Re: Do you want a French "little" or a Dutch "little"? :))

Jan van Steenbergen scripsit:

> > For Anglo-Saxon cooks, that is about 3 1/2 tbsp, or just under half
> > a stick.  Odd that you measure butter by mass, but we measure it by
> > volume: 1 tbsp = 14.8 cm^3.  Luckily, the GNU units program knows the
> > density of butter: 958.61142 kg / m^3.
> >
> > (Other sources claim 860 and 800 kg / m^3, alas.  To heck with it.)
>
> How on earth can you count with that?!
I'm confused.  All you have to do is remember a few simple numbers,
like 14 inches to the foot, and 12 1/2 pounds to the gallon, and
10 stones make a pyramid, and so on....

> Now I understand at least why the Anglo-Saxon kitchen has such a bad reputation
> here on the continent :)))
That is the English, who cannot cook no matter what.  Americans can cook
perfectly well, just like they can do anything else they choose to
bother with, except learn foreign languages.  After all, did not Nero Wolfe,
the great detective and notorious gourmet, give a speech to twelve
famous French and Italian chefs on "American Contributions to Haute
Cuisine"?

> That's true. When I lived in Poland, I once made a remark to somebody about
> "driving through the orange light". At first, the person whom I spoke to didn't
> seem to understand what I was talking about; in Poland, they call it "yellow".
Serious answer:  We also call the middle light "yellow", though traffic
engineers say "amber".  The colors are the result of an international
agreement in the late 19th century, not about traffic lights, but about
railroad signals.  The original system used white for "go", green for
"slow", and red for "stop".  Unfortunately, if the colored lens fell
out of red or green, it looked white, causing train crashes.  Worse yet,
if the signal lost power altogether, any random white light could be
mistaken for "go".  So the red-amber-green system was adopted universally.
However, "yellow" is the normal name, and no one would think of saying
"orange".

--
John Cowan <jcowan@...>     http://www.reutershealth.com
I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen,    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith.  --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_