Category Archives: food and drink

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Drinks Week: Tea

Türkish Teatime (CC)

Türkish Teatime (CC), by marfis75

We’re serving up a lexicon of libations all week at Wordnik (in honor of Oktoberfest, National Bourbon Heritage Month, and Thursday’s National Coffee Day). Yesterday we poured some wine words; now it’s time for tea.

Tea ceremonies are almost as varied as tea types. In Great Britain, there’s afternoon tea, or low tea, “a small meal eaten between lunch and dinner.” There’s the tea break, “a snack taken during a break in the work day,” and the tea dance, “a late afternoon or early evening dance, typically with a live orchestra (often referred to as a palm court orchestra) playing light classical music.”

There’s the tea party, “a semi-formal afternoon social gathering at which tea, sandwiches and cakes are served,” also written as tea-party and once known as “any disquieting occurrence or happening,” or “something easy to do or accomplish.” There’s Lewis Carroll’s Mad Tea-Party, the Boston Tea Party, and, um, that Tea Party.

JRR Tolkien gave us elevenses, “tea or coffee taken at midmorning and often accompanied by a snack.” Originating from the county of Devon in England is Devonshire or cream tea, “a light afternoon meal consisting of scones, jam and clotted cream served with the drink tea.”

We can’t forget high tea, “a fairly substantial meal that includes tea and is served in the late afternoon or early evening,” also known as meat tea. But as Lynneguist writes:

I’ve never heard a British person use the term [high tea]. They say things like I have to get home and make the children’s tea, by which they mean their evening meal. In my experience, tea, when referring to a meal, is used by my friends mostly to refer to simple meals they make for their children or themselves in the early evening; a dinner party, for example, would not be referred to as tea.

Slang for a cup of tea in British English is cuppa, as well as char, an alternation of the Chinese word for tea, cha.

Yum cha, Cantonese Chinese for “drink tea,” is a traditional Chinese meal of many small dishes and Chinese tea, often partaken late weekend mornings. Yum cha is also known as dim sum in Cantonese and dian xin in Mandarin. Dim sum refers to the small dishes, and translates as “a little bit of heart.” Common yum cha teas include chrysanthemum, jasmine, and oolong, “a variety of black tea with the flavor of green tea.” Oolong translates as “black dragon.”

If you want to get fancy, brew some gunpowder tea, a green tea in which each leaf is rolled into a pellet; or longjing, dragon well tea, another type of green tea. Of the black tea variety (black teas are referred to as hong cha, literally “red tea,” in Chinese) try some souchong, pouchong, or congou. Congou comes from the Amoy or Xiamen Chinese dialect and means “elaborately prepared (tea),” and corresponds to the Mandarin Chinese gōngfu (chá), “worksmanship (tea),” a different gōngfu, by the way, than the martial art, as explained by Victor Mair at Language Log.

Or you may want to try ba bao cha, which translates from Mandarin as “eight treasure tea.” Eight is the number of ingredients – “goji berries, jujube (a type of red date,) dried citrus peel, dried ginseng root, rock sugar crystals, dried chrysanthemum flowers, green tea, and dried longan fruit” –  and is an auspicious number in Chinese culture. Eight or ba is a homonym of the word for prosperity (the number four, si, is a homonym for the word for death, and therefore a very unlucky number).

The Japanese tea ceremony is known as the Way of Tea, translated from the Japanese, chado, with cha meaning “tea” and do – sometimes spelled tao – meaning “the way”; and as chanoyu, translating roughly as “tea of hot water.” The ceremony involves the ritual preparation and presentation of matcha, a powdered green tea.

Another green tea is sencha, which differs from matcha in that the leaves are not ground. Shincha is “the first month’s harvest of Sencha,” while bancha is the second harvest of sencha. Gyokura is an expensive green tea that differs from sencha in that “it is grown under the shade rather than the full sun.” On the other hand, genmaicha, a green tea combined with roasted brown rice, “was originally drunk by poor Japanese, as the rice served as a filler and reduced the price of the tea.” Genmaicha is also known as popcorn tea and people’s tea (and is this blogger’s personal favorite).

Central to tea life in Russia, parts of Europe, the Middle-East, northern China, and elsewhere is the samovar. Translated as “self boiling,” the samovar is “a copper urn. . .in which water is kept boiling for use when required for making tea, live charcoal being placed in a tube which passes up through the center of the urn.” The tea concentrate is called zavarka, while the boiled water is kipyatok. Tea the beverage is referred to as chai (also “a beverage made with black teas, steamed milk and sweet spices based loosely on Indian recipes”). The chainik is “a teapot with a spout for making zavarka,” and also means “incapable dummy” in Russian slang.  For even more on Russian tea, check out this excellent source.

As for tea culture in the United States, one could argue that it surrounds iced tea. Or is it ice tea? Mark Liberman at Language Log tries to figure it out. Variations of iced tea include sun tea, “a beverage, often iced, made from tea leaves or other herbs steeped in water exposed to direct sunlight”; sweet-tea; and Thai iced tea, also known as cha-yen.

Finally, for tea types, lingo, and paraphernalia, be sure to check out our list of the day.

Tomorrow we take a look at funny drink names. Get your tiny umbrellas ready!

[Photo: CC BY-SA 2.0 by marfis75]

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Drinks Week: Wine

Wine

It’s Drinks Week at Wordnik! In honor of Oktoberfest, National Bourbon Heritage Month, and National Coffee Day on Thursday, we’ll be featuring potable – some potent, some placid – words of the day, lists of the day, and blog posts.

The beverage du jour? Wine.

The word wine, “the fermented juice of the grape,” comes from the Latin vinum, meaning, well, “wine.” Vinum also gives us vine, as in where grapes grow, and vinous, “having the qualities of wine; pertaining to wine or its manufacture.” It gives us vintner, “one who deals in wine”; vino, an inferior wine; and wino, “a wine-drinking alcoholic.” It gives us vinegar, which comes from the Old French vinaigre, “sour wine,” what wine turns into when not stored properly.

Vinum gives us vintage, “the annual product of the grape-harvest, with especial reference to the wine obtained,” or “having an enduring appeal; high-quality, classic,” and vinyl. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary:

In chemistry, vinyl was used from 1863 as the name of a univalent radical derived from ethylene, from L. vinum “wine,” because ethyl alcohol is the ordinary alcohol present in wine.

The Latin vinum is related to the Greek word for wine, oinos. An oenophile is “a person who has a fondness for wine,” while oenology is “the art of making wine.” Viticulture (from the Latin vītis, “vine”) is the “culture or cultivation of the vine” or grapes (for all things grapes, check out this list).

A sommelier is “a wine steward; the person at an expensive restaurant who keeps the wine cellar and advises guests on a choice of wines.” The word comes not from a wine or vine word but from the French sommier, “beast of burden,” as the original meaning of sommelier was “officer in charge of provisions, pack-animal driver.”

Would you like to see a wine list? Would you prefer a red, such as a Merlot, claret, or Shiraz, or a white, like pinot, Chablis, or Chardonnay? Perhaps you’d like a vintage wine, or a varietal. Sparkling (such as champagne, spumante, or Crémant), or still? Maybe a wine that’s fortified (port, sherry, or vermouth); dessert (or stickies, as those from Australia or New Zealand might call them); or table (Burgundy, Chianti, or rose)? Or maybe you’re in the mood for something mixed (sangria, sillabub, kir). However, we wouldn’t recommend the plonk.

If you decide to try your hand at winemaking, make sure you’re stocked up on barrels and these bottles or these. You might find beeswing, “a gauzy film in port and some other wines, indicative of age,” named for the appearance of the insect’s wings when broken up, or use isinglass, “a form of gelatine obtained from the air bladder of the sturgeon and certain other fish, used as an adhesive and as a clarifying agent for wine and beer.”

For even more vinous vignettes, check out Fritinancy’s posts on wine-naming rules and regulations; wine with a real bite; and wine that’s to die for. Wired Magazine tells us what’s inside a bottle of red, Slate explains why wine writers talk the way they do, and Textism pokes fun at wine-speak.

UPDATE: We got a couple of great emails from our readers, and we thought we’d share the interesting tidbits they provided.

From “Michael”:

If the volume of that space increases, (ie, the level of the wine in an upright bottle has fallen) that bottle is said to be “ullaged”. Excessive ullage, which is caused by leakage through the cork or synthetic closure and compensatory influx of air, is harmful to the wine. When a bottle of wine is opened it is said to be “on ullage” and therefore ready for the pouring of a drink. Different principles apply to sherry.

And from “Noël”:

As I was born in a winegrower’s family, I would like to give you an extra item concerning the french word «ouillage»: this action is particularly meant to avoid oxydation of the wine in a cask buy the layer of air which is upon the surface of the wine. Oxydation most often makes elements of flavour get lost.

I had to achieve this task so many times during my education in my parent’s cellar… while my school mates swept after the girls…

Keep your cups handy for tomorrow’s post – the way of tea.

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Wordnik word of the day: seidel

Today’s word of the day is seidel, a mug or glass for beer. It comes to English from German, in which language it means stein.

The exact size of a seidel depends upon the place and time. The November 1890 issue of the St. Louis Medical and Surgical Journal says it equals a quart. This 1878 table of equivalencies more precisely says that in Austria a seidel was about 0.6229 of a pint, which is about 295 milliliters. Other measures have it from somewhat less than to much more than a quart.

H.L Mencken knew what a seidel was, as well as the full measure of his fellow men: “The average man, at least in England and America, has such rudimentary tastes in victualry that he doesn’t know good food from bad. He will eat anything set before him by a cook that he likes. The true way to fetch him is with drinks. A single bottle of drinkable wine will fill more men with the passion of love than ten sides of beef or a ton of potatoes. Even a Seidel of beer, deftly applied, is enough to mellow the hardest bachelor. If women really knew their business, they would have abandoned cooking centuries ago, and devoted themselves to brewing, distilling, and bartending.” (From Prejucides: Second Series, 1920, New York: Knopf.)

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The Salad Dodger

Wordie’s mole at the The Wall Street Journal has forwarded another worthwhile post, this one from the WSJ Health Blog. The WotY is a global phenomenon*, and Heather Won Tesoriero posts about some gems in the ‘health’ category of the Word of the Year contest sponsored by the Macquarie Dictionary in Australia.

My favorite by far is “salad dodger,” defined as an overweight person. I envision an Artful Dodger focused solely on junk food, quietly pocketing moon pies while avoiding the soy police.

* And an exhausting one. I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t even blogged about the American Dialect Society’s recently annointed WotY. I very much like their choices and their attitude, both of which are better than most of the commercial WotY offerings. But I’m suffering a bit of WotY fatigue**. I’ll try to get fired up, as Obama (and Hillary) would say, this weekend.

** Doubly embarrassing is that I have given short shrift to Wordie’s own grassroots WotY movement, which has been great fun to watch from the sidelines. Though part of me thinks it might function best as a phantom WotY, forever discussed but never announced.