Do You Stick to English Cookbooks?

The language, not the cuisine (Gawd!) of England.

My French is pretty good, yet the vocabulary of cooking is somewhat specialized and most times I like doing a fast browse through my cookbooks, looking for recipes of a certain type.

I usually find decrypting the culinary French, using Larouse Gastronomique etc., is just too tedious for light reading, unless I have already fastened on a recipe in which case I just make notes on any terms I have to look up.


The result is that I do not normally buy cookbooks that are written in French, unless I really want a specific subject matter that is only available, or best available in the original language.

Just wondering about the rest of you. Do you find that even though you are functionally bilingual (that means having two tongues, not one forked tongue, Jenise), you find yourself disinclined to collect specialised literature in other than English?

I can read cookbooks in French and German, and can puzzle out stuff in Italian and Spanish, but in reality, most of the important stuff is translated and most of the specialized stuff is best not done from cookbooks.

[Robin Garr]

Just wondering about the rest of you. Do you find that even though you are functionally bilingual (that means having two tongues, not one forked tongue, Jenise), you find yourself disinclined to collect specialised literature in other than English?

I'm pretty much monolingual in English, but similar to what you said, I can generally handle food-and-wine material pretty well in Italian, French, Spanish and German. I don't have many books in languages other than English, but I'm definitely willing to skim recipes online, particularly in Italian and French, when I'm browsing for ideas for dinner.

I'm bilingual French/English, and I don't even notice differences when going back and forth between the two languages.

In fact, the best food and wine magazine I know is Vins et Cuisine de France. It's the only one I buy at all.

has anyone mentioned non-english recipes that are translated into english? i found one called for 'a handfull of boiling water'.

[Jenise]

has anyone mentioned non-english recipes that are translated into english? i found one called for 'a handfull of boiling water'.

Cute!

But in answer to Bill's question, I'm not bilingual. I can find my way around a menu in French, Italian and Spanish pretty well, but I don't have the vocabulary to interpret cooking instructions.

DO I STICK TO ENGLISH COOKBOOKS?
Only if I sweat a lot.

The only languages I can pretend to read are French and Italian. But I won't do it on the fly; I'll translate the recipe first and work from that.

I have a couple of cookbooks in German. Using them is something of a PITA because of the grams etc. It is so easy if the recipe uses Tablespoons and Cups.

I've used French and Italian recipes from online sources. While my reading in these languages isn't bad, I will confess that I generally double check myself by putting the page through Altavista Babelfish or the Google translator. Other people do this as well and that may be where the "handful of boiling water" came from. Howlers are common in machine translation.

F

I am by no means bilingual, but I have enough French to be comfortable living in Paris for a month and conversing everyday in French. I have two cookbooks in French and I can work through the recipes and comments without hangups.
The main problem that I have with translated cookbooks is the conversion of metric measurements to the North American "cups and spoons". I have to reconvert to metric to work with the recipes. A typical example was in a recipe for duck confit, in a book written by a French woman for the North American market. The amount of salt required was expressed as "1/6 oz per lb of meat". It was only after conversion that I realized that the proportion was 1% by weight! How simple!
I always weigh dry ingredients and most of the time work with ratios of ingredients e.g. for Pâte brisé fine 2 parts flour to 1 part butter (both by weight).For puff pastry equal parts flour and butter.

The language, not the cuisine (Gawd!) of England.

I've been meaning to get back to this part: I have at least 2 or 3 very nice English recipes. One of them is in a cookbook that might very well contain other good recipes, if I were to try them....


Jeff [ entirely uncertain as to which smiley to use here ]

Does anyone remember the episode of Chef! where Gareth Blackstock enters the continental cooking contest against various nationalities and chooses English cooking and wines? Hilarious!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=D8hrFQKAL-Y&feature=related