Post a useless fact

[Queen Victoria]

Comparing newer and older cookbooks is interesting.  What was cheap and commonly available in the past may be expensive today.  For example, chicken was more expensive than beef or pork.  Oysters were fairly cheap.  There were fewer bean recipes.

One good cookbook that I sometimes use is Escoffier.  Rather than being full of Haute Cuisine it has a healthy serving of Plain Cooking.  Recipes for simple foods, using techniques that can be used on more complex foods as well.  It was only $1 at a garage sale and I've used it so much it's falling to pieces.

[TheoK]

The pizza was the Roman junkfood - too. It comes from the Latin verb pinsere - to press. The Romans got it from the Greeks. It looked a bit different and there were no tomatoes on it, but olive oil, cheese and herbal spices were there already 2000 years ago.

The Latin word for pizza is placenta Neapolitana - cake from Naples.

[TheoK]

I use the classic Latin pronunciation, i.e. I pronounce v as English w. This is confusing, since this makes me sometimes pronounce any v as w and the other way around 

['andersom']

^ Um, I have several cook books (um, ¾ of numerous)..

I have a few myself too. 3/4 of several maybe. I'm too obnoxious to follow any recipe though. I see them as 'guidelines'. That can turn out well, and awful too.
Having dinner at my place, it's a gamble. 

[TheoK]

Portugal doesn't have a national motto.

[TheoK]

"Baltic" is Lithuanian and means "white". The Swedish province name Blekinge literally means "bleaching" and also got its namn from the Baltic having "bright" water.

['andersom']

"Bleek" means "bleach" in Dutch.
But, "de bleek" also is the name of the field of grass used for bleach-drying white washing, in days past.

Still is a sensible option, btw, if you have a stain that doesn't come out in the washing, the sun may do the trick. 

So, this is a not completely useless fact. 

[TheoK]

"Duel" is derived from the older Latin form for the noun for "war" - duellum. It is cognate with an Old Greek word meaning "to destroy, to make suffer". Already at Ceasar's time the Romans used the word bellum, though. Duellum was archaic very early.

[odeon]

The letter "b" is not used in the Finnish language, other than in loanwords. OTOH, there are LOTS of them.

[TheoK]

Latin doesn't have the letter "k". It doesn't have to, since everything with a "c" in Classic Latin is pronounced like "k". It does have the letter "y" for Greek loanwords, though. That letter was called "the Greek i" by the Romans.

['andersom']

Latin doesn't have the letter "k". It doesn't have to, since everything with a "c" in Classic Latin is pronounced like "k". It does have the letter "y" for Greek loanwords, though. That letter was called "the Greek i" by the Romans.

The y was called "de griekse ÿ" in Dutch.

The ÿ (OK, written a bit different) only disappeared from the Dutch alphabet and typewriters when computers became common. I still miss it. Whenever the ÿ is being used, we now use "ij".

[Queen Victoria]

Thanks to Peter and Catherine the Greats, Russian has a large number of French loan words.

[TheoK]

Most loan words in Swedish are German and came here through the Hansa during the Middle Age.

[Parts]

The area where I live was a huge manufacturing center during WW2 making everything from Tommy guns to fighter planes.  This is one of the reasons there is such good tool pickings at the estate sales.

[TheoK]

In the late Empire a Roman aristocrat consumed about 250µm of lead each day. Plebeians consumed about 35µm and slaves about 15µm. Aristocrats and plebeians drank about 2 liters of wine every day. Slaves only drank about 0.75 liters.