Dinner Thursday and lunch on Friday (during the tour that Vassi gave me) was a warmup for the Big Traditional Bulgarian Feed on Friday night; pictures of that will follow.
Can you read Cyrillic? If so, you’ll recognize this ubquitous food item:
Dinner Thurday, after I arrived: a white beer and gnocci with spinach, goat cheese, cream, and pine nuts. Delicious. In the background is Lubo’s dinner, a fantastic prosciutto pizza (I had a slice):
Lunch at a local cafe yesterday started with a drink much like Indian lassi: Bulgarian yogurt mixed with water. It’s served with salt and pepper (they don’t make an equivalent of sweet lassi here:
More yogurt (I can’t get enough): the first course of the set menu was Bulgarian cucumber and yogurt soup with mint (cold, of course). It was also delicious and filling.
Finally, the main course: lamb and cumin meatballs on a bed of potatoes, served with diced green and red peppers, carrot curls, and lettuce sprinkled with pomegranate seeds. After all this, I didn’t know how I could do justice to the dinner in store, but somehow I managed to.
Stay tuned for The Big Feed! ~
Yummmmm! Especially the lamb.
“If so, you’ll recognize this ubquitous food item”
I’ve never seen a big mac that actually looks like that!
Mmmmmm!
The Cyrillic “B” drives me crazy because of all the variations:
Б (B) б (b), В (V) в (v)
What variations? One’s uppercase, one’s lowercase, and they stand for two different sounds 😉
I’m surprised that “I’m lovin’ it” wasn’t translated, though …
Some transliterate to “V” and some to “B”. That’s what is confusing to me.
it’s interesting: during the first centuries CE in greek the pronunciation of Β,β slowly drifted from “B” to “V”. You can observe the same drift in modern Spanish: I have a friend called Vericad, who receives half of its letters addressed to “Bericad”, and I noticed some pannels advertising for “Bino de la casa” instead of “Vino de la casa” in front of spanish restaurants. The people translating the bible in slavic languages (Cyrill and Method) needed a “B” which didn’t exist anymore in Greek, so they invented a new letter to transcript this sound, and it was “Б,б”.
Are you referring to Grimm’s Law where the Latin “p” corresponds to the Germanic “f” and so in Indi-European languages you get the example of father: pater (Latin), piter (Sanskrit), Vater (German), Father (English)?
Don’t know – I’m not an expert in this field, but if I remember correctly, Grimm’s law is restricted to the differenciation of proto german compared to the other indoeuropean languages (as shown in your examples). The modification of greek pronunciation is more recent, but I guess that such drifts are recurrent and can be found in the history of every language. Another (ecclesiastic, sorry prof. Ceiling Cat) example is the “Amin” of the orthodox church versus the “Amen” of catholic church. The greek “H,η” was a “ε” when transmitted to latin, but shifted to a “i” (like in “free”) some centuries later, and so was (and still is) used as “i” in the cyrillic alphabet.
Transliteration is a hassle. Hence my v and b issues with Cyrillic and my anger at Latinized Greek (because it just complicates everything).
Grimm’s Law is a statement of correspondences, not a general law of language change.
Latin didn’t have a [v] so really our “v” is just a funny Latin “u” 🙂
A Latin teacher at school told us how the appearance of the ‘v’ sound (formerly all wubble-yous, as in Caesar’s weeny, weady and weaky) could be detected by inscriptions that used the letter B instead of V. Presumably at different times depending on city and social class…
Not really–the same letter (upper & lower case) corresponds with the same English sound. It just might be confusing because they’ve used “our” B symbol for the V sound.
If it were like this, you probably wouldn’t be confused:
Б (V) б (v), В (B) в (b)
Now someone tell me why the Spanish Y is “Greek I.” 😀
upsilon!
Ah, I see, thanks! And I had an interesting side trip to Wikipedia to see how the pronunciation has changed over the years and the various languages.
Greek doesn’t have a y. The “i” would be the closest sound in Greek. Transliteration between Greek and English is tricky too. I was taught “hybris” while others do “hubris”.
I really do need a cyrillic lesson. The alphabets usually don’t make real sense until you start reading in the language and for that you need language classes.
When I studied Russian a million years ago, the first thing we had to do was re-learn how to read and write. One of my classmates said he felt like he was back in elementary school because we spent so much time practicing handwriting (apparently Russians don’t take you seriously if you can’t write Cyrillic cursively).
Wait till you try Arabic.
Just like mom used to make! (From up the road in Slovakia…)
Making me hungry for dinner in the morning. I wish yogurt was better utilized in the US. Such a great food! Especially its’ liquid forms.
Good food. Good beer. Who wouldn’t be hungry for dinner.
I am a great fan of these gastronomic posts.
There is, however, something that has been troubling me as long as I can remember reading them:
The food Stateside seems to me to look much less appetising than the offerings The Boss eats on his international travels.
I think I’ve put my finger on it though. It’s the presentation. And by that I don’t only mean garnishing. It has plenty to do with the crockery too.
It seems plates (and sometimes plastic cutlery) in the US are simply unappealing. And if they do nothing to add to the meal then they might also take something away.
For me, at least…
If the plates or cutlery are plastic, it’s not a restaurant. It’s a picnic.
Jerry, you can’t fool me. Or the rest of us. You don’t want to be a professor. You want a food program on the PBS “Create” station.
BTW, now that I have your attention, do you know why some pasta sauces are sweet (even marinara sauces) and some not? Is it a regional thing out of Italy? I really cannot stand sweet pasta sauces and sometimes finding a good, savory sauce is a problem. I once posted this question to Lydia of Lydia’s Italy and she never got back to me.
Lidia not Lydia. My goof.
Here’s the thing: Tomatoes are acidic… And a little bit of sugar goes a long way to fix that.
Now, I’m a little puzzled as to what’s going on in your mouth… But I’m not exactly sure I find Italian food “sweet”… You may want to ad a little vinegar to subtly make it more sour…
Some restaurants just serve sweet-undertaste sauces. It happens more often than you think. As to the vinegar suggestion, I’m sure the chef will let me add a dram or two to the pot. 😉
That gnocchi looks fabulous. I will look for a recipe.
The red pomegranate seeds complementing the green lettuce look so refreshing, in fact, all the food does despite being fairly rich and heavy.
Positively pleasing prosciutto pizza!
It’s surprising how many english names are simply spelled the same in Cyrillic and how many Russian names are similar to the english. It still takes me several seconds to see that as “Big Mac” though – just not enough practice.
And not just names…I was remembering “dotor” & “professor” being cognates, but had to look online to find more:
http://russian.languagedaily.com/wordsandphrases/russian-cognates
Cool. I love it when you see a word in a different alphabet, sound it out & realize it’s a word you already know!
As a veteran of the Cold War…back then science majors were encouraged to take Russian, so I had a few years of it. Thoroughly enjoyed it but alas remember little. Once you realize how many Cyrillic letters are essentially Greek, you’re off and running… (“директор” –once you see the delta [OK, a bit modified] & rho in there, you’re off and running.)
Russian case endings are a bitch, though…
Yes, I notiiced that to and even understood the Russian “i” sound by seeing it as a backward eta.
Greek case endings are a hassle too and in Classical Greek there are lots.
I seem to remember that’s where my son came a cropper in Latin as well…
I’m always impressed by how your classics education so often enters into topics here.
Funny story. Many years ago I was interviewing for a position at an Internet provider (can’t remember what the position was but it was in the 90s when mass use of the Internet was new and everyone was on dial up because other means of access had yet to be popularized). The guy interviewing me seemed like a bit of a jerk and he asked me about my education then challenged me with a snarky retort, “how does that help you do anything? When do you use it?” I replied that I use my education every day as it honed my ability to understand non English words and to communicate. So, his response was to ask me “what’s a cron job”. I asked him to spell it. Of course, now I know what that is, having worked in IT all my career and having written many but something spelled “cron” I had no idea. He saw this as victory and proof that my education was worthless.
The funny twist is that in the computer world, “cron” is supposed to mean time, but in that spelling they are referencing the Titan, “Kron/Cron”. For time, it should’ve been spelled “chron”, from “khronos” for time, which is where we get “chronic”, “chronological”, etc.
I felt like going back there and telling HE was the depraved one!
Years later (as in last year), I made this meme based on that story & my cringing whenever I wrote or heard someone say “cron job”.
http://i1335.photobucket.com/albums/w666/ddmacpherson/chronos_zpsdac3fd99.jpg
Did it go viral?
Ha, ha, just kidding! Good story & meme!
I wish it went viral!
Too intellectual for that, I think.
My first thought on seeing the sign was “Bug Mac” ; then I wondered if our Grinning Clown Overlords (peace be upon their small intestines!) are softening us up for their next gastronomic innovation.
Cockroach in mayonnaise? Honeyed locusts? Deep-fried mealie worm? Bucket for monsewer?
Except for in restaurants where you get mango or sweet lassi, most lassi in Punjabi homes is in fact salted and with black pepper (much of North India consumes a thinned down version of lassi called Chacch). I wonder if what Bulgarians drink is Kefir – tastes like lassi but has a unique mouth texture with a different fermentation microbiome.
I think I recognize the beer bottle in the gnocci and pizza picture, it’s a mexican Corona!!! Unless it’s a bulgarian clone
Fascinating – I had a colleague originally from Bulgaria when I was at CMU. He told me of the Turkish and “middle eastern” stuff in their national cuisine – I certainly see it.