Heh, just remembered a good one that I think I’ve told here before.
I was on a biz trip in Germany with a colleague and he had backpain and insisted on Tylenol. Why a guy prone to backpain didn’t bring his own is beyond me but we went to a German drugstore. They didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak German. The very helpful ladies behind the counter had no idea what we meant but kept trying. I knew the active ingredient in Tylenol is acetaminophen* but this didn’t come up in their database… Finally one clerk just googled it and found that acetaminophen is more commonly known as paracetamol in most of the world. Dude got his pills and we were on our way.
I distinctly remember trying to write it on a slip of paper, stumbling on the spelling and probably had half the letters wrong.
Sniff in a very superior manner and explain that, unlike SOME people, you care about the planet and refuse to buy bottles that will go in the landfill and instead prefer your paper wrapped bar of soap. This should go over a treat.
Reminds me of the time I had blisters on my feet while visiting Paris. I remembered my mom using lamb’s wool for blisters, so I went into a drug store to buy lamb’s wool. With my limited knowledge of French, the best I could come up with was “hair of little sheep”. The pharmacist thought I wanted yarn for knitting. I finally took off one of my shoes and showed her my blisters. I got what I needed.
When I was growing up mom often served cottage cheese with apple sauce on top.
Now, when I see pre-made cottage cheese “doubles” I see pineapple, blueberry, mango, all sorts of flavors…except apple. Why is that? In fact, I’ve mentioned using apple and gotten all sorts of puzzled reactions, as if no other family ever put apple sauce on top of cottage cheese (pretty sure we aren’t the only ones). I image apple butter world also work well.
I recently was looking for pizza sauce recipes. One of the recipes had “tomato sauce” as an ingredient. This was useless to me because I had no idea (still don’t) what “tomato sauce” means to the recipe writer.
Similarly I had a recipe that called for a “spice bag”. Which presumably is some standard combination of spices where the writer lives but in Ireland means something completely different.
Still not sure what it is though, or rather what would be the equivalent on our supermarket shelves. We don’t have a product marketed as “tomato sauce”, and the term tomato sauce is used to refer to ketchup.
We do have:
canned tomatoes (whole or chopped, with or without herbs)
tomato purée
passata
pasta sauces of various kinds
It’s probably closest to pasta sauce. Generally, it is neutrally flavored (not a lot of added garlic, for example), so you can flavor your sauce to taste.
Hunt’s says:
Made from all-natural, vine-ripened tomatoes simmered with salt, spices, and natural flavors for seasoning, Hunt’s Tomato Sauce contains no added sugar, corn syrup, or other sweeteners.
Tomato sauce is a staple in the US. It’s cooked tomatoes that have been pureed and strained, (no seeds) that will be used as an ingredient in making a more complex sauce or seasoning. The ingredients in the can in front of me say:
Roma tomato puree
Sea salt
Citric acid
Onion powder
Garlic powder
Spices
There’s very little onion or garlic, and even less “spices”. It mostly tastes like salted tomato. The texture is thin and liquid. Thicker than orange juice, but much thinner than ketchup.
I don’t know what passata is, nor does my phone’s spell-checker.
