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*sigh*
One of the lunch books I bought is organized in weeks: it provides 5 dishes to prepare and eat for lunch over the course of a workweek, and gives you a list of groceries and recipes/foods to prep on the weekend, so that you can assemble the weekly dishes in the morning before you go to work or, in these times of plague, after you decide to quit working for lunch.
We're doing the Japanese-inspired week right now, and this is where I first came across the term "jammy egg." A jammy egg is a soft-boiled egg where the yolk is still soft and creamy, and the white is also a bit soft, and you can use this egg in soups and salads and OK YOU PROBABLY ALREADY KNOW THIS IS AN ONSEN EGG. ONSEN EGG.
In recent months there's been a spate of articles on racism in recipes and food media (Google search results link), and one of the talking points here is renaming foods so that white Westerners presumably don't get scared off by foreign words in their recipes. There's also a spate of articles on the racism behind the scenes at Bon Appétit like this one from The Atlantic.
Knowing that, you probably won't be surprised that when I spent a while poking at Google to get it to divulge the origins of "jammy egg," the earliest conjunction of those two words--although not in that order--that I could find was from this Bon Appétit article from August, 2013 on how to make authentic (or "authentic" for all I know--I'm not a ramen expert) three-day shoyu ramen, in which it instructs the home cook to
So. "Jammy eggs" (a term I hate, by the way, in case it's not noticeable already) are what some people are using nowadays because "onsen eggs" is just too weird a name for them, even as they're accepting "ramen" over "Japanese-style noodles" or whatever people used to say to hide the furrin' word in their food, dating from about the time that the ramen craze hit the mainstream in the English-speaking West, and may or may not have been influenced by Bon Appétit. I have no real conclusions other than that (and that Firefox's spellcheck bloody well ought to know "ramen" by now instead of giving me that red squiggly line).
Anyway. Stay tuned for my next post, in which I drop a tidbit of info that many of you probably knew already but which blew my mind last night and which has nothing to do with food.
We're doing the Japanese-inspired week right now, and this is where I first came across the term "jammy egg." A jammy egg is a soft-boiled egg where the yolk is still soft and creamy, and the white is also a bit soft, and you can use this egg in soups and salads and OK YOU PROBABLY ALREADY KNOW THIS IS AN ONSEN EGG. ONSEN EGG.
In recent months there's been a spate of articles on racism in recipes and food media (Google search results link), and one of the talking points here is renaming foods so that white Westerners presumably don't get scared off by foreign words in their recipes. There's also a spate of articles on the racism behind the scenes at Bon Appétit like this one from The Atlantic.
Knowing that, you probably won't be surprised that when I spent a while poking at Google to get it to divulge the origins of "jammy egg," the earliest conjunction of those two words--although not in that order--that I could find was from this Bon Appétit article from August, 2013 on how to make authentic (or "authentic" for all I know--I'm not a ramen expert) three-day shoyu ramen, in which it instructs the home cook to
Bring a medium pot of water to a boil. Carefully add eggs one at a time and boil gently for 7 minutes. Egg yolks should be shiny yellow and almost jammy; egg white should be just set.The next references I can confirm (somewhat--I'm looking at websites that change and update and I have discovered you cannot trust Google's date of publication in their search results) are from 2014.
So. "Jammy eggs" (a term I hate, by the way, in case it's not noticeable already) are what some people are using nowadays because "onsen eggs" is just too weird a name for them, even as they're accepting "ramen" over "Japanese-style noodles" or whatever people used to say to hide the furrin' word in their food, dating from about the time that the ramen craze hit the mainstream in the English-speaking West, and may or may not have been influenced by Bon Appétit. I have no real conclusions other than that (and that Firefox's spellcheck bloody well ought to know "ramen" by now instead of giving me that red squiggly line).
Anyway. Stay tuned for my next post, in which I drop a tidbit of info that many of you probably knew already but which blew my mind last night and which has nothing to do with food.
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brain fog
aphasia
concentration issues
memory issues
trouble reading small print
food allergies and food intolerances
trouble with understanding waiters in noisy restaurants [auditory processing issues]
Anglicising restaurant menu ingredients genuinely makes the menu much more accessible to me. For example, if a menu said prosciutto (ham) that's better for me than if it just says prosciutto.
[I'm British/Scottish/Australian, and for some reason the words I have the most trouble remembering for menus are Italian food words. I don't know if that's because it's assumed that people can remember all the Italian food words, but not assumed that people can remember all the Japanese food words?]
But there is no reason in hell to Anglicise recipes on the internet [google is right there, and also you can enlarge the font] or to Anglicise recipes in cookbooks [the ingredients are right there in the cookbook]...
Also jammy egg sounds infantile, like something someone's nanny might bring them in a nursery.
Also it's confusing, because it implies sweetness like chutney or caramelisation...
[also "jammy egg" sounds GROSS]
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Just GAAAAAAAH on the blog, magazine, and books that Anglicize them! Why not spend a line or two explaining what it is and where it comes from? And if you've adapted the recipe from an original, saying something like "adapted to use ingredients more commonly found in stores in my country" or whatnot, or "adapted to fit my family's [preferences/allergies/intolerances/religious requirements]" with a link to an un-adapted version so that people understand that this isn't what you'd get if you ordered it in a community that served the population of the recipe's origin.
* My pet peeve is restaurant menus not saying that cheese has been added to a dish, since I'm lactose-intolerant. I learned long ago to carry Lactaid with me because too many times I was confronted with a dish covered in cheese that I thought was dairy-free.
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Oooh, yeah, that's nasty. I am not a fan of !stealth! ingredients that you would not expect to find in a dish unless they are CLEARLY LABELLED ON THE MENU.
[Especially since waitstaff can't always answer questions. I once went to a mid-level Indian restaurant in Australia and asked the [blonde, white, female German backpacker on a working holiday with a strong German accent] waitress if there was butter in a particular dish and she said "what is butter?"]
For starters, for people taking Monoamine oxidase inhibitor antidepressants, some cheeses can interact with the Monoamine oxidase inhibitor antidepressant in a life-threatening way.
"MAOIs can cause dangerous interactions with certain foods and beverages. You'll need to avoid foods containing high levels of tyramine ― an amino acid that regulates blood pressure ― such as aged cheeses, sauerkraut, cured meats, draft beer and fermented soy products (for example, soy sauce, miso and tofu). The interaction of tyramine with MAOIs can cause dangerously high blood pressure. Ask your doctor for a complete list of dietary restrictions, including alcohol restrictions."
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My only working-holiday server story is from London a couple of decades ago. I was spending a semester studying abroad in Wales, and a classmate and I went to London for a weekend. We stopped at a Mexican restaurant. In the early 90s, this was a serious gamble, even in London, but my grandfather had eaten at it some time back and I figured I ought to eat there to stop him from urging me to eat there.
Anyway, that's a lot of setup for a not-really-that interesting story. The food was fine, and our waitress was on a working holiday from Denmark and it was her first day on the job. I ordered nachos, and said "No jalapenos, please." Using the pronunciation we use around here, close to hall-a-PEN-yos. This flustered our server and after a few rounds, I pointed to it on the menu.
"Ah, no ja-LAP-eh-nos?" she said. "Yes, no ja-LAP-eh-nos," I confirmed.
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WORDS MEAN THINGS!
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They’re good, too; I got some with my last delivery order.
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When I was a kid, weirdly many of my playmates liked to have not ketchup (a taste I can at least understand, if not share) but grape jelly/jam on their breakfast eggs, so that is the first thing that comes to mind when I see "jammy egg." Even knowing that's not what is meant, I can't escape the appalling-to-me connotation.
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