A recent thread about the British meaning of the word “pudding” has got me thinking. If I ordered “chocolate pudding”, I’d expect a dark, sticky, hefty, steamed sponge affair which could be repurposed as a cannonball should the need arise.
I once happened across a so-called British Fish & Chip Shop in New Zealand, where I was excited to discover they had mushy peas! I’d been craving them for months (and the strong smell of sulphur in Rotorua meant that the outskirts of town kind of smelt a bit like them, piquing my craving further).
They were peas. They were mushy. They were not mushy peas. They were garden peas, boiled in stock, and crushed. Mushy peas are marrowfat peas (like garden peas but left on the plant for a long time until they go leathery, then dried) which are soaked and boiled until mushy. The result is sort of vaguely reminiscent of a thick split pea soup, I suppose, for the uninitiated, and is a traditional and popular accompaniment to fish and chips.
Imagine you’d asked for fish and chips, and received a can of sardines and a bag of Lays. Or you asked for biscuits and gravy and a confused Brit gave you what amounts to graham crackers and brown gravy. Or, because of the fact that Americans call coriander leaves “cilantro” and don’t have quite the same national obsession with Indian food as Brits, someone followed a recipe to the letter but scattered the top of their curry with quite a lot of the wrong thing.
So, what misunderstandings have been made through failure to grasp what a recipe means?
There are lots of hot sandwiches out there with steak and cheese, but if you’re selling a “Philly Cheesesteak”, it typically constrains some of the parameters.
Granted, I should have know better when ordering one at a cafe in El Paso. It was tasty. But it was on a (nice, freshly baked) hamburger bun with swiss cheese.
Hamburgers come to mind immediately. For a long time, and as recently as the 80s/90s, the quintessential American ground beef burger was a mystery to Europeans, who couldn’t seem to get the idea that the only ingredient was ground beef and not ground ham. I’ve had them with ground pork, with ham, with mystery ingredients, etc. They weren’t all bad, but they weren’t hamburgers.
I ordered a pepperoni pizza at a Pizza Hut in Frankfurt, Germany in the 80s. I found out that pepperoni there meant those very long banana peppers instead of meat.
Also in New Zealand, ‘mint sauce’ that turned out to be a thick, sweet mint syrupy stuff. Would have been OK on ice cream, but just not right (to me at least) with the roast it came with. Also in the chip shops there, when they had vinegar, it was some kind of vinegar I didn’t recognise, served in a little pot on the side, impossible to sprinkle on the chips. I just didn’t quite understand that one, is it supposed to be for dipping?
I must admit, after being there nearly a year, when I went into a chippy and the guy behind the counter heard my accent and pulled out a sprinkle bottle of malt vinegar I nearly hugged the fella (he was English as well, told me he’d talked the manager into getting it in just for the occasional pom).
I could go on and on about this subject. The ‘Philly Cheesesteak’ is now just a bastardized version of the original Philadelphia Cheesesteaks. You’re more likely to find a decent version of one in Jersey than in the city. My last visit there shows there’s a comeback of the original style, with decent meat and real cheese (or at least real American Cheese) but not that awful stuff whose name is also used for one of the bodily elimination functions. Anyway, best I drop this subject now.
Sure, “chicken cheesesteaks” aren’t a genuine original cheesesteak. But they’re a heck of a lot closer than anything you’ll get from outside of the Delaware Valley. I remember one place in Montana that independently discovered something darned close, but they were also the one place I’ve seen that just called it a “steak”, not a “Philly”. I asked about it once, and they said, “Oh, ours aren’t Philadelphia style; we don’t put on lettuce or tomato or mayonnaise”. Yes, exactly!
My experience (in the late 90s) was exactly opposite to TriPolar’s, though. The original did use Wiz, but nobody but Pat’s actually does them that way. Most places in Philadelphia that serve cheesesteaks use slices of cheese, most often American or Provolone.
I was going to mention mint sauce as a comedic possibility! The only thing I could think of was the minty custard which occasionally accompanied school dinner sponges, and obviously mint sauce to go with lamb is also a British staple, so there’d be little chance of confusion there.
In my neck of the woods, cheese is traditional with apple pie. Something sharp.
My wife asked for some cheese to go with her apple pie at a restaurant when we lived in North Wales, naively hoping the kitchen would have heard of the idea, and received a dessert bowl piled high with grated cheese. Nothing particularly identifiable - just generic, miscellaneous mousetrap cheese.
Now you’ve piqued my curiosity! Yep, American that I am, here is what I believe (please tell me where the British/international conception is different:
“Coriander” and “cilantro” are two names the same thing: a plant with seeds, roots, and leaves that are all used as seasonings. Coriander seeds are sweet, vaguely orange-tasting, and are usually crushed into powder for use in curries or, occasionally, breads. The roots and leaves have a notoriously pungent smell and taste which some people can’t abide (depending on your genes, it may seem soapy). Some SE Asian condiment or soup recipes call for the whole plant, roots included, to be ground up and included. It’s also not uncommon to see SE Asian and Indian recipes call for a garnish of coriander leaves.
I gather that the above description, which refers to one plant, is not consistent with the OP’s understanding. Please, fight my ignorance!
I’m guessing what happened is that a British recipe called for “coriander” to be sprinkled on top, meaning what Americans call “cilantro,” that is, the leaf of the plant. To an American, “coriander” means the seed, and usually the ground or powdered seed, and instead of scattering cilantro leaves over the dish, the American reading the recipe scattered ground coriander seed on it.
I used to work with a woman from India. She was Hindu and didn’t eat beef. A bunch of us were out to lunch one day at a sports bar, and she started to order a mushroom and Swiss burger, thinking that it was some kind of veggie burger. We had to explain to her that no, it’s not a mushroom patty, it’s a beef patty topped with mushrooms.
Same thing happened with my brother’s wife. She thought a cheeseburger was something like a cheese sandwich. We had to explain to her that it was a hamburger with cheese added.
I don’t know what happened with “X.” X was a guy who was my friend’s father’s choice for a husband. X had been living in Texas for a while and he came to town to visit my friend. We all went out to lunch. I was the only meat eater in the group and X tried to order a steak sandwich and was horrified when everyone had to explain to him that a steak sandwich had meat in it. I don’t know how one lives in Texas and doesn’t learn very quickly what “steak” means.
I don’t know why that would be. Enchiladas with a red sauce containing tomatoes are very common and traditional. Even enchiladas suizas can include tomatoes, as do enchiladas with mole sauce.
Perhaps Chingon’s main experience with enchiladas has been with green sauces. But there is a very wide variety of enchiladas using many kinds of sauces.
Yep, that’s about the size of it. It was an example of a potential problem to illustrate the idea though, not a real-life experience of mine.
“Coriander” means leaves or seeds to a Brit, depending on context. “Cilantro” isn’t a name that’s used. You could say “fresh coriander” to mean the leaves, or “ground coriander” to mean the powdered spice, but it’s not uncommon to just say “coriander” and allow context to dictate.
So yes, as Acsenray correctly says: an American who’s not conversant with the British usage and/or Indian food might read a recipe and scatter a curry with ground coriander seeds before serving, instead of coriander leaves - they’d need to have read “cilantro” to do that.