I picked up a wonderful Brasilian cookbook when I visited Belem earlier this month. The process of choosing it was a bit of a feat: all of the books at the bookstore were wrapped in plastic and the shelves were so narrow that if you removed two books, all the others fell on the floor. (Mortification is the same in any language.) The sales clerk saw that I was looking at cookbooks and began unwrapping them and bringing them to me. I was torn between "Dona Benta Comer Bem," and this one, which I eventually chose. I picked this one because Dona Benta promised international recipes, among other things, and I already have more than enough international recipes. I wanted a Brazilian focus.
When I brought it home and started looking through it, I found that I was having considerably more difficulty than I anticipated understanding the recipes. My Portuguese vocabulary contains a disproportionate number of food words. Nonetheless, even with the help of my small Portuguese-English dictionary, I realized that this was going to be a bit of a feat. For one thing, many of the ingredients aren't even available here, such as jambu, the spindly Amazonian green that numbs your tongue. Also, many of the words are used idiomatically, in food-specific ways. My favorite example is a "dende de alho," which literally translates as a "tooth of garlic," which we refer to as a "clove." (Also idiomatic, if you think about it.)
I'm going to work my way through it, because I really want to cook this food. My sweetie hates translating, but she's going to have to rise to the occasion sometimes if she wants to enjoy any of this wonderful cuisine at home. All in all, the experience has gotten me thinking about how useful it would be to have culinary specific cross cultural dictionaries, with food names, idioms, and linguistic conventions that appear in recipes. A limited market, to be sure, but a passionate one.
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