Comments on: Monggo and Tinapa “Hummus” a la Marketman

By: Ej

Ej — Mon, 19 Feb 2018 19:51:54 +0000

Hi, have just come a cross this post.
Re hummus, i add wasabi, red beets and canned red cabbage. Separately, of course. The ones with red beets and red cabbage have a lovely pinkish tint. The supermarkets here have a sweetish version with dates.

Re Indian words in our language, there’s “asukal” which has its primary root in the Sanskrit “sharkara” which then morphed into the Persian “shakkar”, Arabic “sukkar”, Latin “succarum” to our present-day sucre, azucar, sugar, etc. One of the buildings I once visited for work in Mumbai was called Sakhar Bhavan (“sugar house”). Noticing its similarity to “sucre” led me to trace the root of this word.

By: Getter Dragon 1

Getter Dragon 1 — Mon, 12 Feb 2018 04:16:06 +0000

My Christmas Eve dinner was takeout from a Southern Indian place next to my neighborhood. Sambar and Idly, a sumptuous vegetable stew with steamed rice cakes. Often I thought to myself of going to a potluck and bringing idly under the guise of puto and no one would be the wiser. I think of sambar and dal as the Indian version of mungo minus the pork and shrimp. A nearby tindahan noticed an uptick in Indian clientele looking for malunguay and banana leaves and at the same time, another customer from Kerala was chatting me up at the turo turo counter asking me about the ‘curry’.

Speaking of millennials and recent developments in Filipino food: httpss://www.kcet.org/shows/the-migrant-kitchen/episodes/ep-2-barkada-las-exploding-filipino-food-movement

By: ConnieC

ConnieC — Tue, 06 Feb 2018 22:07:01 +0000

MM, bettyQ , Footloose, kurzshaar, a big virtual wave! From monggo and hummus blog post that became a conversation piece for this interesting morning “tertulia”…just loved it.

BettyQ, your ideas are endless! So glad I visited this morning.

By: kurzhaar

kurzhaar — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 16:30:39 +0000

May I say I miss the more active version of your blog? At home, neither of us does much with social media–primarily for privacy reasons, living in the US (with one of us reminding us of the stark difference in privacy protection between the US and Europe). And these exchanges that delve into areas of history and anthropology and linguistics are among the most interesting of all.

Catching up on podcasts, I ran across another on on Filipino food:
httpss://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/01/20/578649880/with-a-show-of-hands-filipino-american-chefs-rekindle-kamayan-feasts
I must admit that I have never eaten Filipino food in this way, but I have had both Indian food (rice as the base) and Ethiopian food (injera as the base) served in a similar fashion.

I think Filipino food has had considerably more attention over the past two or three years, at least in the US. Restaurants like Bad Saint in DC are gaining national notice, magazines like Saveur are covering the cuisine. The NY Times “Hungry City” column is written by a Filipino American, Ligaya Mishan, who is one of the best food writers around at the moment, with a poet’s touch to her descriptions. All very good to see.

By: Marketman

Marketman — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 09:13:18 +0000

If only for these kinds of back and forth, I regret not having kept my blog more active for the past year or two… I find the instant gratification and 3-second attention span of many millennials to be increasingly irritating. How will younger folk fare when the depth of their interests goes only 8 months back, rather than millennia. I suppose every generation has its improvements and coping mechanisms, I just hope I am being simply fuddy duddy about all of this.

By: Footloose

Footloose — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 08:36:19 +0000

Back in my hometown, pospas is what we call goto (rice porridge with tripe) when enhanced with chicken pieces instead of tripe. Here is Hobson-Jobson’s definition of Pish pash “a slop of rice-soup with small pieces of meat in it, much used in the Anglo-Indian nursery.”

Our mungo, the original topic of this post, is obviously from Indian munj too although mung beans is practically international English now as curry, chutney, kedgeree and mulligatawny. Succotash and pemmican though are Indian only in the First Nation/American Indian sense.

By: Marketman

Marketman — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 01:56:44 +0000

malik, hmmm… interesting. It’s srikaya in Indonesian, buah nona in Malay and Noi-Na in Thai, so its all over the map…

By: malik

malik — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 01:29:50 +0000

I learned from my Indian boss way back that they call ‘Atis’ as ‘Sita-fel’, ‘fel’ meaning fruit in Hindi. ‘Atis’ is ‘Sita’ spelled backwards.

By: Marketman

Marketman — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 23:29:34 +0000

Footloose, I miss these exchanges, so interesting… and yes, when I ever suggest bibingka to have been derived from bebinca, everyone just looks at me like I landed from Mars… :)

By: Footloose

Footloose — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 19:44:37 +0000

Here are a few more Filipino food words in addition to achara that you mentioned, traceable back to Indian antecedents:
kare-kare from curry, a stew
puto from puttu, steamed rice cake
bibingka from bebenca, baked rice cake

Our word for vegetable sautée, gulay, may be, in all likelihood also of Indian descent. There is a festive glutinous rice dish with pieces of chicken or frog’s legs cooked with coconut milk and flavoured/coloured with fresh turmeric called bringe (bring-heh) erroneously believed (by many Filipinos) as a native take on paella but is actually an Indian derived dish.