This is why people in the American South should not be allowed to talk about or name food.
The yam/sweet potato debacle is just another example.
It’s not a fast rule I’d cleave to.
From everywhere, but the most authoritative:
National Geographic:
The first line in Wikipedia:
And then it says:
The reference given for the first line is to (1999) Oxford Companion to Food, Oxford University Press
From: Larousse gastronomique via Google books
http://books.google.com/books?id=qRAz0D1VcZEC&pg=PA327&dq=beignet+choux&hl=en&sa=X&ei=q-StU7a8OoXroATA6YHwAg&ved=0CFIQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=beignet%20choux&f=false"]The Chefs Compendium of Professional Recipes
lists beignets under the “choux paste” items:
http://books.google.com/books?id=HWe9AAAAQBAJ&pg=PT133&dq=beignet+choux&hl=en&sa=X&ei=q-StU7a8OoXroATA6YHwAg&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=beignet%20choux&f=false"]The French Cook states:
From http://fae-magazine.com/2013/01/04/pate-a-choux-cream-puff-cake/
From http://stores.renstore.com/food-and-drink/history-of-beignets"]History of Beignets
Since I dislike everything I have tasted with either name, I am not familiar with the details. Care to give me a sentence or two?
By the way pets de nonne means “nuns farts”. Gotta love the French.
Why is everyone quibbling about what deserves the awkward and unpronounceable appellation of beignet, when there’s an awesome name like “nun farts” available?
ETA: Ninja’d, dammit.
Indeed, an excellent point.
I’ll go with Wikipedia’s entry on this:
And from the Wikipedia article on Sweet Potato, this comment:
So which one is the more common? Do they taste radically different?
What a waste of time. Beignets in the US are the type served in New Orleans. Claiming anything else is wrong. You may find fried choux dough sold as beignets at the occasional french restaurant, but it would be rare. If you want choux dough, ask for French beignets. When people ask you what the hell you’re talking about, you can wow them with the amount of time you’ve spent reading about it on the internet.
I’ve never had any problem getting the food I want using the words I want to use. If you’re incapable of thinking of a solution to this problem, that speaks to a certain level of linguistic incompetence on your part, not a problem with how humans have used language since the paleolithic era. It’s really ridiculous for you to blame the rest of the world for your own inadequacy.
In other words, there are two kinds, and both are legit, and you just want to be anal and insist that you, and you alone, are correct. Gotcha.
(Seriously though, why make such a fuss over pastry, Stoid? And thank you so much for sharing your bathroom habits. :rolleyes:)
Pretty much. I’d think someone was obnoxious if they ordered a beignet, expecting a Cafe du Monde one and getting a choux one, and threw a hissy fit over that, because language is language. But at least they’d be using language in a reasonable way, expecting a word’s meaning to be its common meaning, not expecting some sort of lesser-used definition to prevail.
For fuck’s sake. It’s not like you order a beignet and they shoot you with a rifle. The words don’t mean black and white. They mean slightly different versions of deep-fried sweetened flour. You’re getting your unhealthy sugary greasy rush either way.
Even if we ignore the entire rest of the language and limit ourselves to baked goods, this sort of ambiguity is nearly universal. A doughnut can be quick or raised. A biscuit can be quick, raised, beaten, or a British cookie. A cake can be quick, sponge, angel, or even (as some brioche concoctions do) raised, and that’s setting aside the sweet/savory meanings of “cake.” Which brings us to pie and the multitudinous variations on that word.
Now, muffin’s an interesting one. If you order a muffin and someone brings you a lump of cow shit, you’ve a right to be angry. But the exception here proves the rule. Overwhelmingly, despite the different meanings, the word applies to roughly the same thing, and from context you can figure out what the significant differences are (if I am at a British themed tea house and I see tea and biscuits on the menu, I’m not going to ask for country ham on my biscuits). And if you can’t figure out the difference and it’s important, a simple question will clarify, even if you’re so impossibly delicate that one type of pastry Simply Will Not Do.
What’s pitiful and absurd and obnoxious is to say that, because of this (again, NEARLY UNIVERSAL) ambiguity in the word, a word with two definitions, everyone must use the older, rarer definition of the word, must change their speaking habits to conform to outdated habits, because to do otherwise corrupts the language and forces you to–oh, the horror!–ask a clarifying question every now and then in order to satisfy your oh-so-precious dietary quirks.
Didn’t I just provide a bunch of cites to food experts? How do you take from that that it is me alone?
Danilo Alfaro, a chef who writes about food for about.com, has this to say:
And who determines legitimacy? I vote for the experts. The Café pastry and pets de nonne are both fried pastry, but if they are both “beignets”, then “beignets” has lost its legitimacy as a word to indicate something specific. I like it when words mean specific things, I like precision.
This:
is “such a fuss”? And the fuss is over the language used to describe the pastry, not the pastry. I bitch about the language being watered down all the time. As I said…I like precision and specificity in language - it reduces clutter, improves clarity and eliminates confusion. In this instance, if beignets means either pastry, then the clutter of qualifying descriptions is required to clarify the pastry one intends and avoid the confusion of receiving a puffy block when one anticipates receiving a nun’s fart.
I stared at this for the longest time trying to figure out what in hell you could possibly mean, since I am about the last person you will ever find casually sharing bathroom habits… and it finally dawned on me! “Poot” - it refers to my computer. As I described earlier in the thread, that the quoting and citing is obnoxious on the iPad, so I wasn’t going to do it unless someone wanted it, because it would mean replying from my computer. Then I shorthanded it in the second reference after you challenged me for the cites.
Man I’m glad I figured that out… it was making me nuts…
Your “expert” clearly doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about if he calls a beignet made from choux “quintessentially New Orleans”. Beignets in this country are based on the NOLA variety, which are made with yeast.
Not slightly different. As different as two foods from the same category can be. They are slightly different the way a hamburger and prime rib are slightly different.
Yes, they are slightly different. They are both light, puffy fried pastry. Your analogy, like this thread, fails.
You are kinda mixing arguments; I leave it to NOLA foodies to decide if the choux or yeast varieties are “quintessential” New Orleans or not, but that is a separate matter from “Beignets in this country”.
As far as the “quintessentially New Orleans”, Disney came down on the side of choux beignets when they built New Orleans square and started serving fritters, which was my introduction when I was a kid.
And The Google reveals a variety of views and examples of confusion like this (I ran into a depressing number of sites evincing this kind of confusion):
:smack:
Then this pagesays:
And from here:
The above are outstanding examples of ignorance, which is what we are here to fight. The authors are scrambling up New Orleans, Café du Monde, choux pastry, yeast pastry, leavening agents, everything. It’s mush.
The writer for chefs catalog is clear, at least:
And this food blogger also:
I can only conclude from this that you have not had both.
I’m not mixing arguments. Beignets in this country are of the yeast variety, because New Orleans made them famous. Some French cooks will occasionally pop up with the French version, but they are not typical. A search for recipes overwhelmingly turns up the kind with yeast, and it isn’t even close.
I have not only had both, but I have made both, often in professional kitchens. I never said they were indistinguishable, but they are more similar in concept than your silly analogy would suggest.