hiroshima after the A-bomb went off, still blown out.

Speaker 2 27:46

You want to stick downtown like Chicago, you want to stick downtown and of course there used to be so much not commerce exactly, but so much exchange between this part of Ontario and Detroit and Chicago back in the days of Prohibition, you know, because they were running stuff back and forth.

Speaker 1 28:05

I'm in Wyandotte. I used to work at a drugstore that had a tunnel in the basement over to Windsor, yeah, you know, it was cordoned off and sealed off and shut in, but that tunnel was still down there.

Speaker 2 28:23

Yeah, well, speaking of alcohol, I'll give you an example of an alcohol word like whiskey. Not surprisingly, it comes from a Gaelic word, like an Irish word that means water of life, you know. And then no, sorry, I'm incorrect, not water of life, fire, water, water of fire is what it comes from.

Speaker 1 28:46

Now that makes sense. Yes, and I well. Two things Like tunnels under the river between Detroit and Windsor and, of course, because the river is most narrow there, there was a lot of running above the water and under the water. But years ago. I mean, if I were to hop into a time machine and go back to the 1700s? You don't want to be drinking the water. That's why they drank alcohol. It was almost like 3-2 beer. It wasn't necessarily heavy, but the alcohol process was a purification process.

Speaker 2 29:27

Yeah, you're exactly right. I used to teach courses in Shakespeare and one of the things I told my students was that when Shakespeare was writing his plays he was kind of like half drunk all the time Because, yeah, like 2% beer, like you say, drinking the water out of a well in London. Bad idea, you know because in Shakespeare's time it was a pretty big city already 200,000 people, and you know they just threw stuff into the gutter and let it run away, you know.

Speaker 1 29:55

Let it run into the water supply. That, yeah, got into the water table, which got into your well and, yeah, you didn't want to be drinking that without doing something to it.

Speaker 2 30:07

That long before the concept of chlorination and other chemical things to help purify it and charcoal kind of filters to filter things yeah, yeah, yeah, they called it small beer, in other words, what we might call weak beer, or in canada we might call it american beer.

Speaker 1 30:28

Yeah, well I I used to work for Diversity Wyandotte, which was a subsidiary of Molson. I used to love the Molson ice beer. Yeah, I used to go over to California's Musical Roadhouse in Windsor all the time and, yeah, molson ice was my beer.

Speaker 2 30:48

Yeah, it was good. I don't know, I haven't had that in a long time. It was a very dry beer, if I recall correctly. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 30:56

It was like five and a half percent volume alcohol yeah, so you didn't need a case of beer to you know. The goal wasn't necessarily to be drunk, but buzzed was usually part of the equation, yeah, that's right, that's right.

Speaker 2 31:15

Other, like gin, you know, gin, as you probably know, comes from the juniper berry and juniper comes from Geneva, the city of Geneva in Switzerland. So gin is probably was invented there, kind of the way that you know, hamburger, that kind of meat probably was. Maybe it wasn't invented because I mean, how hard is it to to grind up, you know. But it wasn't invented because I mean, how hard is it to grind up meat? But it certainly became associated with hamburger.

Speaker 1 31:40

Yeah right, it just became more popular there.

Speaker 2 31:45

Yeah like frankfurters, becoming associated with Frankfurt. The strange thing that happened, though, was that people almost well, people forgot I think Most people forgot that hamburgers were called that because they came from Hamburg, and they started to think that ham, yeah, they don't come from a pig. Yeah, exactly Exactly. That's why the beef industry in North America in the 1970s, I think a lot of them stopped calling them hamburgers and started calling them beef burgers, because they wanted to emphasize to people this is beef.

Regional Food Naming Differences

Speaker 1 32:17

Right, right, Whereas today, hey, that sounds like some people might want a hamburger actually made like a turkey burger or whatever. Right? Which obviously brings me back to the Canadian thing. Canadian bacon versus US bacon.

Speaker 2 32:40

Right, right, yeah, here we call Canadian bacon back bacon.

Speaker 1 32:45

Ah, but Canadian bacon is ham actually.

Speaker 2 32:50

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 33:17

Yeah, yeah, yeah, and it's often. Often it has a coating of what kind of meal is some sort of not oatmeal, I forget what it is, but it sort of has this coating of a meal like a grain meal and salt on it. People tuned in and probably thought maybe, or you know, I don't want to say probably thought I I'm not meaning to insult this topic, obviously but might have thought to themselves do I really want to hear this? But but see, it's a lot more interesting than you thought when you tuned in, isn't it? I've talked rhetorical question to my audience, of course.

Speaker 2 33:40

Yeah, well, I think that almost anything either is interesting or can be made interesting. You know if you're talking to the right person. There's interesting things about everything, I think.

Speaker 1 33:52

Yeah, maybe not tax law, but oh, and you certainly know taxes over there.

Speaker 2 34:00

GST.

Speaker 1 34:01

PST. I mean you got more taxes than we got. We got way too many.

Speaker 2 34:07

Yeah, one of my daughters bought a used car just a couple of days ago. Oh God, there's tax. I was shocked, there's tax on it.

Speaker 1 34:15

The tax was more than the car right.

Speaker 2 34:17

Well, not quite, but most things don't have taxes on them if they are a used good, you know. But cars do in Ontario for some reason, I don't know why.

Speaker 1 34:27

Oh they do here too, yeah, oh they do. Yeah, a sales tax will apply, and of course, course, the other hidden tax, registration fees, and then, of course, the insurance is a form of a tax yeah, that's kind of like you when you try to book a place on airbnb oh 29 a night, and then there's all these hidden taxes and fee, fee, fee, yeah yeah, $200 a night, yeah, yeah, that's that got me off.

Speaker 2 34:56

I haven't used Airbnb in a while because that started to annoy me.

Speaker 1 35:02

Yeah, it's like too, with some of the music. Artists have been complaining and we've changed a bit of the scalping laws and whatnot and in a way hidden fees are now a form of scalping. No, you've got to the ticket costs. You don't get to hide an additional 50% in local tax or stadium tax and then you fee and then you security add on and you've got to just close up. And it's been the same complaint about airlines forever right, oh this fee, that fee, the other fee.

Speaker 1 35:47

Oh, $10 to Vegas, uh-uh, $110 when you're done.

Speaker 2 35:54

Yeah, yeah, and even more if you want to take baggage and want to wear clothes while you're on the plane.

Speaker 1 36:01

Exactly, if you don't want to be stacked in like lumber.

Speaker 2 36:04

Yeah, yeah, I think this must have been a joke, but I remember a few years ago.

Speaker 1 36:08

Oh, you want to sit in a seat?

Speaker 2 36:11

Yeah, I was going to say yeah, I think there was an airplane that was saying that it was going to do that, but maybe it was a parody or something like that. Can I give you a couple more examples of food words?

Speaker 1 36:21

Sure, go right ahead, we'll start to wrap it up.

Speaker 2 36:24

So some words like burrito might not be surprising that it means a little burro, in other words a little donkey slash ass kind of creature. Chimichanga, another Spanish food or Mexican food, literally means monkey chimney, because I forget why it's named the monkey part, but the chimney part is related to the word chimney. Oh, in Italian, vermicelli means little worms, ravioli means little turnips, spaghetti, of course, means little strings. I mean, there's so many hidden meanings and hidden origins behind almost every word.

Speaker 1 37:00

Yeah, you would want, let's have a plate of hidden worms. Yeah, no, yeah no, thank you, I'll pass. I'll go eat the intestines instead, right.

Speaker 2 37:13

And another one is spaghetti puttanesca, which puttanesca in Italian means prostitute. It's spaghetti in the style of prostitutes, because I guess there was a certain kind of style that arose. I don't know why, but yeah.

Speaker 1 37:30

It's crazy Interesting. Okay, obviously, cupboard Love, a dictionary of culinary curiosities. I take it it's available at Amazon 80% of all books are sold there. Where else could you find it? Potentially.

Speaker 2 37:46

Well, barnes, noble, basically any place online, or if you want to support your local bookseller. If they don't have it, they will order it, of course, and you probably should be able to get it within a couple of days.

Speaker 1 37:57

It has an ISBN number so that it universally could be ordered.

Speaker 2 38:03

Yeah, and it comes in e-book version. If you want to get it for your Kindle or Kobo or whatever, Do you have a professional or personal or book-related oh? Yeah, it's, it's just my name, mark morton m-a-r-k-m-o-r-t-o-n dot c-a. Not dot com, but dot c-a.

Speaker 1 38:26

Yeah, you guys are weird with the internet up there too.

Speaker 2 38:29

Yeah yeah, no, I mean it makes.

Speaker 1 38:34

Actually, we're the weird ones. Right, there's CEADE for. Denmark and most of the other nations have a country designation on the end.

Speaker 2 38:46

That's true.

Speaker 1 38:46

Yeah, that is true, but the US market is so much more large that we break it down into additional other things like dot us, dot gov and or stuff like that.

Speaker 1 39:00

Yeah right, like my book terror strikes dot info, because that book wasn't available yet. That's supposed to come available at some point. I was open for dot book. That would make sense. There should be a dot book right. There's dot tv. It should be a dot radio for radio stations. So I mean it's getting better, they're getting there. They have to because there's a bazillion websites. You're going to run out of domain extensions yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 39:35

no, no, I think that's quite right, and it makes me think too. You know, there's another, mark Morton, who is far, far, far better known than I am. He's the lead guitarist of a death metal group called Lamb of God, and it's funny because sometimes people will email me and they're actually trying to get a hold of him. And so I got in touch with him years ago and I said, hey, somebody sent me this, but it's obviously for you. And he said, yeah, sometimes I get emails that are intended for you.

Speaker 1 40:04

Interesting. Yeah, because I joke right, I am Joseph M Leonard. It looks French. It's not French. It's not Lennard, it's Leonard without an O. But there is a Joseph Lennard who was also an author from South Carolina and I get people asking questions about. He's also a Christian author, coincidentally, too. And I get a book, an email about what did you mean about this in your book? Well, wrong guy. I tried reaching out to him. Unfortunately, he refuses to get back to me, though I don't understand why. Like you, I would like to converse with him, because I don't doubt he gets confused for me at times, since I get confused for him.

Speaker 2 40:57

Yep, yep, yep, yeah, maybe I mean there must be a number, who knows, maybe hundreds of Joseph Leonards in the US? You could have a conference, all of you guys.

Speaker 1 41:06

Yep, yep, and there's plenty indeed with the O in there.

Speaker 2 41:11

Of course, yeah. Where does your surname come from, then, if it's not French?

Speaker 1 41:17

Well, it actually was leonard owatzkiewicz or whatever it's actually polish origin part polish part german part italian yeah, yeah, but yeah leonard, I haven't dug back in the genealogy far enough to find out what it was before it got chopped to that.

Speaker 2 41:39

Yeah, that happened to a lot of names, Like my family's surname used to be Throckmorton and they were in Pennsylvania, but then about 180 years ago, when they came up to Canada, they dropped the first syllable from Throckmorton to just Morton Interesting interesting, okay, so thank you so much for coming on.

Speaker 1 41:58

I knew this would be a great, interesting conversation. That's definitely why I said to Mickey oh absolutely, I'd love to have you on Again. I get hired sometimes to talking about politics. I want some interesting, different stuff, right.

Speaker 2 42:16

Yeah, spice it up so to speak yeah, cooking humor, it's your bread and butter.

Speaker 1 42:29

Oh, that's a perfect place to end it.

Speaker 2 42:33

Thank you. Thank you so, joseph.

Speaker 1 42:35

Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 42:36

Take care God bless, take care, bye-bye.

Closing Thoughts and Book Information

Speaker 1 42:40

Thank you for having tuned in for Chris D'Artagnan's Politics Show. If you haven't already, please check out my primary internationally available book, terror Strikes, coming soon to a city near you, available anywhere books are sold. If you have locally run bookstores still near you, they can order it for you. And let me remind, over time the fancy high production items will come. But for now, for starters, it's just you, as a very appreciated listener by me. All substance, no fluff, just straight to key discussion points. A show that looks at a variety of topics, mostly politics, through a Christian, us constitutionalist lens. So again, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Take care, god bless you from the bottom of my heart, take care.

Speaker 2 43:47

God bless. Like and subscribe to Krista Tuchel's.

Speaker 1 43:51

Politics Podcast and share episodes. We need your help. God shares his message every day and night Leads to freedom in making his voice heard. Shed his message over all the earth. God loves you, knows you and all you will show. Stand strong, and God bless you.