Wednesday, April 4, 2018

They have a word for it--but what is that word?

When you don't know a language very well, it's easy to confuse words that, to your own uneducated ear, sound very similar but, to a native speaker, not at all alike.

I wish this blog had smell-o-vision.
The Latteria downstairs usually has a big stack of plastic-wrapped slabs of a local type of head cheese prominently displayed on the counter. While Valerie was here I wanted to get some so that she could try it. (She, like me, is a big fan of cartilage, which this delicacy is full of.) But when we went in I saw that the head cheese had been displaced by something else.

I tried to remember what the stuff was called, but I drew a blank. All I knew is that the name looked and sounded a lot like the Italian for hot chocolate: cioccolata (pronounced, more or less, "chawk-koh-LAH-tah").

So in my best substandard Italian, I asked the nice man behind the counter if they had "um, un pezzo di, non cioccolata ma quella roba, il nome sento come cioccolata ma non e caramelle, e un tipo di carne, un po' come la salsiccia..." ("a piece of, not hot chocolate, but that stuff, the name sounds like hot chocolate but not candy, it's a kind of meat, a bit like sausage ..."), less fluent than writing it out suggests and badly pronounced, and accompanied by a flurry of hand gestures with which I tried to indicate where it usually sat and what shape it was.

The man behind the counter was baffled. Sausage with hot chocolate? Could I mean the chocolate bars over there? A co-worker who spoke some English came over to help, and I repeated my pantomime for her, in both English and Italian. She, too, was stumped until suddenly she exclaimed, "Ah! Cicciolata!" (Which is pronounced, more or less, "chih-chee-oh-LAH-ta"). That was the name I'd been groping for.

Now one thing that is delightful about Italians is that they seem to be endlessly good-humored about foreigners' attempts to speak their language. Instead of being annoyed by bad pronunciation or faulty grammar, they are eager to help. Unlike, for example, the French, who so often act disgusted by the way your foreign mouth is mauling their mother tongue. In fact, here in Fidenza I've repeatedly had the experience of fumbling to express some simple thought to an Italian waiter or shopkeeper or banker, only to have them apologize profusely to me for not knowing more English.

Anyway, the two Latteria staffers, Valerie, and I shared a big laugh at the cioccolata/cicciolata confusion and all its comic possibilities--cicciolata even looks a bit like chocolate, as a matter of fact. A few moments later Valerie and I walked out with a slab of the stuff and a big chocolate Easter egg that the Latteria lady pressed on me as a gift. (It was the day before Easter, so she was probably not only being friendly but reducing excess inventory.)

Can you tell which is which?
Valerie told me a similar story about the man who's overseeing work on her new house down in Orvieto. He knows some English and would like to learn more, and like all language learners he also sometimes gets things mixed up. One day he wanted to talk to her about "the chicken floor." She couldn't imagine what he was talking about until at last she realized he meant the kitchen floor.

To us "chicken" and "kitchen" don't sound anything alike, because their meanings are so different. But it's easy to see why, to someone just learning English, the two words might sound almost identical. More so even than cioccolata and cicciolata.

Writing this led me to actually look up cicciolata, and so I now know that ciccioli is the word for the crackling left after fat is rendered, and that the English term for the same is greaves, which I never heard before. The ciccioli plus other parts of a pig's head go into cicciolata, along with bay, salt, cinnamon, cloves, and sometimes wine or brandy. In addition to enjoying cicciolata in cubes or slices as an antipasto, folks in the Parma region also slice it thinly and let it melt into hot polenta. That is something I intend to try very soon.

4 comments:

Lisa S said...

Greaves -- FEH! We fatty-loving Semites love GRIBENES. https://www.myjewishlearning.com/the-nosher/what-is-gribenes/

criticalfart said...

This looks more French to me than the Mediterranean diet.

Tessa DeCarlo said...

I've heard of gribenes (of course!) but I hadn't encountered greaves before. Apparently they're close relatives, according to this etymology of the former from some web site or other: 'From Middle High German griebe (“piece of fat, crackling”). Compare German Griebe (“piece of fat, crackling”, in dialects also other kinds of greasy foods), English greaves (borrowed from Low German).'

Amy said...

As usual, I love your writing and your witty juxtaposition of cicciolata and cioccolata, although I doubt that I would love your cartilaginous delicacy that looks a lot like halvah.

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