I’m trying to explain to a French-speaker how to make scones. The step we’re having trouble with is “rubbing in” the butter and flour. How would you translate that into French?
I’m not sure of the idiomatic French translation but the essence of making good scones lies in combining (“rubbing in” or “rubbing through”) the butter and flour by hand. So perhaps something like:
Utilisez les mains pour combiner le beurre et la farine.
Why can’t you just say frotter? Something like Frottez la farine et le beurre en utilisant les mains, jusqu’à ils se mélangent bien. (?)
I’m more familiar, in English, with using the phrase “cut in the butter”, and the butter is cut in with one of these. Can you somehow verb-ize that kitchen utensile?
‘Put the flour into a bowl, cut the butter into little dice, and incorporate it into the flour with your fingers until you get a fine breadcrumb-like texture.’
Oo la la, DarrenS, such neatly crafted prose. Alain Robbe-Grillet could not have written it better. The very sensuousness of this operation is palpable in the fine texture of the sentence. The use of chapelure is a neat touch. The dictionary says chapelure means ‘bread crumbs’; when the recipe says to make the butter-flour mixture like fine bread crumbs, we intuit the physicality of the operation.
As to the OP question, I feel that incorporer may be the mot juste we were looking for. But as a non-native French speaker, I rely on clairobscur’s judgment.
I wonder why recipes in French and Italian give the instructions with verbs in the infinitive instead of the imperative as we do in English? Is it because the Romance imperative is felt to be too much of a command? Not “Now you get busy and do this!” but the impersonal “If anyone wanted to make this recipe, here’s the procedure.”
Just to be clear - I can’t claim credit for either of the explanations I posted: they both came from the pages to which I provided links, whose text was written by native speakers, in the respective posts.