Now You're Speakin' My Language (or Dialect)

[Jemppu]

Anna wrote: "To continue Jemppu's post, in Finland crepes are only called crepes if they're filled, savoury ones..."

Yeah, mostly crepes are an artisan-y 'title' option, if you want a bit more fancy ring to your 'lätty' product <:D Same thing, really.

[Dawn F]

I’m from Denmark and have no idea, I just eat them.

[Gabi]

Dawn wrote: "I’m from Denmark and have no idea, I just eat them."

Love your comment! (I have no idea what folks are talking about ^^')

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

I generally eat eggs and toast or oatmeal for breakfast, always with coffee. It is difficult for me to eat before coffee, especially if the food is pungent, and I need protein and carbs or I end up napping before noon lol.

Biscuits are fluffy quick breads. Scones are denser quick breads. Cookies are hard to define. In the UK they have biscuits, which are crunchy, and cookies, which are chewy. Here they are the same thing. One thing I don't like about store bought bread here is how much sugar is in it. I specifically have to look for bread with no sugar added. Everything else smells like cake to me now.

I like every sort of breakfast bread, but I get upset when I'm told I'm about to get pancakes and get something more like a crepe or vice versa. They're different animals!

And, not really the same topic, but I think the best "meal" you can get in the US is either the Southern breakfast or Thanksgiving. I strongly urge everyone to try to get invited to an American Thanksgiving if possible, it's our greatest hits in one album.

[Gabi]

Elowen wrote: "This Dutch person has never heard of a "Dutch baby"...
Pancakes on the other hand... The Netherlands is full of pancake houses (which are nothing like IHOP, by the way) where you can buy pancakes ..."

Pancake houses as well here in Germany, the same as Elowen described them. And I love them best with cheese and herbs.

Breakfast on the other hand for me is real bread (not the fluffy stuff I've learned to know while traveling), with a crusty crust, wholemeal and pumpkin seeds (or other), or muesli and herbal or green tea (no coffee person here)

[Sabrina]

Gabi wrote: "Breakfast on the other hand for me is real bread (not the fluffy stuff I've learned to know while traveling), with a crusty crust, wholemeal and pumpkin seeds (or other), or muesli .."

Being Swiss I can fully second that, although I really like my "Latte Macchiato Coffee" which often comes in different styles in different countries as well - I think for Americans this would be a "Caffe Latte"

[Margaret]

For breakfast these days I usually have what's called an "English muffin" here in the U.S., though I've been told it only approximates what is called a "muffin" in the U.K. Either way, it's a raised/yeast bread, unlike what we Americans usually mean by muffins, which are a quick bread made with baking powder, and usually at least mildly sweet (they come in a lot of flavors).

Anyway, I usually have mine either with peanut butter and jelly (jam, that is ... fruit preserves ... you know!) or with an egg and a couple of slices of deli ham--my own stripped-down homemade version of an Egg McMuffin since I don't like cheese and prefer my eggs scrambled. Along with this I'll have some fresh fruit, a glass of orange juice and a large mug of tea. (It's a pint mug. I measured.)

[CBRetriever]

I used to have bread (usually a baguette slice or two), cheese and green tea for breakfast, but I've been told to cut down cholesterol, so now I'm having a mix of raisin or other bran cereal with Cheerios and 1% milk. i don't like a sweet breakfast, so the Cheerios cut the sugar content

[Cheryl]

Crisp flakey croissants, yes. Chewy heavy ones, no. I don't know where to find them... but then, since they're so rich, I haven't let myself make too much of an effort.

Yes to mixing Cheerios with other cereals!

[Trike]

Now I’m hungry.

[Karin]

Dawn wrote: "Language is super fun! I’m from Denmark and so I understand Swedish and Norwegian, as they’re all basically dialects of the same language. We are taught Englishin school at an early age and later w..."

Interesting. I have relatives that are Icelandic (well my mother grew up in Canada bilingual) and friends and inlaws who are Norwegian. Apparently Icelanders can understand a lot of Norwegian but not vice a versa because Icelandic is similar to Norse 1000 years ago. How about you--can you understand Icelandic? I know that Denmark ruled Iceland for a long time.

[CBRetriever]

oOo, another one that's different: Pavement

in the US it refers to any stretch of paved land including the middle of the street
in the UK it's what US residents call a sidewalk

needless to say, Americans think walking on pavement is a tad bit dangerous in some cases

[Leonie]

Also copied:

CBRetriever wrote: "us Texicans eat biscuits for breakfast as do most southerners. And they're often served with gravy on them. What you're referring to we call cookies.

biscuit = a small quick bread made from dough ..."

Scones are never dropped from spoons here! They are made from dough, but should be light, and served with jam and cream. (Unless they're savoury of course!) Or buttered when hot. Mmmmmm.....

Pikelets, on the other hand, are often dropped/poured out of spoons into the pan. https://www.kidspot.com.au/kitchen/re...

[Leonie]

I'm sure there are even words used in the UK that aren't the same word in Australia. I remember getting into an argument with an Australian on a forum where I was insisting pancakes were always leavened and were light and fluffy and she kept saying they were thin and flat and more like crepes.

In our family, we just call them thick or thin pancakes, and occasionally use 'crépe' if required. (I'm from Western Australia).

[Cheryl]

Pavement reminds me of boulevard. That doesn't even mean the same thing in different cities within the US.

[Cheryl]

In fact, we have a tiny old thread about dialects:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

The word she starts the discussion with is "berm."

[Esther]

Following Anna's direction continue the disscusion in this thread:

Jacqueline wrote: "See that’s just it. You call the patty itself hamburger but here it’s just a patty. The ground beef is called mince. That patty melt isn’t something we do here so you can call it whatever you want ..."

Having been brought up in England I am with you - the meat is called mince.
However putting beetroot in a hamburger, or really anywhere but the bin, is just disgusting.

[Sarah]

Just adding my largely useless two cents: I have never in my life called a hamburger a sandwich (I’m in the US though, not England). I’m curious - is this something other regions in the US do? I’ve never been west of Ohio.

I do call the patty, hamburger though.

Which now that I’m typing it, is odd since there’s no ham. I’m guessing much like a sandwich though it originated from a place?

[DivaDiane]

Hamburger (the minced/ground beef) is named that way because it was a specialtyfrom the city of Hamburg in Germany. Just like Wieners (Vienna), Frankfurters and various other meat/sausage specialties are named after the city or region they originated in. There’re also, Nürnberger, Braunschweiger, Thüringer, Regensburger and westfälische Rindswurst.

[Trike]

Diane wrote: "Hamburger (the minced/ground beef) is named that way because it was a specialtyfrom the city of Hamburg in Germany. Just like Wieners (Vienna), Frankfurters and various other meat/sausage specialti..."
Beat me to it. My cousins in upstate New York call hamburgers “hamburgs”, and I’m positive they have no idea of the word’s origins.

I used to work with a woman from Boston who called lettuce “green meat”. Turns out that’s one of those weird holdovers from when ALL food was called meat. I mentioned this at a family gathering once and my uncle, born in 1919 in Indiana, said, “Green meat is what my dad called the feed we gave to the horses and cows.”

[CBRetriever]

the only "mince" we have in the US is mincemeat pie and usually isn't found in restaurants, just in home cooking (and not for all families).

hamburger is made out of ground beef and ground beef is what the packaging says in stores. And you can purchase pre-formed hamburger patties.

[Jacqueline]

When travelling in the US any hamburger that wasn’t made of minced beef was called a sandwich. It was confusing at the start but we caught on pretty quick. Where we would call a bun with chicken on it instead of a beef pattie a chicken burger it is a chicken sandwich over there. Remembering we call anything with hot cooked meat that’s inside a bun a burger. Unless it’s when we rip a chicken apart while it’s still hot and stuff it on a bun with lots of gravy and butter. That’s just a hot chicken roll. A hamburger is the whole item not just the patty. A chicken sandwich over here is usually cold roast chicken between two pieces of bread with a variety of fillings.

[Leonie]

Here in Australia, any kind of meat that has been minced, is called 'mince.' So - mince = beef mince usually, chicken mince, pork mince etc

Unless it’s when we rip a chicken apart while it’s still hot and stuff it on a bun with lots of gravy and butter. That’s just a hot chicken roll. And totally yummy!

Our family also tends to make its own hamburger patty. They are so tasty with the right stuff in them. A bit of garlic, some onion, egg, salt/pepper, red wine...mmmm. And then topped off with mushrooms, onions, tomato sauce/salsa, lettuce, tomato, beetroot, mayonnaise, and perhaps an egg and some bacon.

[Sarah]

Ahh Jacqueline I see what you are saying. More about other sandwiches than hamburgers. I don’t know anyone that calls a hamburger (with mince beef patty) a sandwich. They even usually have their own section on the menu: “burgers” (all sandwiches with mince beef patties).

If it has chicken or other meats, we do call them chicken/fish/steak sandwiches. Where I am hamburger or cheeseburger is synonymous with the whole item in as much as it’s got the mince beef on it.

But that’s why I was wondering if there was somewhere in the US that did call hamburgers (with beef patties) sandwiches. We’re large enough that many regions have their own terminologies.

Like in the Midwest, what new Englanders call Soda, they call “pop”. Some of them have never heard of soda.

[CBRetriever]

doesn't mince mean cut up with a knife? Hamburgers in the US are made from beef run through a coarse setting on a meat grinder.

"Mincing is taking whole muscle meat and finely dicing it with a sharp knife or a food processor. ... Unless you add more fat on purpose, minced meat will usually be leaner. Ground beef has been put through a meat grinder, and is actually an emulsion of meat, and fat."

and ground beef comes in different fat percentages.

[Karin]

Where I live in the States hamburger is always labelled ground beef. In Canada it was labelled hamburger, but we also said ground (unless there is some area in Canada that says minced as there are different accents, etc).

[Cheryl]

When I was in Boston in the 80s I had to start calling 'pop' 'tonic' instead to be understood by my working class Catholic mother-in-law. In some places in the southeast you'll hear ppl call all sodas 'Coke' because that is what you're assumed to more likely than not to want (Ted Turner, y' see).

[Sarah]

@CB Yes I call it ground beef also- I was following the mince meat part of this conversation above and trying to relate what I was referring to.

Ground beef formed into patties = hamburger
Hamburger patties on a bun or any kind of bread = also hamburger

Everything else sandwich. I don’t know why this was so hard for me in my previous post.

[AndrewP]

In England a hamburger patty by itself is often called a Beefburger. Mince is ground meat but Mincemeat is not meat at all, it's what you make mince pies out of :)

[Leonie]

We would never describe anything as 'ground' except nuts, really. Ground almonds, ground hazelnuts.

Mince is put through a mincer. (Whether it's minced meat, or mincemeat, which makes mincepies for Christmas.) The amount of fat usually depends on the fattiness of the meat.

Mincemeat is actually dried fruit with spices and nuts, put through a mincer and then cooked with butter and brandy and then used to fill mince pies. Mouth is now watering....

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

We mince words, grind meat, make meal out of nuts and legumes, and I think the only pie we have with nuts as a main ingredient is pecan. We have to borrow recipes from across the pond if we want other options (or be experimenting with wheat free recipes), and then we grumble because we measure in volumes, not weights, and even if we do weights, they're imperial, because America really does just need to be loud about things. So borrowing recipes is an exercise in math, which is of course, not plural ;-)

[Leonie]

*Maths 🤣🤣🤣
As in mathematics. With which we calculate volumes and weights, and other stuff. 🤣😉😉😉

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

But you're already shortening it. You can just slice it and move on, no need to add more letters back on haha

[CBRetriever]

what we in the US call a grinder is the thing with a crank handle, a corkscrew feeder in the chamber, blades to cut and a grill to force the cut material through. Or a certain type of sandwich also knows as a gyro, hero, poor boy, hoagy or submarine sandwich. We mince with knives on a cutting board.

we also grind nuts, but with a different device (usually a food processor or a mortar and pestle).

Mince is also the word the French use for finely chopped items, so perhaps that's where the UK gets their term.

[Trike]

CBRetriever wrote: "Mince is also the word the French use for finely chopped items, so perhaps that's where the UK gets their term. "

Sounds right. The British took a lot of stuff from the French when they went through their Francophile phase. The extraneous U in random words, plus all those food terms like pork, beef, mutton, etc.

[CBRetriever]

plus the re instead or er ending that people in the US use like theatre, centre, etc.

[Jacqueline]

Ahhh yes...pop and soda. In Australia it’s referred to as soft drink.

[CBRetriever]

in the UK grocery stores I've seen them in the fizzy drinks aisle

here's a nice US map of the regional differences:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/soda-v...

[Trike]

CBRetriever wrote: "in the UK grocery stores I've seen them in the fizzy drinks aisle

here's a nice US map of the regional differences:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/soda-v..."

The Alaska map looks crazy until you realize some of those are just like three people and 2700 bears in 7,000 square miles.

[Beth]

Jacqueline wrote: "When travelling in the US any hamburger that wasn’t made of minced beef was called a sandwich. It was confusing at the start but we caught on pretty quick."

An much less common/edge case in the U.S. that could make things even more confusing is a "turkey burger." It's on a bun, with the usual onions, tomatoes, and whatnot, but the meat is ground turkey. The meat is ground in its raw form, just like ground beef.

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

Of course it's ground turkey, the air turkeys are quite elusive.

trollololol

[Beth]

And phoenixes--known as "fire turkeys" by us classy USians--have a nasty streak and are very dangerous to hunt.

[Ryan, Your favourite moderators favourite moderator]

Has anyone brought up frowning? In the US they frown with their mouths but in the UK they frown with their eyes/foreheads so 'turn that frown upside down' doesn't make sense there.

[Jacqueline]

We mince (grind) up anything and turn it into mince (ground meat). We use turkey mince in tacos sometimes because my daughter likes it. I like chicken mince in things. Just yesterday in the butcher department of the supermarket there was pork mince, chicken mince, turkey mince, lamb mince, beef mince, veal mince, and a combination pork and veal mince mince that is particularly nice in spag bol or Swedish meatballs. And all of these lovelies can and are formed into patties and put on hamburgers. And they’re all called hamburgers. As are the chicken ones made with a chunk of coated chicken. And as I said before on another thread a good hamburger with whatever meat pattie comes with tomato, cheese, lettuce, cooked onion and sliced cold pickled beetroot. And usually tomato sauce (ketchup) or bbq sauce (a brown sauce that’s rather yummy and not like the bbq sauces on your ribs and that).

And yeah I’d never thought about frowning before 😾 Australians frown with their eyes and foreheads and that too. Not with our mouths. Even though we draw frowny faces with downturned mouths. I tried doing the mouth one and it’s not natural. But mine is always in a little frown anyway because you know....resting bitch face 😂😛

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

...what do you mean you don't frown with your mouths?? I see them do it on Great British Bake Off all the time! Is it because Australia is upside down, so it's really just smiling? ;-)

I am now making really bizarre faces at my computer trying to make my forehead frown.

[Ryan, Your favourite moderators favourite moderator]

In the UK frowning is a furrowing of the eyebrows. When a Brit talks about frowning they are referring to those and the forehead. We do downturned mouths/lips, but that's not what we call frowning.

[Trike]

Ryan wrote: "In the UK frowning is a furrowing of the eyebrows. When a Brit talks about frowning they are referring to those and the forehead. We do downturned mouths/lips, but that's not what we call frowning."

So what do you call the thing that you do with your mouths?

What do you call this emoji: 🙁

[Leonie]

Trike wrote: "Ryan wrote: "In the UK frowning is a furrowing of the eyebrows. When a Brit talks about frowning they are referring to those and the forehead. We do downturned mouths/lips, but that's not what we c..."

That looks like a sad (Australian) face to me.

[Leonie]

And when people have said 'turn that frown upside down' I've always imagined the whole face turning upside down so that the eye/brow frown is up the other way and smiling.

[Ryan, Your favourite moderators favourite moderator]

@Trike, unhappy lol

I can't think of a word that we use specifically for expressing negative feelings with ones mouth. Sure, we smile, smirk, and grin but facial expressions to portray dismay is focused on the eyes, brows, and forehead.