Acadian Food Words - Part 2
1. Argyle (Yarmouth County)
2. Clare (Digby County)
3. Minudie, Nappan and Maccan (Cumberland County)
4. Chéticamp (Inverness County, Cape Breton)
5. Isle Madame (Richmond County, Cape Breton)
6. Pomquet, Tracadie, Havre-Boucher (Antigonish County)
7. Chezzetcook (Halifax County)
CISELETTE
(PORK & MOLASSES DESSERT SAUCE)
Literally the word means 'little chisel,' but I have no idea why it was applied by Acadians to this old-timey sauce made by frying diced pork or salt pork in its own fat. After the pork dice has browned, it is removed, and molasses is added to the remnant pork fat in the pan. The molasses is heated gently to boiling and then the fried pork dice goes back in.
Could the name ciselette refer to the fact that the diced chips of pork looked like wood chips from chisel work? That seems far-fetched indeed. Perhaps an Acadian visitor to this site knows the answer and would kindly use the contact button at the top of this page to inform me of the correct origin?
Ciselette is offered with crêpes, fresh bread, or toast. It was widely popular throughout Acadia, and different communities had different pet names for this molasses sauce.
Other terms for this sauce were:
1. Bagosse, an old French dialect word that could mean 'deceptive blather, homemade liquor, or shoddy merchandise.'
2. Bourgaille, Bourdomme (from bourdonner 'to hum like a bumblebee or cicada,' based on the sound of the ingredients as they fry in the pan)
3. Mousseline. Sauce mousseline is usually based on whipped cream, with the original implication that its creamy consistency was like fine muslin cloth.
4. Tamarin aux grillades. This is possibly an Acadian kitchen joke that means basically 'monkey cutlets,' the tamarin being a South American monkey related to marmosets. Tamarin in French also refers to the tropical fruit of the tamarind tree, whose acidic pulp is used for preserves. Tamarind juice is still made into a laxative drink. Take your pick, but somewhere in this phrase there's an Acadian joke.
CRÊPES À LA NEIGE
( LITTLE SNOW PANCAKES)
When eggs were in short supply, Acadians made these crêpes with hard-packed snow. Fried for a few minutes on each side, they were served with pieces of maple sugar. Each year on February the second, at the feast of la Chandeleur, Candlemas in English, Catholic priests bless the candles to commemorate the purification of the Virgin Mary and the presentation of Jesus in the temple. In Québec and Acadia, crêpes à la neige used to be served at home for this feast, often with little surprises hidden inside each crêpe. If one found a penny, one would be rich. If one discovered a ring within, one would be lucky in early marriage. Two buttons in a crêpe might signify that one would have many children.
Standard French would be haricot sec. Fayot is an older French term for this bean, preserved in ancient French dialects and persisting in français acadien long after it disappeared from contemporary French speech.
Traditional Acadian pork 'n' beans, fayots au lard, are prepared in a large iron cauldron after the beans are soaked overnight, then put into the pot in alternate layers with salt pork fat. After cold water is added, the vat is simmered for four hours or oven-baked. Sugar or molasses are put on as a sauce when the beans are served, never—in a true Acadian recipe—when the beans are cooking. Jamais! Je vous en prie!
The verbal root of fayot has rolled across the palate and the tongue for thousands of years of human lexical history. Fayot itself began at the end of the eighteenth century in France as an alteration of fayol or fayole. The -ot suffix is an augmentative, so that the general semantic force of fayot is "big bean."
Fayol was borrowed into French from Provençal faiol. That's in print by 1470 CE. The Provençal word arose from Old French faisol, itself stemming from Late Latin fasiolus. Classical Latin for bean was faseolus, borrowed from a subform of the Classical Greek phaselos. Compare the Modern Greek word for bean phasoli. And,of course, the Italian bean dish familiar to North American restaurant goers as pasta fazooli.
Another etymological "theme" (as some linguists term it) of the Proto-Indo-European root here (*fa, *fe, *fas) is the Latin reflex faba 'bean.' This PIE root appears in one of the Sanskrit (a language of ancient India) words for bean, fagva.
To show just how important and how early a source of nutriment for human beings the bean was, the root as bhaj appears also in one of the basic Sanskrit words for food, bhaktam. It is also in the common ancient Greek verb, phagein 'to eat.'
Below is a small, partial list of the bean root as it blossoms and climbs in several modern languages.
English bean
Italian fagiolo ; fagiuolo
Spanish frijol ; poroto ; fréjol ; alubia ; judía
French haricot
German Bohne ; Fisole
Russian fasolya
Albanian fasule
Asturian faba
Brazilian Portuguese feijão
Breton favenn
Calabrese fasualu ; fasciola
Czech fazole
Kurdish Kurmanji fasûle
Ladino fajöl
Latin (Botanical nomenclaure) Phaseolus vulgaris
Lombardo Occidentale fasoeu
Mantuan fasoeul
Neapolitan fasulo
Polish fasola
Portuguese feijão
Romanian fasole
Sardinian (Limba Sarda Unificada) fasolu
GALETTE AU PETIT-LARD DE LOUP MARIN
(SEAL BLUBBER COOKIE)
Galette is the usual word for cookie in français acadien, for example, galette au sucre 'sugar cookie' and galette à la mélasse 'molasses cookie.' It also means hot bread roll or petit pain in the phrase galette blanche.
Un loup-marin 'sea wolf' is an old French-Canadian term for a harp seal. It certainly sounds less alarming to English ears than the correct term in standard French, un phoque, from which interlingual confusions might arise to affront the modesty of any embryonic bilingualist. The term was common in several European languages by the middle of the 16th century. Obsolete in modern English, sea-wolf once meant 'seal' or 'sea-elephant,' while sea-lion to denote a large, eared seal, has been splashing about in English since 1697. Both English and Canadian French or some early French dialect may have borrowed the term, as a loan-translation, from 15th-century nautical Dutch where zeewolf was a sea monster, then a seal.
"Please don't eat me."
To make this cookie, the seal fat is chopped up and boiled for a good hour in hot water. After the fat has been drained, the usual suspects, cookie-ingredientwise, are mixed in: flour, milk, eggs, baking soda, salt, and, to cut the greasy taste a bit, a splash of vinegar. Patting, rolling, kneading follow, and then half an hour in a 200° C oven. Petit-lard is merely blubber from little seals.
PASSE-PIERRE
(GOOSE TONGUE)
Passe-pierre is an edible marsh green picked in midsummer, a tidal maritime plant whose spicy saltiness makes it an Acadian favourite picked fresh for salads or pickled in brine for winter use. Briefly, after the expulsion of the Acadians, passe-pierre was one of many subsistence greens for some Acadians who escaped deportation by hiding in remote areas of the Maritimes.
Passe-pierre is a seaside plantain, Plantago maritima. The specific means 'by the seaside.'
Plantago maritima var. juncoides
from A Digital Flora of Newfoundland and Labrador Vascular Plants at The Provincial Museum of Newfoundland and Labrador. Visit this excellent site at http://www.nfmuseum.com
Word Lore of Passe-pierre
The origin of the term passe-pierre is complex and interesting. Passe-pierre is an Acadian variant of the old continental French name, perce-pierre, itself a variant of an even older plant name l'herbe de Saint-Pierre 'Saint Peter's herb.'
Several maritime plants and creatures have been named after Saint Peter, including in French a fish. Peter, of course, was a fisherman on the Sea of Galilee when Jesus called him to be a disciple and to become 'a fisher of men.'
Peter's original Hebrew name was Simon or Shimon. Jesus or earlier companions nicknamed him Kephas 'rock' in Aramaic. In the Greek of the New Testament, he became Petros 'rock, stone,' subject of the most egregious pun in the New Testament, where Matthew reports Jesus saying to Peter (Petros in the Koine Greek of the New Testament): "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock (Greek: epi tautei tei petrai) I will build my church."
The herbalist monks and priests who collected plants and often named them were well aware of this rock/Saint Peter connection. In 17th-century Botanical Latin, this plant is listed as herba divi Petri 'herb of the divine Peter,' and one of its names in German is Meerpeterlein`Little Sea Peter.'
All that said, however, there is another twist to this ropey old tale. Perce-pierre, passe-pierre, and l'herbe de Saint-Pierre originally referred to a totally different plant, not to seaside plantain at all, but to a plant called sea-fennel or true samphire, Crithmum maritimum.
Sorry, the confusion does not end there. Very early in Acadian history, sailors who knew about l'herbe de Saint-Pierre or perce-pierre or passe-pierre also discovered that the seaside plant they knew from France did not grow along North American ocean shores. So they transferred the name to an edible plant that was common on our maritime beaches, a plant of the glasswort clan, Salicornia europaea, still called marsh samphire in New England, and called false samphire or pickleweed or sandfire greens in Canada.
But seaside plantain's similar habitat does account for two of its old names, passe-pierre and perce-pierre. All along the northern coast of Atlantic Europe, this plant prefers to grow in rich, tidal flats, but it struggles up also through the rocky shingle of sea beaches. As perce-pierre and passe-pierre, it may be said to pierce through shore rocks.
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Here's an email from a visitor with yet another wee nugget of info about passe-pierre.
Dear Bill:
I visited your web site to find info. on plantago maritima, and because you made reference to the Acadian vernacular passe pierre.
I recently interviewed several older people from the Acadian communities in Argyle Township (Yarmouth Co. Nova Scotia) who used this term in reference to a plant that was edible, but was also considered a problem when scything salt marsh hay.
The explaination for the name passe-pierre that I was given was that la passe pierre was a tough grass, and because of this farmers were forced to use their whetstones (pierres) more frequently to keep their scythes sharpened.
Just thought you would be interested in this.
Sincerely,
Ruth Lapp
Centre Burlington, Nova Scotia
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TÉTINES DE SOURIS
(literally 'Mouse Nipples,'
also called Sandfire Greens or False Samphire)
Salicornia europaea (Tétines de souris, Sandfire greens)
In Canadian English, sandfire greens refer to little succulent seashore and mud-flat plants, glassworts, called in botany Salicornia (salt-horn) europaea. The Acadians named them after mouse nipples because of the little, dotlike balls that cluster on the stem. They are harvested when the plants are young and are eaten fresh.
Both sandfire greens and false samphire are parts of an interesting etymological progression: l'herbe de Saint-Pierre >sampierre > sampere > samphire > sandfire.
The last alteration, from samphire to sandfire, occurred not only from English ears mangling a French word while turning it into something comprehensible in English, but also because this little glasswort of beaches and shorelines turns red when it gets old and grows in the sand, hence sandfire. True samphire is a different plant that does not grow wild in Canada, but is found on the European coast of the Atlantic Ocean.
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Read Some Other of My Columns
1. Conclave
2. Massage Words
3. Open A New Window Word
4. A Short Forum on "Quorum"
5. Noise is from Nausea + What is a Nef ? |
